Mike French is an artisan of rare focus and sensibility. As the founder of Texas-based Red Rabbit Trading Co., he crafts at the intersection of time-honored technique and a profound reverence for Southwestern heritage. His work draws deeply from early 20th-century Native American, frontier, and WWII-era aesthetics — objects shaped by hand for people whose lives were intertwined with vast landscapes and stories of survival. Each sterling silver piece he creates is painstakingly formed, often set with stones like turquoise that seem to contain time itself.

French’s process is slow and deliberate, rooted in the practices of true craftspeople — hand-stamping, tufa casting, stone-setting — all approaches that treat the medium not merely as silver, but as story. A feather isn’t just a feather. An arrow isn’t just an arrow. These visual artifacts carry a density of meaning that resists quick consumption. His work traces a direct line back to the Fred Harvey era, when handmade jewelry became a cultural shorthand — sold to railroad travelers seeking tangible connections to the American Southwest.

Yet French’s creations don’t rely on nostalgia. Instead, they embody an obsessive attention to symbolism that lifts them from ornament into the realm of personal relics. These are heirlooms in the making — pieces steeped in story before they’ve even been worn.

Working in collaboration with Mike, our North Star was to surface five pieces that feel universal in their historical resonance — the kind of specificity you glimpse in old black-and-white photographs of soldiers, bracelets hand-stamped and peeking from beneath a uniform cuff. Available in limited quantities as a one-time release, each piece is a riff on those deeply personal artifacts from the 1940s and ’50s — humble yet powerful objects that bring a sense of connection and meaning to the everyday.