About the brand

Susan Alexandra

Susan Alexandra is Susan Korn's New York brand of hand-beaded bags and joyful Jewish jewelry, full of color, humor and Yiddish.

Based: New York City
Since: 2014
Craft: Hand-beading and enamel jewelry

Susan Alexandra is the colorful, funny New York brand of designer Susan Korn, who founded it in 2014 as a jewelry company run out of her bedroom. At the time she was making hand-painted jewelry. Then, on a walk through Chinatown, she found a tiny storefront packed with little beaded creatures and pictured handbags. The shop's owner, Lisa Deng, had never made a purse, so Korn commissioned a watermelon bag from her. The first bags sold within days, and made-in-NYC beaded bags became the brand's signature.

Korn doesn't hide where the joy comes from. "I am obsessed with Jews, they are my favorite thing in the world," she told the New York Jewish Week. In November 2022 she launched a Judaica line in honor of her grandmother Rose, a Holocaust survivor, with yarmulkes, mezuzahs, menorahs, dreidels and jewelry hung with Yiddish charms.

The Jewish jewelry is playful on purpose: hand-enameled Stars of David, chais and Yiddish words like chutzpah, mensch and oy vey, on bronze, sterling silver, pearl and crystal chains.