Designed in Tallinn, finished in Valenza: how an engagement ring actually gets made in Europe

Most fine jewellery brands are vague about where and how their rings are made. This vagueness is usually strategic. The gap between “handcrafted in our atelier” and the actual production reality is, at many houses, considerable.

Here is exactly how a Rauno Oidram ring gets made — where each stage happens, who does it, how long it takes, and why I structured the process this way.

Stage one: design (Tallinn, 1–2 weeks)

Everything begins in Tallinn, where I work.

For a signature piece, the design work is already completed — the collection represents years of development, and the proportions and setting philosophy are established. For a bespoke commission, this stage involves understanding your brief, developing concept sketches, and arriving at a direction you have approved before anything physical is made.

Once the design direction is confirmed, I produce technical drawings: plan views, elevations, section details, stone seat specifications. These are not renderings for the client’s benefit — they are engineering documents that tell the workshop exactly what to build. Every dimension, every angle, every tolerance is specified.

This precision matters. Imprecise drawings produce imprecise rings. The most common source of disappointment in custom jewellery is a gap between the image the client was shown and the object they received, almost always because the brief was never translated into precise technical instruction.

Stage two: stone sourcing (Tallinn and Antwerp, 1–2 weeks, overlapping)

Stones are sourced in parallel with the design process rather than after it. I work with several dealers — primarily out of Antwerp, the centre of the global diamond trade — with whom I have built relationships over years of commissions.

For each commission, I request a selection of stones matching the brief within a defined quality range. I review them against the design, assess cut quality and optical performance directly rather than from a grading report alone, and select the stone I consider the best fit. The client sees the shortlisted options before I commit.

This individual sourcing means you receive a stone chosen for your ring, not a ring designed around whatever was in stock. The difference in the final object is visible.

Stage three: production (Valenza, 3–4 weeks)

The technical drawings and confirmed stone specifications travel to Valenza, a small city in the Piedmont region of northern Italy and one of the great centres of European fine goldsmithing.

Valenza produces approximately a third of Italy’s fine jewellery, and Italy produces approximately a third of the world’s. This is not incidental — the concentration of skill here represents generations of accumulated craft knowledge. The goldsmiths I work with are second- and third-generation craftsmen, working in workshops that have operated for 40 to 60 years.

Production proceeds in three stages:

Casting. A master model is produced from my technical drawings, typically via CNC milling followed by lost-wax casting. The casting captures the geometry of the design in metal — the shank profile, the setting walls, the shoulder geometry. Casting tolerances at this level are extremely tight; a well-executed cast needs minimal correction.

Setting. The stone is set by hand. For a bezel or flush setting, the metal wall is burnished around the stone in a controlled manner. For a claw or prong setting, each prong must be individually pushed to the exact pressure that secures the stone without stressing it. A stone set too loosely will move; one set too tightly is at risk under impact. The setter’s judgement here is the difference between a ring that lasts 50 years and one that loses a stone in 5.

Finishing. This is where the ring becomes the ring. Finishing involves a sequence of operations — filing, sanding, polishing, and in some designs, texturing — that bring the metal to its final surface quality. At the level I work at, finishing alone takes four to six hours per piece. The difference between a well-finished ring and a poorly finished one is not subtle; it is visible in the depth of the polish, the crispness of the transitions, the behaviour of the metal under light.

Stage four: quality check and delivery (Tallinn, 3–5 days)

The finished ring returns to me in Tallinn before it reaches you. I inspect it against the original drawings, assess the setting security, evaluate the finishing quality, and in most cases wear it for a day to check comfort and proportion in use.

If something is not right — a setting that is not perfectly even, a polish that falls short of standard — the ring goes back to Valenza. This has happened. I would rather wait two weeks than send you a ring I am not satisfied with.

Why Valenza, and not elsewhere

I chose to produce in Valenza rather than locally because the craft density there is unmatched in Europe. Tallinn has excellent craftsmen, but the finishing tradition in Valenza is of a different order — it is a culture of fine jewellery making, not simply a skill. The best finisher I know within 500km of Tallinn is good. The finisher I use in Valenza is better, and I made that choice deliberately.

The result is a European ring in the full sense: designed in the Baltic, finished in Italy, drawing on both traditions.

For more on how the costs of this process are distributed across the final price, read What you’re actually paying for in a €5,000 engagement ring. If you are considering a fully bespoke commission, the complete process is described in A guide to commissioning bespoke.