The Five Commandments
The Five Commandments
Five rules we keep, not five promises made to you. They are what we decide at the bench when nobody is watching, and the only reason the pieces come out the way they do.
I · MANU
By hand, or it does not exist.
Every piece is made by human hands, one at a time, in our forge. No machine finishes what a hand began. If a piece cannot be made this way, we do not make it, however well it would sell.
II · NATUS FRACTUS
The flaw stays where it fell.
Our pieces are born from a break we make on purpose, and the break stays exactly where it happened. Nothing is polished back into innocence. The mark is not damage we tolerate: it is the reason the piece exists, and the one part of it that cannot be made twice.
III · VERITAS
Nothing wears a name that is not its own.
When a stone is grown in a laboratory, that is what we write. When the earth made it, we name each inclusion an origin, not a fault. Gold means solid 18kt, and no other metal borrows the word. We use the exact name even when the exact name is worth less.
IV · FIRMITAS
The metal holds the stone.
Every stone sits in a seat cut into the piece, and the metal around it is raised and pressed back over its edge, grain by grain. What holds it is the piece itself, and you can see it: the grains are there, on the surface, around the stone.
V · CUSTODIA
We answer for it, always.
A piece that comes back to us is repaired, for as long as this workshop exists. Not as a courtesy, not as an exception: a piece with our name inside it stays our responsibility, whatever year it is and whoever is wearing it.
