Alicia Arnold joins Sasha Primak to expand custom gold jewelry programs

Alicia Arnold’s appointment as design director at Sasha Primak is more than a personnel change. It places a classically trained goldsmith and platinumsmith at the point where concept becomes metal, and where custom jewelry has to be beautiful, manufacturable and comfortable enough to be worn every day.

Arnold will lead creative development across fine jewelry and bridal, with a mandate to collaborate with retail partners on custom programs and capsule collections. That is a meaningful signal for independent jewelers, who increasingly want signature work that feels exclusive without turning into a one-off operational headache. At Sasha Primak, the creative brief now sits inside a house that was founded in 1978 and still builds in New York City with product development, CAD/CAM, casting, diamond and finishing capabilities under one roof.

That vertical integration matters. A designer with bench training tends to think in terms of how a ring actually holds together, how a shank wears over time, how a setting protects a stone, and where a mount can be refined without compromising strength. Sasha Primak says it blends old-world Russian and Italian craftsmanship with modern jewelry technology, a combination that suggests Arnold’s background could sharpen the company’s gold jewelry language in practical ways: cleaner construction, smarter metal use, and custom pieces that are easier for retailers to adapt for different clients without diluting the design.

Arnold arrives from Tiny Jewel Box in Washington, D.C., where she served as director of custom design. There, she led the in-house bridal collection Roslyn and created bespoke jewelry for private clients, public figures, think tanks and official gifts of state. Her experience spans more than two decades in fine jewelry and luxury product development, including hand rendering, CAD development, product conceptualization and creative direction across fine and high jewelry. That range is exactly the sort of fluency a manufacturer needs when it wants to move from production support to true design authorship.

David Primak, the company’s chief operating officer, said the hire is intended to deepen the house’s manufacturing heritage and create “true creative partnership” for independent retailers. Arnold said she sees an opportunity to build on Sasha Primak’s craftsmanship through fresh design, strong storytelling and newly developed collections. With new fine jewelry and bridal collections in development and customization capabilities expanding, Sasha Primak is positioning itself less as a back-end supplier and more as a creative manufacturing partner, one that understands how the best gold jewelry has always begun: at the bench.