VEERT is not a jewelry brand, as founder Julia Lang is quick to correct when we begin our interview. ‘Whenever we actually explain the story of VEERT, we never say ‘jewelry line.’ We always say ‘lifestyle line,’” she notes.

It’s an honest mistake. If you look at VEERT’s Instagram page, you’ll likely see square upon square of pearl strands, chokers of glittering green gemstones, gold and silver studs, with many of those jewelry pieces shown on (mostly male) models, some simply photographed on deep green backgrounds. But VEERT, co-founded by Leontinus Arnolds (a German-Albanian entrepreneur based in Germany), whose first collection launched in November 2020, is still in its nascent stages in the grand scheme of things. Jewelry is merely the beginning. “Over time, we're going to be a brand like Hermès, where we offer any category,” Lang says.

Fashion is always of the moment, and so it’s tempting to see any apparel or accessory label as defined by its current creative director or latest hit collection. But that would be an ahistorical way to look at the industry. Both Gucci and Louis Vuitton got their start as leather luggage makers rather than clothing brands, with the latter only introducing its first ready-to-wear collection in 1998 under the tutelage of Marc Jacobs, nearly 150 years after its founding.

Trends come and go. A label, or maison, or, as we usually say nowadays, a brand, can last a century if you let it. And Lang is not a designer by trade after all, but a consummate expert on branding. “I'm planning a 100 years ahead,” she says of her vision for VEERT.

A decade prior to VEERT, Lang founded the creative agency Julia Lang Worldwide, where she crafted the images of actors, musicians, and athletes, most prominently Roc-A-Fella Records co-founder Kareem "Biggs" Burke, massaging their existing star power into more polished, stylish heights. Putting her stamp on her own product was always on her mind, however. “I always wanted to have my own line and I never really wanted to just do the expected route and launch a T-shirt and hoodie brand,” Lang explains. “I wanted to have a much bigger umbrella.”

Born in Tanzania to German parents, Lang originally founded her agency in Berlin. But she had her sights set on New York as the place to really make her mark, and eventually relocated to the American city in 2015. “It's a city where you grind and hustle. You see some sort of result, which I did not see in London or Berlin. Because I've been working hard my entire life, but New York really felt like the ground to see the most results in return,” she says. Lest you think the New Yorkers who see their home as the center of the world are just speaking from ego.

With an initial $10,000 investment from Arnolds, Lang was able to set about making a brand in her own image, after many years of working for other clients from behind-the-scenes. Though VEERT is not a jewelry line strictly speaking, jewelry is a useful place to start for crafting a legacy brand. Far more than any other apparel or accessory category, it needs to stand the test of time. VEERT hit the scene in late 2020 with necklaces, earrings, and rings using timeless materials like freshwater pearls and 18k gold, but gave them a slightly subversive twist by featuring them on predominantly male models.

“There’s a lot of somewhat traditional femininity around it, but we shoot everything on male models and our clientele is 75 percent male at this point,” says Lang. “It really goes back to our visual language and showing our male audience, ‘Look, it's really cool, it's accepted. You don't need to be fearful to be judged. We are at a time in place where it's actually accepted.’”

Lang was not the first to push genderless pieces, but VEERT came about when pieces marketed as unisex, genderless, however you want to call it, were more and more commonplace. Without gendered sizing, the jewelry category offers certain freedom in that aspect, but there are still notions of course of what men or women “ought” to wear.

Those traditions can offer room to play rather than constraints however. Freshwater pearls feature heavily throughout VEERT’s early collections, in chokers and strands, dotted between green onyx and malachite, as a simple earring stud. “We play with a lot of pearls, and when you go back hundreds of years, that's a very traditional female medium and jewelry that queens wore,” Lang says. And there is something delightful about seeing such a delicate material associated with a hyper-feminine figure like Betty Draper worn on tatted up male singers like Maluma and Miguel, both early fans of VEERT.

But Lang does not view them as defining VEERT or even a flash-in-the-pan trend, even while pearl jewelry for men has come to be an defining style of the early 2020s. “I would never jump on a trend. I feel like it's more so that we were on the forefront and a lot of male, well-known artists started to wear our brand. And then more male figures on a mainstream level felt brave enough to also buy it,” she notes. “And then again, I feel like pearls are so integrated at this point in the jewelry space, they will not go anywhere.”

There is a balancing act instead when creating a brand, between offering up a signature and painting oneself into a corner. And branding doesn’t always need to be complicated: as anyone who has been to any sporting event knows, something as simple as a single color is a powerful signifier of identity and alliances. Lang found green as her personal signature hue when an old boyfriend gifted her a green dress, and she donned the color when attending public events like fashion shows until it became associated with her. “Green is the heart chakra, green is money, green is hope. I'm not a girl who wears pink, I don't like blue, so green was always my go-to color,” she explains.

Naturally, green became the hero hue for VEERT, with Lang citing another legacy name as inspiration. “When you think about Tiffany, it's without saying that blue is Tiffany's 1837 Blue. Not every single piece needs to have an obvious green element, but whether it's just the shoulder label or the little logo on our extension on the jewelry, that's enough. So over time, it goes without saying that green is associated with VEERT,” says Lang.

But again, VEERT is not a jewelry brand. For 2023, Lang is looking to break into apparel with a VEERT menswear line, albeit one that any gender can wear. Apparel represents a new sort of challenge, not just in terms of branding and marketing but in creating something that lasts. Clothes are more mercurial than jewelry when it comes to changing trends and tastes, especially in a crowded market of new brands popping up every day and a nonstop calendar of fashion weeks, not to mention a frenetic fashion media landscape that demands something new to cover every hour of every day. But Lang is looking to remain focused on the big picture.

“When you think about Chrome Hearts, they launched in 1998 and are equally relevant because it's just the aesthetic and the look, so you don't have to constantly produce new pieces,” Lang explains. “Number one, what I'm trying to do is have drops that are collector pieces over time, and are equally relevant without attaching any season or any year.”

If you’re building a brand to withstand a century, you have to look further than just this season’s demands. “It's not overnight,” says Lang. “It's very much doable. You just have to build step by step.”