COVER WOMAN CALLBACK Nina Berenato

A YEAR OF GROWTH

Since Nina Berenato graced the Austin Woman cover in June 2019, she’s embraced new opportunities while staying true to her mission.

BY CY WHITE

The Zoom window opens. A young woman, surprisingly young, graces the screen. Nina Berenato isn’t shy, possessing an honesty that isn’t exactly commonplace among the Hollywood elite. In fact, she’s as far away from Hollywood as you can get, yet her creations continue to capture the attention of some of the most powerful women in entertainment. Her most recent job again made headlines: providing Angelina Jolie with an eye-catching chin cuff she wore on one of her first red carpet appearances in almost a decade, for the premier of another Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbuster, Eternals.

“I didn’t even know it was going to go on Angelina,” Berenato reveals. “I get a message from her stylist, Jason Bolden, who’s a very famous stylist. He’s got Alicia Keys, Gabrielle Union. He’s never worked with me before, but I’ve been emailing him for 10 years,” she says with a laugh. “Rachel, who works in the store with me, says, ‘Hey, you got this order from somebody, and they need it tomorrow.’ I say, ‘Who is it?’ and she says, ‘Jason Bolden.’” Her eyes light up, the memory still sending tremors of excitement through her. “They wanted all the face pieces, the chin cuff, and I thought it’s for one of his regular clients. Of course I would have no idea he’s working with Angelina Jolie because she hasn’t been out. So I’m scrolling through Instagram the next day, and I see a picture of Angelina Jolie and her kids. I zoom in and I’m like…” The sound that comes out of her mouth, what sounds like she’s choked on her own gasp, accompanies an animated flourish of her hands. “Then the next day my website starts going, ‘Ring, ring.’” Not bad for a self-proclaimed nerd who has a deep adoration for Greek and Roman mythology. Her connection to the goddesses reigning on Mount Olympus famously informs the art she adorns equally powerful women in music and film with. Embracing change. Leaning into the challenges of the world’s ever-shifting landscape. Berenato is seemingly made of this: tenacity and the guile to move wherever a new opportunity presents itself. Even when the idea isn’t her own. The one thing we did differently was making it into an activity you would do with someone that you love, like a bestie set, or a mommy and mini set or creating an intention with it and then cutting the bracelet off when you accomplish it.

[That’s] what really drove people to the bracelets.

“The Forever Bracelet came from a customer who came into the store and asked if we could weld a bracelet straight on her. So it’s definitely not us inventing the wheel. The one thing we did differently was making it into an activity you would do with someone that you love, like a bestie set, or a mommy and mini set or creating an intention with it and then cutting the bracelet off when you accomplish it. [That’s] what really drove people to the bracelets.”

Berenato’s is one of the few businesses that managed to flourish amid the craziness that enveloped the world for the past two years. When utter chaos reigned and uncertainty wrapped its claws around local small businesses, she didn’t panic. She made a list.

“I came up with a way of contacting stylists directly, because usually I would work with a rep. I went on Instagram and basically got all of these stylists’ emails myself, built this big spreadsheet, started contacting them directly and saying, ‘Hey, here’s all of my line. I have samples here. I’ll send it to you in the mail.’ That kind of opened up this whole new system of communicating with stylists that we’d never done before.”

Opportunities continued to present themselves. However, when the option to expand her Austin-based jewelry store to Houston (home of some of her most notable clients) arose, she hesitated.

“That’s always scared me,” she admits, “because I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m gonna like it. I just love being at the store. I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to bring the juju that we have here to somewhere else, and it might just mess everything up.’ My therapist helped me. She was like, ‘That is totally rooted in fear. You create your own path. You can still be at the store in Austin every single day making jewelry and have a Houston location.’ Being able to utilize that location as a way to make the same type of impact for women in Houston and just continue to spread that, that is what got me really excited.”

In the couple years since she graced the Austin Woman cover, Nina Berenato has launched a couple new collections, started plans on opening a pop-up shop in Houston and, yes, made headlines for more of her creations gracing the visage of powerful women in entertainment. She welcomes each new opportunity with grace and immense enthusiasm. And she’s never lost sight of her mission, of her desire to uplift local women-led businesses.

“We tried to make sure we were connecting with our community of makers even more,” she says. “Last year we did the Making it Together Auction where we basically had one item [each] from about 150 female makers. We still did our Holibabes Holiday Market in person with some small tweaks, and we were really able to crush it for some awesome local women. So just keeping our mission in the forefront and being a little bit creative on how we can get around some of these roadblocks I think was really the key.”

Nina Berenato: creative, entrepreneur, a woman for her community. The same woman who didn’t want her name on her business, so instead named it after Psyche, her favorite Greek goddess. Her new collection, named after Pandora, considers the other side of the legend. “There was also hope locked in [Pandora's] box,” she says. “This whole collection is keyholes, and it’s the idea that we are the box. We have all the hope inside of us, and we just have to let it out.”

Visit atxwoman.com to read the interview in its entirety.