The 90s Studio started with a short list of names, not a supplier catalogue. We went looking for benches, and for the people sitting at them. Some of them have been setting stones since before any of us were old enough to wear one. We know their hands, their tempers, which days the work comes slow and which days it comes easy. Nothing leaves here until someone we can name has put hours into it. Every other thing about this brand is downstream of that one arrangement.

The stones take longer than the silver ever does. Good jade does not arrive on a schedule, it turns up or it doesn't, and when it does you take what the seam gives you rather than what the order sheet asked for. We have walked away from more material than we have ever bought. What we do buy gets cut, set, and sometimes rejected at the last stage because the colour turned wrong under the bench light. That is why the runs are small. That is why a piece goes and does not come back.

Nothing that leaves this studio is identical to anything else that leaves it. It cannot be. A hand does not repeat itself the way a die does. There are tool marks on our bands, facets that catch the light unevenly, a shoulder sitting half a degree off from its twin and we leave all of it exactly where it is. The demand that an object be flawless is really a demand that no person ever touched it, and that is not the kind of thing we are here to make. Wear the ring if you like. What you are actually wearing is the hours, and the hand, and the small honest proof that both were there.