Tammy Carmona

Tammy Carmona is a multi-talented designer and event producer, based in Brooklyn, New York. Over the course of her 25+ year long career, she has created award-winning movie sets, won competitions in floral design, and invented over 400 products for dinnerware & tabletop industries.

Tammy is the owner & CEO of Carmona New York, a design & decor company offering a multitude of services ranging from interior design and staging, to unique silk floral centerpieces, to award-winning dinnerware and tabletop products.

Tammy speaks 4 languages – English, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Spanish. She has traveled to over 50 countries, and has a cosmopolitan awareness of the various design influences and traditions all over the world, which she brings to her floral arrangements and product designs.

Tammy’s story began in Israel, where she started working in a flower shop at the age of 10, helping to clean up vases and prepare flowers. The store owner, noticing her diligence and skill, taught her to create simple floral arrangements. At the age of 14, she was already managing a gift shop and defining her own unique gift wrapping style, that kept customers coming back. At 15, she sewed a wedding dress for a customer.

Even at this early age, Tammy demonstrated a talent for design, creativity, and a sense of beauty. However, she didn’t have much room to grow. At 17, she came to America for the 1st time, a young woman without a dime, without language, without connections, without family or friends – but determined to make a name for herself. Because of the language barrier, she started with sewing dresses for women in the local community, working out of a basement apartment, and creating designs that impressed her customers.

She also learned how to bake and decorate cakes, some of which ended up winning awards and being featured on the front covers of bridal magazines. Pastillage (cake decoration) is an art that takes most people years to master, and even then, they don’t often manage to create cakes – in an apartment kitchen – that sell for thousands of dollars and get compliments from industry titans like Sylvia Weinstock.

Tammy also taught herself how to carve fruits and arrange fruit platters, reaching a level of skill that led her to teach fruit carving and arrangement at multiple seminars throughout the United States and Israel. She even published a book titled “Aristocratic Fruits”, which has been used by 1000s of women to create stunning fruit-based decorations for their own family events.

By the way, she did all this while raising 5 kids.

Eventually, Tammy moved on to event planning, applying her sense of style and her work ethic to produce events that dazzled the New York community. Weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, corporate events, birthday celebrations, private parties – nothing is outside her reach, and every event is completely unique and spectacular in its own way.

While working as a garde-manger chef and party planner, Tammy realized that the selection of dishes that the restaurants and caterers were working with, was boring and inadequate. So she did what all normal people do in this circumstance – came up with a bunch of designs, went to China, found a factory, and started producing a line of unique dinnerware that was oven-safe, microwave-safe, freezer-safe, and dishwasher-safe – as well as featured never-before-seen shapes and creative cooking and serving solutions. The Carmona line of dishes became an instant hit with homeowners and restaurant owners alike – it was lightweight and durable enough for the commercial kitchen environments, yet so beautiful that 100s of families around Brooklyn have “Carmona Closets” full of dinnerware sets that let them cook and serve in style.

Tammy is the kind of designer that people all over the world commission to work on various projects. She has designed a millionaire’s mansion in Hungary, produced events in Morocco, consulted on product design at a factory in Czech Republic, conducted lectures and training seminars in Israel, and helped to organize community events in Louisiana after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

If it has to do with shape, color, function, or design – chances are that Tammy will be able to envision and execute it to perfection. This is why Carmona New York is able to offer a complete line of design services, whether it’s dinnerware or crystal, cakes or events, silk floral arrangements or custom wall decorations.