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The project was part of a 20th anniversary celebration of the house’s Nudo collection.
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Pomellato’s new traceability app is “just embracing the pace of the world, I think, and where we’re going,” said Stéphane Gerschel, global brand managing director of the Italian jewelry house.
The app, which debuted in iOS and Android in late October, allows a user to learn about materials, manufacture and workmanship; use augmented reality to “try on” rings; shop some collections; and, after a purchase, download information about the piece’s origins. “We thought what’s important nowadays is to let the public know — meaning the customers have a right to transparency and have a right to sourcing,” Mr. Gerschel said.
Pomellato, established in 1967 in Milan, has been known for its use of color and bold design in fine jewelry and, in recent years, the Kering-owned brand has had a focus on sustainable practices. But while the house has obtained Responsible Jewellery Council certifications and uses Fairmined gold, it hasn’t “communicated so much about it,” Mr. Gerschel said.
Early this year, inspired by similar apps in the food industry that chart the freshness of produce, he said he thought it would “be nice to have a sustainability aspect to the celebrations” for the 20th anniversary of the brand’s Nudo collection. In its design, the stones appear to float, suspended above a prong-free setting.
Margot Peppers, consumer trends editor at the trend forecasting platform Foresight Factory in London, said such traceability sources are a burgeoning field. “There’s definitely an appetite for kind of measuring our impact and wanting brands to give us the guidance to do so,” she said — as long as a traceability solution is easy to access and use.
Other jewelry brands also have introduced programs. In 2018, De Beers developed the blockchain platform Tracr to track its diamonds. And earlier this year the Spanish brand Tous announced a partnership with Tracemark in which its jewelry will be engraved with numbers, or labels will feature QR codes, to enable traceability.
Ms. Peppers said she thought the jewelry and luxury worlds were well-positioned to benefit from such innovation because “traceability is, of course, it’s about ethics and it’s about sustainability, but it’s also about understanding the story behind the design and showing that it’s not mass produced and adding that emotional added value to the actual design.”
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The post Pomellato Debuts a Traceability App for Its Jewelry – The New York Times first appeared on Magikal Journeys Jewelry Handmade.
