March 31, 2025 |
The Great Frog is steeped in hippie serendipity, hell-raising rock history, and the counterculture. “I like to think we’re the Cartier for goths,” says Reino Lehtonen-Riley of the jewellery brand founded by his parents, Carol Lehtonen and Paterson Riley, in 1972. It quickly became rock ‘n’ roll’s crown jeweller. This is where Slash, Lemmy and Iron Maiden bought skull rings, heavy-duty chains, and one-of-a-kind belt buckles.
Reino Lehtonen-Riley, designer and owner of rock ‘n’ roll jeweller The Great Frog
The business was on its knees when Reino, then aged 27, took over its jewellery design and operations in 2006. After his father died last October, he became the sole proprietor. Like his dad before him, he still carves every new piece in wax in the workshop (a traditional technique used to make casts for jewellery design), and, in 2025, the brand is thriving, with six stores in Los Angeles, New York, and London (Soho, Shoreditch, and King’s Cross). His strategy for success was threefold. He harnessed The Great Frog’s cult heritage – it still produces many of his dad’s designs. Quality is crucial. Its jewellery is built to last a lifetime and be handed down through generations, with everything handmade and finished using British hallmarked silver, platinum, or yellow, white, or rose gold.
Reino has also broadened the appeal of the brand, reaching out to new customers through careful collaborations (everyone from Dr. Martens, Cutler and Gross, Palace and Porsche; he’s also designed a custom chopper and jewellery for Harley-Davidson). Now, the heavily pierced and tattooed staff in the Ganton Street boutique (the original shop) are just as likely to be serving a Japanese fashion addict in head-to-toe Comme des Garçons as music fans and rock royalty.
Incidentally, the Comme connection comes from Rei Kawakubo herself, who, in her youth, was obsessed with rock ‘n’ roll and would buy eye rings from The Great Frog whenever she was in London. The brand has been stocked in Dover Street Market since it opened in 2004. “I got a garbled message saying, ‘Someone called Ray wants to put some jewellery in their market.’ I didn’t know a Ray, and then I was like, ‘That’s Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons!’” he recalls with a laugh.
from left: a human skull from Reino’s collection in the Ganton Street shop; Reino hand-carves and test-wears every design before it goes into the shop
The Great Frog was born in 1972, when Lehtonen and Riley set up shop in a rickety Grade I-listed Georgian house just off the fashionable hub of Carnaby Street. Riley’s jewellery workshop was in the basement (a former bakery), the shop was on the ground floor (as it is today), and there were bedrooms above. The unusual brand name comes from a story in one of the West Coast psychedelic comics that Riley collected. “It was about this guy who had taken LSD and he’s pondering life’s existence,” says Reino. “It’s an astral-plane trip and he’s floating in space. He comes across this huge frog floating on an orb, gets down on his knees, and asks, ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ The frog goes, ‘All the waters of the earth are contained within the armpit of the great frog.’ And that was our little strapline,” he says, pointing to merch bearing the storied line.
Today, The Great Frog is still a mecca for musicians and anyone with a penchant for alternative lifestyles and the dark side. Several human skulls and a human thigh bone nestle in the display cabinets alongside a cornucopia of skull rings, oversized crosses, studded bands, and the brand’s distinctive bone alphabet pendants. There’s even a coffin ring for the morbidly obsessed.
spider pendant and mixed-metal rings
Reino tells a story which, like many things associated with The Great Frog, comes with an important caveat: “There are a lot of stories. I don’t really know if they are true or not, but they’re good stories,” he says, referring to his dad’s “truth-bending skills” and the glorious mythology around the brand. This particular tale refers to how the FBI once closed down the LA store because they suspected the skulls there came from graverobbers. “My dad collected skulls, and I collect them. We get them from antique markets, but my dad used to tell this story. Some of the skulls apparently came to us from his mate who, back in the ’80s, used to turn up and pay for his jewellery with muddy skulls in a plastic bag.” When Reino’s cousin, who ran the LA shop, repeated the story on TV, the FBI swooped.
Riley had come over from New Zealand in the 1960s, following his dream to join a band. He immersed himself in the London music scene but never made it as a musician. He did, however, have a knack for fashion, working in the clothes shops of Carnaby Street and doing a stint as a menswear buyer at Harrods. One store sold hippie jewellery, brought over from Morocco, where the owner went to buy his hash. It was cheap and badly made, and because Riley disliked giving refunds, he learned how to make and fix the pieces he was selling to his friends. Most of them were musicians. “My dad was part of that scene with Lemmy and all those guys. They’d go out drinking in Soho at The Bag O’Nails [a famed rock music venue where Hendrix played and where Paul McCartney met Linda Eastman]. There’s massive rock ‘n’ roll history all around here [Soho], and it was very much the start of a whole new genre,” says Reino.
Psychedelic music was cross-pollinating with hard rock to form the beginnings of the heavy metal scene, and its iconography was evolving with the sound. “If you wanted a skull ring back in the ’60s, it didn’t exist,” he says. “So when one of his musician friends said he’d like ‘a big fuck-off skull ring,’ my dad said, ‘Oh, I could do that for you.’” The Great Frog was born and, with it, the key motifs of the metal scene. Lemmy was an early adopter. “He would be wearing it, and people would say, ‘Oh, that’s really fucking cool. Where’d you get that?’ The Great Frog. Nobody else was doing it. [Dad] was pretty much the inventor of this style of jewellery.”
from left: a work bench in the basement of the Ganton Street store, where everything is handmade; skull rings, turquoise rings and bracelets in the Soho shop
Riley would carve his distinctive designs on benches in the basement of the Carnaby flagship and sleep off the previous night’s indulgences on the couch upstairs. By all accounts, the building was a death trap. Reino recalls visiting his father one morning: “He was asleep upstairs. Half the ceiling had collapsed, and he hadn’t noticed. I said, ‘Someone’s going to die in here if we don’t fix it.’ He’d be like, ‘It’ll be alright, it’s been here 300 years, it’s going to last another [300].’”
Reino took the opportunity, when shops were closed during Covid, to renovate the place and discovered it was built on a plague pit. He added modern essentials like air conditioning and a fire alarm but retained its original features. The workshop is still in the basement. There’s an archive room featuring photos and memorabilia, including prize pieces such as Lemmy’s belt buckle and Riley’s guitar. Upstairs, you can buy archive designs, collaborations, and memorabilia, including pot-leaf pendants, miniature spoons, and weed grinders. “Originally, I was deeply embarrassed about all these weed leaves and coke spoons, but now I think it’s really fun. It’s our roots and what we started out as,” he says. “I feel like a bit of a fraud because I can’t stand the stuff,” he says, gesturing to the ganja grinders. “I used to smoke it solidly for 20 years, and now it would put me in a coma for two days if I even smell it.”
rings and chains sit on a display cabinet that contains a human thigh bone
Reino’s parents split when he was 10, and he moved from the shop to Harrow, North London. “We lived in the ’burbs, and my parents looked like the Addams Family. Now I look back and it’s really fucking cool, but back then, as a pre-teen, you just want to be normal and fit in and not have outrageous parents. Back then, my mum would wear spandex print leggings and white cowboy boots. My dad would wear the same.” Riley would drive them around in a Volkswagen estate, which he’d hand-painted black, that backfired loudly. “It looked like a hearse. I look back on [my childhood] now, and it was an amazing upbringing that gave me so much and was so rich. But at the time, you’re just like, ‘Fuck, it’s so embarrassing. Can everyone be normal, please?’” he says. For a long time, Reino was ambivalent about the business. “I didn’t see it for what it was. I saw it through the eyes of a child. It was always on the verge of collapse, there was stress and money issues. There was a lot of dysfunction, and I wanted nothing to do with it.”
from left: Reino outside 10 Ganton Street,the original branch, which opened in 1972; Ganton Street staffers: Matty Noble, Saskia O’Hara and Ross Ingielewicz
He rebelled by training in industrial engineering and product design at Hertfordshire University, then went travelling and worked in designer retail, but the jewellery world had a strong hold. “I’d been around it all my life and picked things up almost by osmosis.” He lived above the shop for years, just like his dad. Now, he has a workshop at home in rural Essex, where he lives with his family. His own taste in music and style is more eclectic than his father’s, taking in D&B, jungle, and hip-hop via skate and bike culture, as well as the greats of rock ‘n’ roll. One of his oldest friends is Alex Turner from Arctic Monkeys. It all informs The Great Frog today, but when he drives his two kids to school, they want one thing. “‘Daddy, AC/DC!’ I love that,” he says. One of the many things he has inherited from his father, alongside a talent for storytelling, is a sense of serendipity. Adventures just happen to him. On his first trip to Los Angeles to open the outpost there, he bumped into Lemmy at LAX. “We talked about my mum and dad.” The rock star offered him a ride – in his limo, of course – to the Chateau Marmont (where Reino was staying with Turner). They drank Jack Daniel’s and Coke and smoked Marlboro Reds all the way into town. The Wanderer [a 1961 classic by pop crooner Dion] came on the radio, and he started singing along in his Lemmy voice,” says Reino.
Lemmy ended up coming to the boutique opening, where there was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s waiting for him, and when the party got shut down by the police, he took everyone across the road to his favourite stripclub, Cheetahs. Reino had to stay behind and lock up the shop. “It’s one of my biggest regrets in the world, not to have gone to a stripclub with Lemmy.”
from left: hand-finishing a ring; the basement workshop, which used to be a bakery
Taken from 10 Magazine Issue 74 – MUSIC, TALENT, CREATIVE – on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
Photography by Anna Stokland.
