Creator. Dream Facilitator. Maker of the Only Thing That Was Missing.

Prologue

There was a little girl who once built a wingback chair for her Barbie doll out of two jewelry cardboard boxes, cotton balls, and pink cotton velveteen — complete with a matching skirt along the bottom and two perfectly pulled cushions. She didn't buy it. She made it, because making was what her family did.

Her father was a journalist who became an Episcopal priest. They moved often and didn't have a lot of money. What they had was imagination — and it ran in the family.

That little girl was Marti Heil. And that wingback chair was the first Fables piece, decades before she knew what Fables was.

The Performer

Marti didn't set out to become a jewelry designer. She set out to tell stories.

On a full scholarship — one of only ten students admitted to the Musical Theatre program that year — she earned her BFA from the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, one of the most selective conservatories in the country. She moved through the world as a performer — a singer-songwriter, a model, a commercial actress — someone fluent in the language of character and transformation. She moved in circles where Bob Dylan personally invited her to join what would become the legendary Rolling Thunder Revue. She turned it down. She turned down three record deals. Not from lack of talent, but from something harder to name — an instinct that the story she was meant to tell hadn't found its form yet.

It found its form when she became pregnant with her first child.

The Beginning

Betsy Rogers, a professor at FIT, noticed something: Marti's ideas were pouring out of her faster than she could learn to make them. So she took her to 47th Street — New York's legendary jewelry and diamond district — and introduced her to Joe Ipek at AMPEX, the caster Marti would work with for the next thirty-some years.

Joe taught her the lost wax method of casting. He taught her the weight relationship between carving wax and sterling silver and gold — the technical foundation that would make everything else possible. He let her come back again and again to watch the process, to learn by being present. And somewhere along the way, Marti taught him something too: that the “impossible” was possible, that imagination didn't have to stop at the edge of what had been done before.

He called her his sister. The photographs of her three children were tucked into the mirror behind the AMPEX counter. She nearly went into labor there twice. She knew and loved his wife and children. And every year, Joe's mother would come from Turkey for a few months and spend her days — every day — sitting in the AMPEX waiting room, to be near her son. She wore all black and mourned her late husband for the rest of her life. Marti sat with her often. She was lovely.

Joe Ipek is in heaven now. But his fingerprints are on every Fables piece ever made, and his belief in what Marti could do helped build everything that followed.

Her first pieces announced exactly who she was. A pair of champagne glass earrings with bubbles rising to the top — worn by Paulina Porizkova in Mademoiselle. And a broken column earring, shot for Vogue, whose secret was invisible: the jump rings were hidden behind the break, so the earring appeared to float, suspended at the fracture by nothing at all.

That earring changed everything. The owner of Vittorio Ricci on the Upper West Side — the first store to carry Marti's work — wore her one prototype to Marla Buck's showroom at Fragments. Fragments called. They already knew the whole story. They told her that everyone in the business knew it — and that the version someone else had made didn't have the hidden jump rings, so it was an entirely different animal.

Fragments signed her. The industry had already decided.

The Ascent

Marti's work appeared in every major magazine. WWD quoted her. Harper's Bazaar shot Apollonia — one of the most iconic faces of her era — wearing Marti's broken heart earrings. Barneys New York ran a full-page ad in Interview magazine — Andy Warhol's magazine, the cultural document of the era — and two or three of the pieces featured were Marti's.

Her jewelry filled the entire window of The Whitney Museum's Store Next Door. It sold out in a week. Her work entered hundreds of stores worldwide: Barneys New York, Bloomingdale's, Linda Dresner, Henri Bendel, The American Folk Art Museum, and The Whitney Museum Store Next Door — where both the window and the shelves told the same story: this was jewelry that belonged in a museum, and the museum agreed.

This was not mass-market jewelry. It never was.

The Interlude

At the height of her commercial reach — having just added some thirty new stores following the birth of her third child and only daughter — Marti made a deliberate choice. She stepped back from the business side and turned fully toward her children.

She kept all three out of preschool until kindergarten. She took them to mother-and-child music, art, and pottery classes. She filled their Flatiron loft with creative projects. Every summer, the day school let out, she swept them away — each child allowed to fill a Barnes & Noble canvas bag with a treasure trove of their own choosing in summer reading. Then three months of just being kids: making their own art, playing sports, going to the beach, catching summer movies, hunting baseball cards, and hosting endless slumber parties.

No agenda. No schedule. Pure childhood — designed by a woman who understood, instinctively, that the greatest creative act is giving people the space to become themselves.

She never stopped designing throughout those years. The ideas kept coming. She simply stepped away from the business and let the craft breathe. When she returned, she brought everything she had learned in that quieter time back into the work.

Look at how her children turned out. The investment was not small.

The Collaborations

What happened next was not a marketing strategy. It was recognition.

Directors, costume designers, and stylists began reaching for Fables pieces when they needed objects that could carry the weight of a character. When Showtime's Penny Dreadful needed jewelry worthy of Dorian Gray, Marti's work became the inspiration — and was sold in the Showtime Store throughout the run of the series. When Taylor Swift's stylist was dressing Reeve Carney for the "I Knew You Were Trouble" music video — a role Taylor Swift personally requested him for — she set aside what she had pulled and chose Fables instead.

Julie Taymor put the Scissorhands Cuff on Prince Ferdinand in The Tempest, alongside Helen Mirren, Russell Brand, Jeremy Irons, and Alfred Molina. WhoWhatWear named it a Fall Pick. It appeared in Vogue. It ran in a nationwide Gap campaign alongside the Harmonicuff. And when Kenny Ortega directed the FOX remake of Rocky Horror Picture Show, Tony Award-winning costume designer William Ivey Long told Marti directly: Riff Raff's finale costume was inspired by her Scissorhands Cuff. The “R” Signet Ring and Nail Coffin Ring were on Riff Raff's hands throughout.

For the Interscope recording artists CARNEY's "Love Me Chase Me" music video, Marti served as full costume designer — and the scope of it was staggering. Every costume worn by all 70 people in the video came entirely from her own private collection. She hand-dyed many of the pieces herself, in her kitchen in Los Angeles. Working alongside a dear friend and successful costume designer, she held fittings at the family home, with massive rented clothing racks filling the rooms. The director asked specifically that her Fables jewelry be featured throughout. It was handmade production design, executed with the same intention she brings to every piece she creates.

The Scissorhands Cuff has now appeared in two major films, a nationwide ad campaign, Vogue, Rolling Stone, and WhoWhatWear. It is, in every sense, a piece with a life of its own.

And the story is still being written — on two stages at once. The Hadestown film had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and opens in theaters nationwide on July 24, 2026. Orpheus wears Marti's Carnival Token necklace throughout the entire film. And in Times Square right now, there is a billboard for The Great Gatsby on Broadway — the stylist, already a fan of Marti's work, met her on a street corner downtown to collect a case of pieces she had pulled while rushing to a fundraiser. Her Mild Havana Cigar Band Ring and Hook and Eye onyx chain earrings are on that billboard, on the columns of the Broadway theatre, and on Jay Gatsby himself — played by her son Reeve, starring alongside his new bride, Eva.

Reeve — the child she was carrying when she first walked into AMPEX and met Joe Ipek — is now on a Times Square billboard wearing his mother's ring.

The story was always going to end up here.

The Philosophy

Sterling silver is softer than other metals. That softness gives it warmth — in the hand, against the skin, and, as it turns out, in sound. Marti designed a sterling silver guitar slide for her son Reeve — to her knowledge, the only one of its kind in existence. It is the only slide he uses. The warmth of the metal changed the tone of the music.

That is what Fables has always been about. The right material, made with intention, changes everything it touches.

Every piece is hand-enameled, hand-signed, and made to carry something — a story, a character, a memory, a mood. Fables jewelry is not decoration. It is narrative made wearable.

The Landing

Marti Heil is a creator and a dream facilitator. She made the jewelry that helped directors realize their visions. She made the slide that gave her son's music its warmth. She raised three children — Reeve, Zane, and Paris — each of them living their own extraordinary creative lives.

She turned down Bob Dylan. She turned down three record deals. She followed an instinct she couldn't fully name, into a studio, into the metal, into forty-plus years of making things that mattered.

I am grateful for my particular road not taken. I landed exactly where I was meant to be.

Epilogue

Recently, antique jewelry dealers have begun reaching out — having acquired Fables pieces and assumed the maker was a man named Marty, no longer living. To be asked about work that had already found its way into the world, already being collected, already being sought — it was an early dream of mine that in decades to come, my jewelry would live on.

It already has.