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Her Great-Grandfather Founded a Jewelry Dynasty. She’s Building Something It Never Had.

Five generations of family history taught Haverhill Leach the manufacturing instinct. The rest she figured out at a dining room table.

The polishers go fishing on their lunch break. This is the first thing to understand about the place where Haverhill Leach makes her jewelry. In a low building on the water in Warren, Rhode Island—the smallest town in the smallest county in the smallest state in America—the benches face the harbor, and the people who spend their mornings bringing a high shine to gold can, when the hour comes, walk out and drop a line. Forty-one people work under that one roof—designers, stone setters, chain assemblers, a team buying gold and gemstones, customer service, the person who ties the ribbon on the box—and a piece of Haverhill Jewelry passes through all of them, from first sketch to finished knot, without ever leaving the building. It is not the image the word factory summons. And the woman who built it never intended to be here at all.

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Leach is the fifth generation of a jewelry family, which makes her, by the usual arithmetic, a member of the dynasty. By her own accounting, she is nothing of the kind. The dynasty is real, though, and more storied than she lets on. Her great-great-grandfather, Edwin Leach, launched jewelry ventures in Brooklyn in the 1880s before founding Leach & Miller in Attleboro, Massachusetts—a house remembered for its sterling silver, Swarovski crystal and early hand in Art Deco jewelry. Even before Edwin’s death in 1915, his son Edwin Francis Leach had struck out on his own, founding Leach & Garner in 1899 at 23 years old—a separate venture built with a factory partner and backed by the Garner family as investors. Leach & Miller carried on under family succession after Edwin’s death, producing Art Deco pieces until it closed in the early 1930s. Leach & Garner, meanwhile, grew over the following century into a household name in jewelry manufacturing—the maker of the clasps, earring wires, bindings and beads that are the unglamorous bones of the trade. Haverhill’s grandfather, Philip Leach, joined in 1938 and took the presidency in the mid-1960s; Haverhill’s father, Edwin F. “Ted” Leach II, came aboard in 1972 and later spent more than 25 years hosting his own jewelry show on QVC. The family sold the company in 2007 to Cookson Group, a British precious metals company—a decision that looks, in retrospect, like prescience.

Her father had received warnings in late 2006 from two........

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