Showcase: CRED, fair trade fine jewellery to covet

February 25, 2009 by greenmystyle

CRED represents the marriage of truly stylish jewellery design and immaculate ethical and fair trade principles. CRED create pieces that you will both treasure and feel proud to wear, because they are at once beautiful and meaningful.

To understand the story of CRED, the source of fair trade fine jewellery, you first need to understand its founders and designers, Christian Cheesman and Greg Valerio. These are two individuals with the kind of passion and commitment to a cause that the rest of us can only watch and be inspired by.

After a trip to India in 1998, during which they witnessed women and children working in inhuman conditions, Greg and Christian felt compelled to help improve the plight of similar workers in the jewellery trade that CRED was part of. Their goal was to create a totally transparent supply chain for jewellery. This would mean customers like you and I could understand exactly where our treasured wedding ring, diamond earrings or gold necklace came from, and trust that neither person nor planet were exploited in the creation of it.

To give a sense of the scale of this task, Greg and Christian would be taking on industries that are centuries old, with strongly ingrained practices, deep cultural mores and caught in a web of conflicting politics and power. They were ridiculed at first.

Christian writes: “When we started CRED we wanted to create a company that reflected a set of values that we were passionate about: values such as environmental sustainability, justice for the poor and the upholding of human rights. As we embarked on our journey in 1996 we wanted to get to the heart and source of where all our jewellery and raw material was coming from. Transparency in the supply chain became the Holy Grail that we sought after.”

Simultaneously upholding the principle of great design, the business partners have toiled hard to bring about transformations in the ethical jewellery supply chain in the last decade. While creating a range of utterly covetable pieces, and collaborating with emerging design talent, CRED has also been instrumental in creating the fair trade jewellery industry.

Realising that perhaps the greatest victims of an unethical jewllery trade are the small scale miners, CRED became a founding member of the Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM), and has played an active and foundational role in the creation of what is now the world’s first ‘Fair Trade Gold’ standard.

CRED also facilitated the introduction of Fairtrade Labelling Organisation (FLO) to ARM, conceived the idea of The British Ethical Jewellers Association and are signatures to The Golden Rules (www.nodirtygold.org).

The story of CRED is also the story of beautiful design. Working with recycled silver, fair trade Oro Verde gold, fair trade platinum, conflict-free diamonds and fully traceable gem stones, CRED designers work with artisan manufacturing to produce simple, elegant and timeless pieces – from wedding jewellery to every day items – to complement stylish living. See our five favourite pieces here.

You don’t need to wait to get engaged or married to indulge in CRED, though if you are about to take the plunge we can’t think of a better option. We recommend that you think about buying fewer pieces of fashion jewellery and instead invest in a longer-lasting CRED piece. Wear CRED every day and you’ll be showing the world that you appreciate beautiful things created with care and kindness.