The Toronto jewellery designer putting a high-fashion spin on wearable tech | Canada Voices

Toronto jewellery designer Steff Eleoff wanted to wear an Oura Ring, but everything about it went against her design ethos.

The popular health tracker has found a fanbase among women seeking to better understand their menstrual cycles, fertility and hormonal changes. But its chunky metallic band leaves much to be desired. A scroll through TikTok turns up plenty of variations on the question “Why is the Oura Ring so ugly?” from those looking for something sleeker, chicer and less obviously techy.

Enter 28-year-old Eleoff, known for her liquid-metal earrings, pendants and rings. When she uploaded a TikTok video earlier this year lamenting the same, she was flooded with messages asking for her version of a stylish solution. Eleoff, it turned out, already had something in the works: a sculptural sterling silver cover, rendered in her signature drippy aesthetic, that slipped over the Oura Ring. She launched it two weeks later, in February.

“We worked around the clock to make it happen because we knew tech companies moved fast and I knew someone else was going to have this idea, too,” said the designer of her 15-person Etobicoke team. The first 100 Elixir covers sold out in 48 hours, and she followed them up with another style, the Flow, two weeks later. Eleoff sold more than 2,000 covers in those first weeks.

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In 2015, the Apple Watch launched to great fanfare, with fashion industry endorsements and, later that year, an Hermès-branded edition with leather straps for the luxury consumer. Since then, the wearable tech category has boomed among biohackers, productivity obsessives and the wellness-minded: According to a 2025 report from Canadian research firm Leger, roughly 40 per cent of Canadians use wearable technology, with smartwatches being the most popular choice. Smart rings, meanwhile, are gaining ground: Oura doubled its revenue for the second year in a row in 2024. As of earlier this year, 72 per cent of the Finnish company’s members worldwide are women, with 31 per cent age 29 or younger.

Despite the mass adoption of wearable tech, there’s still a glaring divide between fashion and function. Outside of Oura’s 2022 collaboration with Gucci – a special-edition smart ring detailed with gold – options for elevating the devices are largely limited to Etsy sellers with one-off designs and a handful of fine jewellers with ring covers that push the investment to a new level. Fine jewellers Suzanne Kalan and Logan Hollowell, for example, frame the tracker with pavé diamonds. Eleoff’s tech covers, which have since expanded into a full collection of styles, start at just more than $300.

Eleoff, who has been designing jewellery since 2020, already counted celebrities such as Kylie Jenner and Olivia Rodrigo among her fans, and Selfridges in London and Kith in Tokyo among her retailers. The success of her brand’s tech ring covers has brought even more attention, resulting in Holt Renfrew pop-ups at the store’s Toronto Bloor Street and Yorkdale locations ahead of the holiday season, and a New York showcase sponsored by Shopify earlier this month.

She credits the success of her ring covers to how quickly her team was able to respond to a conversation already in full swing. But the process wasn’t without growing pains. The initial orders ballooned far beyond the studio’s capacity and the wait for a cover stretched to several months, drawing frustration from customers online.

“It was so fascinating as a business owner to learn this part of the business. We can sell so much and see all these numbers expanding, but then it’s like, ‘Oh, wait, now we’re refunding all these people. What do we do?’” she said.

The designer took to social media to explain the delays.

“We’ve been transparent from the beginning of starting the business, when I was in my parents’ basement and my mom was helping me ship packages. We filmed all of that.” With an expanded production team and interest trickling over into other areas of the brand, such as birthstone letter necklaces and new pieces inspired by bodies of water, Eleoff said she plans to keep production in Canada.

“Everything is made by hand,” she said. “We’re a team that’s slow and intentional with what we’re making.”

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With Canada’s wearable tech market projected to grow by roughly 15 per cent by 2031, there’s plenty of opportunity to bring more stylish alternatives to market. And Eleoff is open to expanding beyond rings.

“If Apple called me, I’d do it in two seconds,” she said.