The engineer who studied gears, then married into a five-generation jewelry dynasty and rebuilt it to order.
Andrej Strojin. Sunglasses on, supply chain solved.
A consultant who traded slide decks for an assembly line.
In a converted studio at 99 Water Street in Warren, Rhode Island, fine jewelry gets made the way most companies are afraid to make it: only after someone has paid for it. No back room stacked with unsold necklaces. No guessing which birthstone will move in March. Andrej Strojin runs HAVERHILL as a place that builds for the customer, not in advance of the customer - and that single inversion is the whole business.
Strojin is co-founder and CEO. He is also a Slovenian-trained mechanical engineer who spent a decade inside Strategy& and Deloitte before he had ever set a stone. When he talks about jewelry he reaches for the vocabulary of lead times, throughput, and forecasting accuracy. The romance of the craft belongs to his wife and co-founder, Haverhill Leach, a fifth-generation New England jeweler. The clock belongs to him.
The pitch is deceptively plain. A customer picks a piece - a necklace, a bracelet, a ring, a pair of earrings - chooses the birthstones that mean something to them, and HAVERHILL makes it in 14k gold and ships it, often the next day. The rare trick is doing all three at once: genuinely high quality, genuinely personal, genuinely fast. Most of the industry can manage two.
Under Strojin the company has quadrupled its sales, crossed $16 million in revenue in 2024, and grown at a compound annual rate of roughly 40 percent for three straight years. It has appeared on the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies three years in a row and earned a spot on The Lead's Foremost 50 in 2025. For 2025, the company is on pace to clear $25 million.
We see a wide-open opportunity in the market. Customers are increasingly embracing jewelry that's made just for them, not just pulled from a shelf.
Bumble does not list "co-founder" as a match preference. It should.
Haverhill Leach had jewelry in the genes - five generations of New England jewelers behind her, plus a design career that ran through Kate Spade, Mayle, Waterworks, and a swimwear line of her own. By 2013 she was on the road with 160 trunk shows, and her customers kept asking for the same thing: birthstones, a way to make a piece personal.
What she did not have was an operator who thought in systems. Then, in 2018, she matched with a management consultant on a dating app. Four months later they were married. Strojin's engineering and strategy background slotted into Leach's artistry like a clasp into a loop. The marriage and the company were, from the start, the same partnership.
It is the kind of origin story that sounds invented. It is not. The consultant who could model a supply chain married the designer who could draw a heirloom, and together they built something neither could have built alone.
March 2020. The world shut down weeks before Mother's Day - the single biggest moment on a jewelry calendar. Outside manufacturers went dark. For most small luxury brands, that is the end of the season.
Strojin and Leach did the opposite of waiting. They bought stones and metal from local Rhode Island suppliers to lock in inventory, invested in production equipment, and set up an assembly line in their own garage. Leach's parents pitched in. Where outside manufacturers had needed seven days to finish an order, the in-house team turned pieces around in one to three.
The result was not survival - it was a record. They sold more in the week before Mother's Day 2020 than in the entire previous year. The garage proved the thesis Strojin had been carrying in his head: if you control production, you can collapse the gap between desire and delivery. Speed is not a logistics detail. Speed is the product.
In 2021 the garage graduated into a real studio in Warren, an integrated operation with R&D, production, fulfillment, and customer experience under one roof, supported by a flexible network of master jewelers. The improvisation became infrastructure.
We made more sales in one week before Mother's Day 2020 than the whole previous year.
Nothing is produced in advance. Every piece is built after the order lands, which kills overproduction and waste - and turns inventory risk into a non-issue.
Strojin leans on analytics to read purchasing trends, so the studio can prepare materials and capacity for demand it can see coming weeks out - without making the finished goods early.
"There are few competitors that can make something that's really high quality, specially made for a customer, and delivered the next day." That sentence is the entire competitive strategy.
Our growth proves that customers want more than luxury - they want meaning, speed, and transparency.
There are few competitors that can make something that's really high quality, specially made for a customer, and delivered the next day.
The credential list reads like two different people. A mechanical engineer who can also model a market. A strategy consultant who can also run a factory floor. Add an Executive MBA from COTRUGLI Business School and executive programs at MIT and Wharton, and you get someone over-equipped for a small jewelry company - which is exactly the point.
Most luxury brands are run by people who love the object. HAVERHILL is run by someone who loves the throughput that delivers the object. That is the unfair advantage hiding inside the love story: Leach makes the thing beautiful, Strojin makes the thing arrive.
Engineers are trained to remove waste from a system. Strojin removed the oldest waste in jewelry - making things nobody has bought yet - and replaced it with a promise: tell us what you want, and we'll build it now.
The most romantic thing an engineer can say to a customer: "We haven't made it yet - tell us what you want."
Profile compiled from public sources: LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Providence Business News, Inc., and HAVERHILL press materials. Figures reflect company-reported numbers.