RUNWAY
FoundRae’s Beth Hutchens, a Downtown Girl to the Core, Has Opened an Uptown Outpost for Her Collectible Jewelry BY LYNN YAEGER OCTOBER 5, 2024
Beth Hutchens, outside her new store at 777 Madison Avenue Photo: Aaron Weiss / Courtesy of FoundRae
“It’s funny—it actually did feel like I was voyaging to a new city,” Beth Hutchens, founder of the cult fine jewelry brand FoundRae confesses, when she is asked about her forays to the Upper East Side, expeditions that led her to open a new shop in the wilds of Madison Avenue. Hutchens is, after all, a quintessential downtown girl. Today she is wearing a t-shirt that she has eviscerated with scissors and that flaunts smiling ketchup and mustard bottles, not exactly the garb you would expect on an Upper East Side doyenne. For the past nine years she has been the proprietor of a gorgeous store on Lispenard Street in Tribeca, a destination for travelers who venture below Canal Street in search of the collectible FoundRae jewelry that is meant to express their unique personalities. But when her daughter began attending school uptown, and Hutchens got to know the neighborhood a little bit, she realized that there were in fact, uncounted women—and men—who were not yet members of the extended FoundRae family. “We all have egos,” she admits. “I thought everyone comes downtown—and then all of a sudden I realized, well, a lot of people don’t. There’s a whole other world up here that really has a lot of creativity and an interest in art and craftsmanship.”