Design and Creation at Lolo and Galago

When our founder created Lolo and Galago, his goal was to provide our customers with jewellery finished to a premium level that can be worn with pride. But he also wanted every piece to be beautiful in its design as well as its quality-and as such we make sure we go through a rigorous process so that each piece we produce can be worn as a work of art.

To get both beautiful design and construction is a challenge, requiring a lot of time and effort, involving people from all over the World- but it is time and effort we will always put in- and in this blog, we wanted to show you how. After all, there’s nothing better than being able to appreciate both craftsmanship and artistic talent in a single piece.

 

The first stage with all jewellery is for a designer to sketch up their original ideas for a collection. Our team in London starts with some brief guidelines for our designers. Our team will talk about upcoming trends, styles and inspirations and develop a mood board of images and ideas, like above, for our designers.

 

Our designer will then get to work sketching a variety of concept ideas based on our early art work, similar to the sketchbook page above. Our creative team then works with our designers, iterating through several designs, constantly re-working ideas until the perfect piece is finalised.

 

 

For a final jewellery design to be agreed, the piece must reflect the themes and inspirations that the collection needs to represent, and be versatile in design so our customer can wear it in a variety of ways. We never accept a final design until we are confident it is exclusive, beautiful and can be worn as designer art. Once everyone in the process is agreed, a finalised drawing is produced like above.

So, now we have a beautifully designed piece incorporating its own style and message- but we still need to produce it! Whilst our designers begin working on our next exciting collection, our goldsmiths start the technical work.
One of the beautiful things about jewellery manufacturing is it hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years- and at Lolo and Galago to make our exclusive jewellery we still use a lot of traditional methods.
Whilst for some pieces we use 3D design, in others our goldsmiths still carve the piece by hand.

 

 

Once we have our carving- which takes several days- we use it to create a rubber and resin mould which will be used to cast our first ‘master’ silver piece.

Our craftsmen then improve the master piece by polishing and filing small details before creating a second, perfectly formed mould. It is from this final mould that we then produce our final pieces. We have several stages and moulds as this helps create a much better finish- more on that next week!

 

Now it’s time to add some stones! We have an expert team who travel the globe to source the highest quality stones and cuts, attending the world’s largest stone markets. We then use our team of goldsmiths to set our stones, polish the raw piece, plate it, and then polish it... again!

It’s then time to Assay our piece before packaging it beautifully ready for a customer. It’s hard to believe just how many people have worked on creating a single piece and how many painstaking hours have gone into its design and production. But once you wear it, its beauty, depth of design and wearability make all that effort worthwhile.

And that is something both Lolo and Galago and our customer can be proud of.