When I started making in 2002 I had no idea that Rob, a boat skipper, and I would one day be working together with a team of lovely island employees – I also didn’t realise how hard it would be to grow a business either, I wish I had kept a log or diary of the hours invested and the time spent worrying about it all!

We have always been very conscious of the importance of scaling rather than expanding and have therefore been very selective about who we stock with and have learnt to say no to galleries and stockists (some of which have been big companies) in order to maintain the essence of our small island brand.

Apart from some batch castings that we have done by a company in the jewellery quarter in Birmingham and the fine chains we buy in, everything we produce is made here in our island workshop by one of the islander makers.

Living on a tiny island makes you very conscious of your environmental impact – waste can’t be ignored here, we’re very aware that what comes in must go out somehow. We are fortunate that jewellery and to some extent the bullion we use, is light and can be easily posted, there is minimal packaging, barely any water consumption, no heavy plant machinery used within the production or transportation. Postal deliveries are taken by bike or on foot and the only vehicle we have is a small electric flat bed, a bit like a golf buggy. We use this to get larger items – mainly cardboard boxes or our packaging from the quay, where it arrives by boat, to the workshop. Apart from a barn that we use to store cardboard boxes in a dry space (the workshop is old and very leaky) everything is contained within the workshop.