J.H. Breakell & Co.: Newport's Nautical Jewelry Catalog
In 1972, a Newport, Rhode Island silversmith named James Breakell opened a small workshop and began casting sterling silver and gold jewelry inspired by the coastline around him. More than fifty years later, that workshop still operates as J.H. Breakell & Co., and the mail-order catalog James and his wife Joan built to sell what he made — assembled, by his own account, almost by accident out of magazine advertising — is still how most of the company's jewelry reaches buyers today. The company's history is a useful case study in how a single-location maker turned a stack of magazine rate cards into a national catalog business, and it's worth understanding where the brand came from before deciding whether its catalog is the right source for a piece of nautical or nature-inspired jewelry.
From a Newport Workshop to a National Catalog
James Breakell founded the company in Newport in 1972 and opened his first retail shop there in 1973, working as a professional silversmith who had previously made pieces for other manufacturers and a design studio before striking out on his own. After he and Joan married in 1980, the couple pooled their resources and grew the business together — a partnership that became central to how the company designed and sold jewelry going forward. It was the company's move into mail order in the mid-1980s, paired with advertising in magazines like the New Yorker and Smithsonian Magazine, that turned a local Newport shop into a business selling well beyond Rhode Island.
At its peak operating footprint, the company worked out of a two-building location on Newport's Spring Street, employing a team of ten craftspeople who produced a catalog of roughly 300 different jewelry designs while also handling customer service and shipping in-house. Joan Breakell became the company's creative lead over time, particularly after James faced challenges with his eyesight, carrying designs from initial sketch through to the wax model used in casting. Pieces from the company's earlier decades — particularly work from the 1970s and 1990s — have since become sought-after by collectors, a detail that speaks to how long some of these designs have stayed in continuous production.
Building a Customer List With Magazine Space Ads
The advertising strategy that built the mail-order business was deliberately narrow. Rather than running broad brand campaigns, the company placed small, single-product space ads — one item per ad, offered in a choice of sterling silver or 14-karat gold — in magazines selected from the Standard Rate and Data Service media directory, a trade resource used to compare magazine circulation and readership data. The company favored publications with roughly even male-female readership, on the theory that jewelry ads perform best where both genders are seeing them; the first ad to really work was for a silver seagull bracelet. Because Breakell casts the same design in both silver and gold from a single mold, running both metals in one ad was straightforward to fulfill profitably.
The catalog itself started as an afterthought — individual product cards printed to send to people who wrote in asking about an ad — and grew from there into a full mailed catalog. By the mid-2000s the company was mailing roughly a million catalogs a year across nine separate mailings, split between two catalog editions and three different cover designs. Prospecting for new buyers shifted over time to cooperative catalog databases — services like Abacus, I-Behavior, and NextAction Network that pool purchase history across mail-order retailers — which let the company model and target buyers likely to spend over $100 per order at a lower cost than renting a single retailer's mailing list outright.
Roughly 80 percent of sales came through mail order — the catalog, the website, and an 800 number — versus about 20 percent through the Newport retail store, according to a 2006 trade-press profile of the business. That same profile noted the company's most valuable list wasn't necessarily its biggest one: buyers who had ordered more than once within a twelve-month window converted far better than one-time gift purchasers, who tended not to become repeat customers. A holiday mailing that year illustrated the split clearly — roughly 52,000 existing customer names produced an average order of $136 at a 2 percent response rate, while about 137,000 rented prospect names averaged a $150 order at a 0.7 percent response rate, according to the same source. Those figures describe the business as it operated two decades ago rather than current performance, but they show how deliberately the mail-order model was built around repeat buyers rather than one-time gift sales.
The Broccoli Pin That Made It to the National Archives
One of the company's early products has a stranger history than most catalog jewelry ever gets. When President George H.W. Bush publicly said he disliked broccoli and intended to keep it off the White House menu, James and Joan Breakell sent one of their sterling silver broccoli pins to First Lady Barbara Bush. The pin later became part of a National Archives display of gifts given to presidents — an unusually public afterlife for a catalog novelty item. During the 1992 election, the Breakells sent the same pin to candidates Al Gore and Bill Clinton, and the company still holds onto the framed thank-you letters it received back from Tipper Gore and President Clinton.
That instinct for a memorable, story-driven piece shows up elsewhere in the early catalog too. According to the same 2006 profile, a flip-flop sandal pendant was one of the company's first products and had, by that point, remained a consistent seller for years — evidence that the design language the company built its reputation on wasn't limited to one hit item.
What's in the Catalog Today
The current catalog is organized around the same coastal and nature-inspired themes the company built its name on: starfish, seahorses, lobsters, anchors, sandpipers, bees, dogwood blossoms, and sunflowers have all appeared as pins, pendants, or earrings over the years, reflecting the company's seaside Rhode Island location. Browsing the site's collections today turns up named groupings including Sealife & Nautical, Sentiments, Tailored Classics, Winter Wonderland, Artisan Metals, Diamonds, Nature, Family, Gems, Pearl, and a men's line — all worked in sterling silver, 14-karat gold, or a combination of the two, with diamond pieces available in both natural and lab-created stones.
The company's annual snowflake design has become its most consistent collectible program. Each year's edition is sold as an ornament, pendant, earrings, a charm, and a pin, and the current 2025 design carries a "Dove of Peace" theme — continuing a tradition that, as far back as 2006, had already turned the snowflake into a piece collectors watched for annually. A "Shop by Year" section on the site groups snowflake and other designs by decade, running from the 1990s through the current year, which is the kind of archival organization that only makes sense for a brand with genuine design history to draw on rather than a rotating seasonal assortment.
The company also publishes short buying-guide posts on its site — recent entries cover how to read a jewelry hallmark, how to start a charm collection, and how to choose a chain length — which function as the modern equivalent of the printed inserts a mail-order catalog used to carry alongside its product pages.
Ordering From the Newport Store or the Catalog
The physical retail location is at 215 Goddard Row in the Brick Market section of historic Newport, open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., with phone orders taken at 800-767-6411. Orders over $50 ship free. Returns on non-engraved, non-family jewelry are accepted within 60 days, and every piece carries a two-year warranty against manufacturing defects — worth confirming against the specific item page before ordering, since engraved and personalized "family jewelry" pieces are carved out of the standard return window. Shoppers who'd rather browse a printed catalog than the website can still request one directly, a direct continuation of the mail-order model the company built its business on in the 1980s.
Who the Breakell Catalog Suits
This is a strong fit for a shopper looking for a specific piece with a real design pedigree — coastal and nature motifs, an annual collectible, or a personalized family or sentiment piece — from an independent New England maker rather than an anonymous mass-market chain. It's a weaker fit for someone chasing fast-fashion trend pieces or the lowest possible price point, since the catalog is built around sterling silver and gold construction and named collections rather than costume jewelry turnover. A shopper near Newport can handle pieces in person at the Goddard Row store before buying; everyone else is working from the same catalog and website that has carried most of the company's sales for decades.