The merging of fashion and technology in the form of wearables is imminent. Companies like Kovert Designs are spurring that process with their luxury connected jewellery. As much as this London-based company fuses cutting-edge smart technology with beautiful design, conquering the fashion world isn’t what Founder and CEO Kate Unsworth has set out to do: rather, her mission consists of propelling a movement toward using technology more mindfully.

The innovative design house recently launched their premier product line, ALTRUIS, with its Cleopatra Collection. This range of high-end jewellery helps its wearer fight the distracting tendencies of everyday “fast information”. How? The stone on each ring, bracelet or necklace contains a circuit board, rechargeable battery, vibration motor and Bluetooth technology. Through an app, you can set profiles for different times of the day — ‘meeting’, ‘dinner’, or ‘creative time’ for example — and select which notifications you want to seep through by pre-determining specific contacts, keywords or modes of communication. Subtle vibrations alert the wearer, empowering them to step away from their compulsive smartphone habits. The jewellery also acknowledges that wearable technology is still an evolving space with many shortcomings: each piece is built so that the stone can be replaced by future editions.

Drowning out the noise and fighting “notification nausea” is a need that hits close to home for Kate. Reaching near burn-out in her previous career, a short digital detox instilled her with a fresh perspective. “I felt like I had been put back on the earth and was alive again. I reassessed everything — I hadn’t been productive at work, even though I was connected all the time. When I was with friends or family, I wasn’t 100% present,” Kate shared with us. “Rather than enforcing rules on myself to limit my technology use— which is just impractical— I wanted a tool that would let me customise how connected I wanted to be throughout the day”. As well as releasing products that enable us to disconnect to reconnect, Kate is focusing on building a community that emulates the “Kovert lifestyle” in less tangible ways as well.

As a technology startup, Kovert Designs answers the aesthetic demands of the fashion world by creating products women actually want to wear. At the same time, they take new direction from the more gimmicky quantified self wearables saturating the market.