About

Everything here is made of the same three things: 316L stainless steel, natural stone, and a long detour.

I spent the eighties and the nineties in the Portuguese ceramics industry. Not inside one factory, but between several of them, always arriving with the same question: what is this piece supposed to be, before anyone touches clay? That is where I learned the one lesson I have never had to unlearn. An object is decided long before it is made.

In 2004 I went to Thailand, to understand it and to source there. It is a country full of extraordinary makers, and at that moment it was ahead. China had not yet arrived. A year later I moved to Macau and made a life there. It was home until Germany. The work itself was across the border: two or three days a week on the mainland, where the suppliers were. I learned the trade from the inside: how things are sourced, costed, argued over, and shipped.

I also built my first jewellery brand in those years. It was called ANOUK. It did not work. I am not going to dress that up; it taught me more about what a brand actually is than any of the years that went well.

Then Germany — family is what brought me here, and here the road ended. A company in Bavaria, and the attempt to build this properly. That did not go as it was supposed to either. The product was right. The timing and the backing were not. A small house making considered steel jewellery was, at the time, a difficult thing to explain when security counted for more than a good idea.

Pedro de Bettencourt

I am starting again, and this time in the open.

What has changed is not the jewellery. It is the distance. It is now possible to make a piece, show it, and put it into someone's hands without a chain of people in between deciding what she is allowed to want.

That is the entire reason this shop exists.

What we make

Stainless steel, 316L, the grade used for surgical instruments. It does not tarnish, it does not stain a wrist green, and it is genuinely hypoallergenic. It is also honest: it costs what it costs, and it lasts.

The stones are natural: amazonite, agate in black, grey, white and yellow, quartz in rose and smoke, aventurine, and freshwater pearls. Each is cut individually, so no two pieces are identical, and we have stopped apologising for that.

The forms are deliberately quiet. Nothing here shouts. The pieces are built to be combined. A chain, a pendant, a second pendant, a bracelet that borrows from the necklace. What you wear is arranged by you and not by us.

Everything ships from Germany.

Who is behind it

Pedro de Bettencourt, de Bettencourt Handels GmbH, Scheyern, Bavaria.

Forty years of getting products made, on three continents, most of it under other people's names. This one has mine on it.