The maker
I should be honest: there was never a plan. I didn’t set out to build a jewelry brand, or even to make beautiful things. I was just curious, and I wanted to make stuff. The rest I only really see looking back.
It started with a machine that wasn’t mine
In 1991 I was an IT technician in a shop in Patras, writing code at night for the love of it. A man came in who’d bought a big CNC machine from Italy but wouldn’t pay for the software it needed, and asked if we could write him one. I said I would — I didn’t yet know how. I built him a program that traced drawings with a digitizer and turned them into the code a machine could cut. And when I watched my own code move that machine, something moved in me too. I didn’t know what I wanted to make. I just knew I wanted to make machines that make things.
The long way round
It took a while — about two decades, on and off. The parts were expensive, so I waited; when they finally got cheap I designed my first machine myself and built it in my bedroom. I started keeping little used precision parts from Japan in a drawer, sure I’d need them one day. In 2013 I did: I built a small, fast, very precise machine — the big one cutting the parts for the small one — and that little machine has made every piece since.
None of that was patience toward some goal. I was just curious, and I kept following it.
Wood, and a suggestion
I wanted to carve wood from the start. I found some beautiful, very hard species — one of them sands to a mirror — and a friend said, why not jewelry? Something clicked: small, precise, and it could be beautiful. I sliced the wood thin and made pendants. Around then I was burning knots into wood with a laser I’d rigged up, and the designs began to find their shape.
The trouble was the chains — I couldn’t stand the cheap metals against the skin. So the pendants waited, in a drawer again, while I changed jobs and houses. Then I sent a few pieces to my sister, and she said they’d make beautiful earrings. She was right — and titanium ear hooks solved the very thing that had bothered me about the chains.
I wanted it a lot better
The early designs were good, but I wanted them a lot better, and that took years more — a proper process, the right box (the ready-made ones were never good enough), the photographs. The lockdown finally gave me the time to finish the tools: a camera, and the software I wrote to generate the designs and the machine code, one piece at a time.
Why I keep going
I still don’t think of myself as an artist with a vision. I’m just someone curious who wanted to make things — and this is what that curiosity became. What keeps me at it is the same thing that started it: there’s still nothing like watching a new design fall out of the transformations and thinking yes — that’s really good, and wanting to make the next one. That people find their pair in these — that someone meets their piece — means more than I expected; but if I’m honest, it’s the making that keeps me at the bench.
And maybe that’s the whole of it, looking back: a curious person; a knot transformed until you’d never find it; an endless tie; and, for whoever it’s for, their one pair — never remade. Knots, in every sense.
One last, honest thing
I’m not a writer. I told these stories the way they came to me — plainly, as the truth came out — and an AI helped me turn them into something worth reading. That feels right, somehow: I’ve spent my life making things with tools I didn’t expect to love — a machine, some code — and the words were no different. The truth is all mine. Shaping it into something you’d want to read, we did together. The story, like the pieces, is still being made.