Our Gold

A wedding band is the one object most people intend to keep forever. It seemed wrong to make something that permanent out of material we couldn't ask a single question about.

Gold is the part of this work with the longest shadow. Most of it arrives at a jeweller's bench with no history attached — not because anyone hid it, but because the supply chain was never built to carry that information. We have moved to the version that does, and we have accepted what that costs.

Fairmined is an assurance label that certifies gold from artisanal and small-scale mining organizations — the small, often family-run operations that produce a meaningful share of the world's gold and almost none of its paperwork.

To be certified, a mining organization has to meet requirements across four areas: formal and legal operation, environmental protection, labour conditions, and traceability of the metal itself. Certification is audited, and Fairmined publishes audit summaries for each certified mine on its own website — you can read them without asking anyone's permission.

There is a second tier, Fairmined Ecological, for gold extracted with no toxic chemicals at all and with native ecosystem restoration. Standard Fairmined requires responsible chemical use and a gradual reduction; Ecological requires their absence.

Certification also sets what the miners are paid. Certified organizations receive at least 95% of the international gold price as published by the London Bullion Market Association — a floor, not a negotiation.

On top of that price, buyers pay a Fairmined Premium of USD 4 per gram, or USD 6 per gram for Ecological gold. The premium goes to the mining organization itself, not to a broker or a trader, and the organization directs it toward its own development, its miners' welfare, community projects and environmental work.

That is the mechanism worth understanding: the premium is not a donation attached to a purchase. It is a term of the trade.

Four things stack up, and none of them is dramatic on its own.

The metal price floor. Certified gold cannot be bought below 95% of the LBMA price. Conventional gold can be bought wherever it is cheapest.

The premium. USD 4 per gram, or USD 6 for Ecological, paid on top.

The chain of custody. Certified gold stops being certified the moment it is melted with uncertified metal. Keeping it separate means casting inside a facility authorized to handle it, in dedicated runs — which is slower and less efficient than pooling everything together.

Small batches. We make each piece to order. There is no production run to spread setup across.

We want to be accurate about the size of this: the metal standard is one input among several. Design time, hand finishing, stones and small-batch production all sit inside the price too. Anyone telling you a single line item explains the whole difference is selling you something.

Six things, in roughly the order they happen.

The cheapest path was available to us, and it was genuinely cheaper. We could have kept buying metal job by job and said nothing about it — that is what most of this industry does, and no customer would have known to ask.

We didn't take it, for a reason that is more practical than moral: we could not describe our own supply chain, and we were not willing to build a permanent object on top of a question we couldn't answer.

So the added cost buys something specific. Not a feeling about the planet — a manufacturing route we can name and you can check, and a standard whose premium reaches the people who did the hardest part of the work.

Five steps, and the second one is where most brands lose the thread. Every 14K gold piece now follows this route under our Fairmined licence.