Our customers’ dilemma
If you have visited any one of our Aurex showrooms intending to buy a jewellery piece and it was not available in stock, or it needed to be adjusted for size, you will attest to the fact that you were advised to “come back in 10 working days”. We have witnessed first-hand the involuntary jaw drop that follows almost instantly, as well as exclamations along the lines of; “But I want to use the ring for a court wedding in 3 days!”
Which is totally understandable. There are functions which you cannot exactly plan ahead for, and you would need to just walk into the Aurex showroom, get a ring, and walk out!
But why does it take so long?
To make this simple, let us liken your jewellery order with us to a pizza order at your favourite pizza joint. Excruciatingly long process, but worth every minute of the wait!
After you place your order with our showroom, it is sent to our Production team for processing. Rings, pendants and some earrings usually go through a process called Lost-Wax Casting.
Behind the curtains
The process starts from our rich product library with over 3000 designs, where a coded mould is kept for every design, we have ever made. Our Production team will physically select the specific design mould for your selected design and inject molten wax into that mould. Once the molten wax solidifies, the team will take the wax model and ‘clean’ it. At this point your ring is a rubbery, wax ring. This is the stage where they will adjust the ring to your specific size. The team then group the wax moulds according to like metal, and build these into what they call a ‘tree’.
Your ring on a ‘tree’, with other customers’ rings, is then put into flasks and some investment powder is added to the mix. Investment powder is that white stuff used for making casts to plaster on broken or injured limbs. Fun fact:- we probably use more investment powder in our Factory than the hospitals do! After the investment powder dries up, we put the flasks into de-waxing machines where the wax melts and leaves imprints of the designs into the solidified investment powder.
Still, the process is far from complete! We will intentionally spare you the lengthy explanation on what happens in the assaying department to get the proper gold and silver that will be used for making the products.
The next process involves injecting molten metal into the flasks – either gold or silver. Remember the design imprints left by the melting wax designs on the solidified investment powder? This time, the molten metal will fill up those imprints and solidify. As they demould the investment powder, voila! Your ring has been cast! The rubber melts away and your ring is now metal.
And then what?
No kidding, there still will be a lot to do to make your ring shiny and sparkly! From the rough cast that the team would have made, they will still have to set gem stones by hand, file and polish it several times for that perfect finish. You can understand the process in more depth here https://makersrow.com/blog/2016/06/5-steps-to-jewelry-casting/#
Our dilemma
On our part, the 10 working days really just fly by! But worry not, we have mastered the art of doing our magic in that short space of time and still present to you your favourite ‘pizza’, with all the toppings, just like you like it! See our finished products here.
