Here we are!

Hi everyone! Welcome, and thank you very much for visiting bk&leo jewelry! For my first blog post, I wanted to do two very important things:

First, I want to give some context for the name and explain what this jewelry line is all about. It took me a very long time to get to the bk&leo name, and there are a few reasons I landed on it. Most importantly, a portion of the proceeds from each and every piece of jewelry will be donated to an animal welfare nonprofit. I have loved animals my whole life, and bk&leo is an acronym for how I want all animals to be treated – with kindness and love. Over time, I hope that bk&leo will grow to become a bigger platform to help fight animal cruelty and support animal rights/rescue organizations, big and  small. To start, I have partnered with three rescue and welfare organizations who do beautiful work and fight to save homeless and mistreated animals every day. You can learn more about them here:

• Mr. Bones & Co.
• Animal Haven
• PAWS Chicago

Secondly, I wanted to sincerely thank the many people who supported me and enabled the launch of bk&leo! It truly took a village (actually three, between New York, Chicago and Sydney!)

• My parents, I couldn’t be luckier to have you
• Joey, my brother and business/financial advisor
• Eric, my day-to-day sounding board/problem solver
• Morgan, Brian and Amanda, for supporting me along the way
• Uncle Sidney and Aunt Ali, who commissioned my first piece of fine jewelry
• All of my brides, bridesmaids, relatives etc. who have allowed me to contribute to your big day, including my sister Morgan, Merle, Sammy, Jen, Nicole, Sara, Ashleigh, Allison, Trish, Caroline and more
• Elli and Rachel from Mr. Bones & Co., for giving me the push that I needed
• My cousin James Deckinger, my developer Simon Vrachliotis and my logo creator Gerard Soratorio, for helping me make the site a reality
• My amazing photographers, Tomasso Fontanella and Ryan Carville
• My gorgeous models Jenny, Mari and Monica for making the jewelry look so fly 😉
• Naz, Jessica, Neal, and many others who have provided invaluable business advice and friendship along the way

I will never be able to thank you enough!

On a closing note, here are some amazing pictures of my four-legged brothers and two of the great loves of my life, Mogul and Arthur.