Good Gold is a jewellery studio that focuses entirely on plain, gold wedding rings (and the occasional special release piece) made from locally-sourced ethical gold. Our jeweller, Siggy, has over 20 years of experience making rings and a deep connection to the West Coast where we source our alluvial gold.
Our business has evolved over the last decade to reflect the evolution of our personal values, including a widened lens of what it means to be an ethical business.
More than just using sustainable materials and recycled mailers, we want our business to be a bridge away from the extractive and destructive version of capitalism we’re currently living within, to serve as a decolonising force and hopefully as a roadmap of expanding outward instead of scaling up.
This is a grand experiment in the Next Economy doubling down on community, craft, collaboration and art. We’re turning away from AI created content, paid digital ads that drive economic disparity by funding billionaires. If you want a deeper dive into our lore, our history and what we hope comes next, read Our Cosmology.
We exist as a worker’s co-op of three women; Siggy Hilton, Laurel Williams and Katie Pascoe.
Siggy is the hearth keeper of our business. She makes each and every ring by hand, she made her first ring over 20 years ago. Instead of casting our rings, she bends a strip of metal into a circle, solders the join and then hardens the metal with a hammer and fire and then files and sands the ring into its most considered form. Working a ring in this way makes the atoms of the gold align, giving the ring strength and solidity. We love that she works these traits into each ring; strength, alignment and solidity (lovely building blocks for a sturdy marriage).
Siggy tells us that she loves working with gold because, it doesn’t naturally occur on earth, instead it arrived here on comets and meteors. In her words, “every speck of gold in the rings originally came from outer space, which makes it feel a little bit magic.” She enjoys making rings and letting her mind wander and that she has the time and space to learn things almost by accident. When asked what impact she wants to make in the world, she says, “a light impact.”
Anyone that’s spent a bit of time with Siggy knows she actually makes a huge impact on everyone around her. She’s a trusted secret keeper, the soft place you go for a good cry, the house where all the teens know they can get a snack and a lift. I’ve watched her make rings for 20 years, she holds each one up to the light to make sure the join is closed, takes the time to sand the inside engraving so the words aren’t sharp, re-writes the printed order details to make sure everything is correct, washes and polishes each ring and then wears white cotton gloves to package them up before sending them off to you.
I’m Laurel, I write the words for Good Gold. I come from a long line of storytellers and grammar people. I think humans are incredible. Beyoncé can sing and I can feel it in my body across seas, continents, time, space and whatever magic that makes streaming television work. We made streaming television! And mashed potatoes and spaceships and cross stitch and terrariums and sequins and hip hop. We can look in our best friend’s eyes and have an entire conversation without making a single sound.
I especially delight in people that can make beautiful things with their hands, like rings made from space gold and that people buy those rings from us and they stay in their family forever, across generations, from ancestor to ancestor. For some reason, I’ve also always loved selling people things. When I was 8 I would sell Garbage Pail Kids cards to kids at school whose parents wouldn’t let them buy them from the mall. A few years ago, I couldn’t figure out how I could love selling things to people but also really hate extraction, exploitation and capitalism. It didn’t make sense.
So, I had a good long think, a good long read, wrote a lot of entries in my diary and figured out that commerce can exist without capitalism. That it’s really human to want to exchange work and ideas and craft for other resources. Not everyone knows how to make a gold ring and it’s not a bad thing to want a gold ring for your wedding day. So, Siggy, Katie and I are working to transform our business so that if we grow, we expand out, not up. I’ve made that mistake before, I’ve had businesses that got too top heavy and it felt yucky. In this second half of my life, I’d like to build bridges away from the systems that are failing us and towards what could come next.
Like the gold from space, Katie is new to our workshop home, but you could easily assume she’s a naturally occurring element. Katie is art embodied, trained as a visual artist with a focus on jewellery and object as well as a practicing occupational therapist. She sees Good Gold as a connecting force, the rings connect the couple that wears them to each other as well as to our workshop and craft. Her role is to connect us to a wider world of creatives-photographers, wedding dress designers, florists, perfume makers, chefs and bakers.
Katie joined our business at a crossroad, for us personally as well as the wider world. We had a decision to make, carry on as a business by investing in AI content creation, to feed ads and money into digital platforms like Meta and Google, stop all together, or figure out a new way. We decided to turn towards art, analogue life, human connections, physical forms and old school storytelling and collaboration.
Katie has brought so much wisdom, light and energy to our workshop in the last few months. She’s transforming our work from both an occuapational therapy standpoint, making our setting feel supportive and transforming the visual language of our brand to reflect our values and wishes. We can’t wait to see where we all go together. We know it will involve, bonfires, water, stardust, moon gazing, books and conversations that start very mushy and end up feeling like we have a sturdier grip on reality.
