A working room for jewellers who have signed the Code. Membership is free and stays free. The room costs money, and it is the only thing here that does.
Signing the Code is a public act. It is also a solitary one. You put your name down, and then you go back to work.
The Bench is the other half of it. A room where the questions that are too specific for a website get asked and answered by people who have the same ones. What a refiner actually told you. Whether a supplier's paperwork means anything. What you said to a customer who asked where a stone came from, and whether it held up when she pushed.
Your business name, your country and the date you signed, on the public roster, for as long as you want them there. The Code itself. Notice before it is ever changed, and the right to keep your record of having signed the version you actually signed.
This does not expire and it does not downgrade. Nothing on this site is held back from you to make the room look better.
Money, and nothing else. A member who pays for The Bench appears on the roster in exactly the same words as one who does not: no badge, no order of precedence, no note beside the name.
If you ever find a way to tell from the roster who paid, we have broken this, and we would rather hear it from you than not hear it.
Bench makers, independent shops, studios, repairers, online sellers. Businesses small enough that the person reading a new regulation is also the person at the bench.
The association is open to any jeweller who signs. The room is built for the ones who have nobody to delegate this to.
On 27 September 2026 a set of environmental claims that are ordinary in this trade today become unlawful to make in the European Union. A house of any size has had counsel reading the text for a year, someone whose job it is to act on it, and a marketing department that will rewrite the website in an afternoon.
A studio with one bench has the same date and none of that. The rules do not scale down. Neither does the penalty for getting them wrong, and not knowing has never been a defence anywhere.
That asymmetry is the whole reason to put small and mid-sized jewellers in one room. Not sentiment about the little shop. Reading a directive once and setting out plainly what it says is the same work whether one business needs it or four hundred do, and there is no good reason four hundred should each pay to have it done alone.
On 27 September 2026 the rules change. We are writing a plain-language account of what the directive actually says, for a business with one bench and no lawyer, with the passage each point comes from quoted beside it so that you can check us rather than trust us. We are not anyone's lawyers and every page of it will say so.
It will be published here, in the open, at no charge and behind no form. There is nothing to join and no address to leave. Take it, send it to whoever in the trade needs it, print it and put it on the wall.
We could have made it the reason to pay. We would rather it reached the shops that need it, and a room whose first act was to charge people for a deadline would not be a room worth sitting in.
As with the governance undertakings on the about page, these are things we will have built or will have to explain. They are not aspirations.
Commitment seven asks every member to publish, once a year, where they have got to. A large house has a team who know what that document looks like. Most jewellers do not, and "write a public progress report" is not a usable instruction on its own. The room is where that template gets written, argued with, and revised by the people who actually have to file one.
Commitment one asks members to establish what they can about origin and to say plainly where their knowledge stops. Doing that means knowing which questions produce a real answer, which assurances mean less than they appear to, and which refiner will tell you the truth on the phone. That knowledge already exists, scattered across everyone who has had to ask. It has never once been collected.
An answer given once in a call is lost by the following week. Written down and indexed, the same hour becomes something the two hundredth member can read through in their first few days.
We do not know yet, and a roadmap that pretends otherwise is a sales document. The first year will be run by asking the people in the room what is actually in their way, and publishing what they said.
It is not priced yet. It does not open on the day the association does, and we are not taking money for it now.
A room with four people in it is not a room, in the same way that a roster of one is not a roster. The Bench opens when enough jewellers have signed the Code that walking into it is worth the trouble, and it will be priced at what it costs to run rather than at what the trade will bear.
Signatories will be asked what the room should hold, and what that is worth, before either is settled. They will be told first when it opens.
Signing the Code is free, takes a few minutes, and is the only part that has to happen in order. Everything on this page is built on there being a membership to build it for.