Cool Coconut

Since 1999 we’ve made our jewellery in the same family workshop in the Philippines.

That’s the whole business, really. Not a factory, not a supplier list that changes with the season — one workshop, the same one we started with, shaping wood into our designs for twenty-five years.

We work in three timbers. Most of the range is Pangantuon — a pale, soft Philippine wood, also known as whitewood. It is a pleasure to work and it takes colour beautifully, which is why the range looks the way it does. Some pieces are coconut palm wood, darker and striped through the grain. And the Smarties necklaces are coconut shell, which is where all of this started.

They know the timber. We know the colours. Each season we send designs; they send back work we’re happy to put our name on.

We design from Mullumbimby, in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales — beaches, waterfalls, rainforest and rivers. That’s where the colours come from.

These are good materials to build a business on, and for three different reasons. Pangantuon is soft and fast-growing, and we’ve funded a planting of it to put back what we take. Coconut palm is endemic here, abundant, and replaced far more quickly than we use it. And coconut shell is simply what’s left after the coconut has been harvested for food — it would otherwise be thrown away. We’ve eaten a few along the way, too.

We don’t carry a certification. What we have is twenty-five years with the same workshop, which is its own kind of evidence: we deal fairly with the people who make our jewellery and the people who sell it, and we always have. An ethical business is the only kind that lasts this long.