Van Cleef and Arpels demanded from the German supermodel’s company, Heidi Klum GmbH, and Mouawad, another firm with whom Heidi Klum collaborated when designing the pieces, for damages worth 25,000 American dollars. The French producer of luxury jewelry claims that both of the companies mentioned above attempted to obtain profit by selling a piece of jewelry, in the shape of a clover, initially designed by Van Cleeg and Arpels for the Alhambra collection. The Van Cleef & Arpels Inc company is held by the Richemont group.
Following the scandal, the “Project Runway” host decided she will bring her jewelry design career to an end and pursue other goals. However, Heidi Klum, wife of singer Seal, decided she should try to go down swinging, and issued statements according to which she is upset by the need to retire but she does not see herself as entirely to blame for the failure, hinting at partnering company Mouawad. "Unfortunately, I did have a partner who maybe wasn't as knowledgeable in terms of setting up a business," Klum told Stylelist in an interview.
Asked about the incident, partner and designer Pascal Mouawad told Stylelist "Heidi and I collaborated together for five years on designing, marketing and distributing a jewelry collection to carry her name. Recently, Heidi decided that she no longer wanted to design jewelry and instead would pursue other goals." According to Mouawad, the incident came on rather absurd reasons, since there are many designs of jewelry in the world, and the collection launched by Heidi Klum came as a result of years of work, but Van Cleef & Arpels decided “they wanted to have the clover, even though our designs have never matched”.
Klum went on saying that Van Cleef & Arpels pursued and sued everyone who had clover jewelry in their designed collections, which prompted her to ironically and rhetorically “then who's the person with the clover and the person with the heart?”, adding these are tactics slightly similar to bullying because a large company, such as Van Cleef & Arpels, with tradition and a history in the business, has an army of lawyers and mouth-pieces who will literally tear to shreds the designated target of the day. “I'm a small fry next to that," Klum concluded.
The bottom line is that Heidi Klum partnered up with Mouawad and tried to launch a designer jewelry collection of her own, but she was clueless to the cutthroat nature of the jewelry business that she was trying to enter and received a hard lesson in company competition. As far as you are concerned, I say it again, if you are interested in Heidi Klum jewelry, hit the retail stores because they are now applying major discounts to the collection.