A few months ago Rob Scanlan owner of R J Scanlan & Co Pty Ltd together with his General Manager Stephen Brown visited us in Germany to discuss the forthecoming plans for the TeNo distribution in Australia. Stephen sent us a short report about his factory visit and his impressions. That’s what he wrote:
In Australia I work for R J Scanlan who is the Australian distributor for TeNo. In January I was lucky enough to visit the TeNo factory in Pforzheim Germany.
Having worked in the jewellery business for a long time and having visited factories in Hong Kong, Thailand, Japan and Australia I thought I knew what to expect, but the visit to TeNo was incredibly impressive.
As TeNo is a quality product I thought that the manufacturing process would be largely automated because the finish on the jewellery is always so perfect.
What I discovered was that the items are made with a combination of state of the art technology and a high degree of human intervention.
There is one machine that really blew me away. It sorts the diamonds for the de luxx pave set rings to match them for size, then conveys the information to another machine that drills the holes to perfectly space the diamonds. The diamonds are then set by a skilled diamond setter by hand. The end result is a wonderful high quality ring.
I also watched a technician hand applying the ceramic to a ring and using ultra violet light to cure and dry the ceramic. It was explained that the ceramic can have bubbles in it so quality control is very strict. Once the ceramic had hardened the ring went to another technician who used a lathe to remove the excess ceramic and polish it.
When gold inlay is used, the technician uses a shaped piece of gold and carefully hammers it to expand it into the machine shaped slot (see picture) prior to it being hand finished.
I just couldn’t get over the sophistication of the machines and the multiple tasks they performed and the number of times each product was handled by technicians to hand finish a piece. I now understand the TeNo sign off “Emotional technology” as TeNo pieces are a marriage of machine and human.
Best Regards, Stephen
Stephen, thanks a lot for being so kind to write such a detailed report about your visit and sorry for being so late with this blog, but unfortunately your email was lost in my mailbox…
By the way – here one can find a list of australian jewellers where TeNo is available.
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