I’ve been dreading this call.
I met D.D. many years ago through a friend, at a time when I was searching for a way to reinterpret the famed elephant-hair bracelet. Instead of replicating it, he offered me something far more meaningful: a sustainable version carved from water buffalo horn—no harm, no compromise, just beauty shaped by human hands.
D.D. is the root of my brand. Truly. He is the quiet architect behind a material that has become part of ZADEH’s DNA—buffalo horn, with its warmth, its depth, its soul. He carves impossibly thin fibers that move like elephant hair, each strand pulled from raw horn with a precision that still humbles me.
His own story is extraordinary, though he would never tell it. He escaped the Congo at its height of turmoil, rebuilt a life in Belgium, and eventually found his way to Canada, carrying nothing but talent, resilience, and these hands that could coax poetry out of horn.
The Brant bracelet—one of the cornerstones of ZADEH—exists because of him. My aesthetic, my early identity as a designer, the foundation of everything I’ve built… so much traces back to that first moment we met.
And today, the call I’ve been bracing myself for finally came: he is retiring, closing his doors this December.
Even though I’ve known this day was coming, it feels like a chapter of my career—one of the most important—is gently closing. I do have some stock left, but not much. When these last pieces are gone, they will truly be gone.
So if your heart has ever tugged at the Brant—if you’ve ever wanted something that carries the soul of craftsmanship, the hand of a master, and a story unlike anything else—you should claim one while you can. They are one-of-a-kind in the truest sense.
Once they’re gone, they’re gone.
