The Federal Trade Commission is the USA’s federal agency for protecting consumers, aka customers, from untruthful and deceptive business practices. This extends to the jewelry trade terms “hand-made”, “hand-wrought”, and “hand-polished”. The FTC specifically states:
a) It is unfair or deceptive to represent, directly or by implication, that any industry product is hand-made or hand-wrought unless the entire shaping and forming of such product from raw materials and its finishing and decoration were accomplished by hand labor and manually-controlled methods which permit the maker to control and vary the construction, shape, design, and finish of each part of each individual product.
b) It is unfair or deceptive to represent, directly or by implication, that any industry product is hand-forged, hand-engraved, hand-finished, or hand-polished, or has been otherwise hand-processed, unless the operation described was accomplished by hand labor and manually-controlled methods which permit the maker to control and vary the type, amount, and effect of such operation on each part of each individual product.
A key point of this definition is that the construction must be of raw materials, which the FTC defines as, “As used herein, ‘raw materials’ include bulk sheet, strip, wire, and similar items that have not been cut, shaped, or formed into jewelry parts, semi-finished parts, or blanks.”
The team at Timio follows these guidelines to the “t”. All our products start from raw materials, specifically grain, wire, and sheets which we order from our trusted wholesale suppliers. For grain (aka beads of metal), we heat the metal in a crucible, pour the molten metal into an ingot mold, and then pull the material into wire or hammer it into the desired shape. When we start with sheets and wire, we shape and file it into links, clasps, anything we need for a piece. All of our processes are by our own hands- we don’t use automation or machinery that we don’t manually control for the creation of Timio products.
We firmly believe that the skills and manual labor required to create jewelry from raw materials with manually-controlled methods, is an art worth preserving and continuing. The craftsmanship behind each piece adds a value to a piece that isn’t present in a machine-made version- an intangible, even emotional value tied between the craftsperson and the jewelry owner. There’s something special in owning a piece that is not mass manufactured, and not exactly the same as every other piece. Experience the difference for yourself with Timio investment jewelry®.
