The Art of Saving Animals

This season at Classic Hardware I collaborated with four talented artists and asked them to create an Endangered Creatures Collection.
Kelly Vivanco painted a touching series of bears. Bonni Reid created a wild series of big cats. Melissa Contreras did a lovely gouache series of baby animals from Africa and
Simon Sotelo did detailed etchings of winged creatures. We have the images available on our vanity cases, necklaces, bracelets, rings, earrings and some money clips and cufflinks, too.

The best part of the story is we have teamed up with the non-profit organization, Born Free USA. We are donating a portion of the proceeds from each sale to them. Their mission is to end suffering of wild animals in captivity and rescue individual animals in need as well as protect wildlife in their natural habitats. Here is Oliver the monkey having some fun at the Born Free primate sanctuary.

As some of you may recall, “Born Free” was an award winning movie in 1966 about an orphaned lion cub names Elsa based on a true story. Elsa was raised by George and Joy Adamson and then released back into the wild. Real-life husband and wife Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna played George and Joy in the film. There is a great PBS documentary about the movie that you can watch here

They became wildlife activists in the process and began Born Free in the UK along with their son William. Among the many great things they did for animals, was house the famous Christian the Lion, prior to him being released back into the wild of Africa. This video is an amazing account about Christian the Lion. It brings me to tears every time Christian recognizes his caretakers after a year in the wild!

We are very happy to begin our collaboration with this wonderful organization. Here is the Born Free USA press release.

And just to make sure we covered our bases, we ran it by Bugsy, the Classic Hardware studio cat, He gave it the paw of approval. We hope you will, too!