
The technology for creating 3D printed precious metal jewellery has been commercially available to the jewellery trade for just over 3 years now. But while we haven’t seen anyone able to incorporate precious metal sintering into a viable business model yet, the promise of that technology excites quite a few people in the luxury market, and may go some way towards explaining why the concept of jewellery CAD itself is slowly and steadily continuing to build its caché.
The Jewellery Editor has recently interviewed several big names in luxury jewellery manufacturing and retail to see what they’re currently doing with jewellery CAD and 3D printing. Along the way, she collected a series of beautiful CAD-made jewellery images to accompany.
While I can appreciate the importance of playing up the novelty of new technology in such a way as to excite luxury buyers without scaring them, I still cannot help but giggle every time I read yet another article using the words “Jewellery CAD Revolution”. CAD/CAM has been pretty much ubiquitous in British jewellery manufacturing since 2007, and it was being used by some rebel designer-makers from the early 00’s (more on that in my next post). But even after all this time, and with a growing crop of jewellery designers wearing their use of CAD prominently in their brand image, it seems many buyers of jewellery must still find the idea shocking that a computer can be used by a designer to make something graceful in gold. And so articles like this one must be written again and again.
But since Ms. Doulton has such grace and style in pretty much everything she publishes, I cannot fault anything she’s presented.