New York – Longtime jewellery industry journalist Hedda Schupak died Tuesday morning in a Philadelphia-area hospital of complications from lung cancer.
She was 62.
Longtime friend and industry colleague Russ Shor confirmed the news to National Jeweler.
Schupak studied fashion design at Drexel University and later transferred to Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, where she graduated with a degree in English and communications.
Shor first met Schupak 37 years ago when she started as an assistant production editor at JCK Magazine, then published in Radnor, Pennsylvania.
She became the publication’s fashion editor in 1997.
“Fashion design was her real passion,” Shor said, and she pushed the industry to think of jewellery as more of a fashion accessory and to market it to women who were interested in buying jewellery for themselves.
For a 2019 National Jeweler article asking members of the industry to weigh in on the biggest developments of the past decade, Schupak listed the industry’s recognition of female self-purchasers as one of them.
She noted the importance of “the industry finally, FINALLY starting to acknowledge the importance of selling jewellery as fashion to a female self-purchasing audience”.Schupak became editor-in-chief of JCK magazine in 2000, a position she held until 2009.
She became editor of the Centurion newsletter in 2010 before announcing her “semi-retirement” last year, telling JCK news editor Rob Bates that leaving the jewellery industry was “bittersweet”.
“I’ve just been lucky to have had such a great career in such a great industry,” she said in the article published on JCKOnline.com. “I’ve had a lot of opportunities to travel around the world and meet people from so many different places. I just feel very blessed.Schupak lived in a Philadelphia suburb with her husband, Jim Baum, and their five cats. Baum had just retired from First Union Bank.
“They had all these plans,” Shor said. “They were just going to have a good life in retirement.”
National Jeweler will have more on Schupak’s life and career, including funeral information, as it becomes available.
