Hernán Herdez is an 11-year old jewelry line made by Melissa Hernandez. And it began, like so many creative ventures do these days, as a hobby. “I was living in New York at the time, I moved there for an internship, and was working as an art director, but my accounts were pretty boring,” she explains on a recent call from her studio in Puerto Rico, where she’s based. “I needed a creative outlet.”

While she spent her days working on how to market “cellphones,” among other decidedly un-sexy things, she began making jewelry, which she sold under the name Coyote Negro, along with vintage clothes and pieces by other designers. She describes those early pieces as “bohemian and elaborate,” which makes sense given the trends at the time, but by her second collection she “landed on something more

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