Four minute read
Kay Duggleby and her husband Glen run Love Is A Moment, a family business producing beautiful silver jewellery — featuring fingerprints, birth stones and personal messages — that we are now able to offer to Poppy’s clients.
Kay tells us all about the personal experience that got them started, the response they’ve had from clients, and how they make sure that their products are ethically and sustainably sourced.
My husband Glen has been in the jewellery industry for 40 years, designing wedding and engagement rings. When his mum, Eileen, died a couple of years ago, his sister wanted a keepsake. Through his work, Glen knew about fingerprint jewellery and got pieces made for his sister and nieces. They loved them so much. They found it such a comfort. Eileen was such a massive part of our family, loved and respected by us all.
I left my job in the property industry last September to work full time with Glen on memorial jewellery. It was a massive leap of faith. I’d been in my other job for 20 years and I felt quite institutionalised. It's definitely scary — this is now my company, I can push in the direction that I want and I make the ultimate decisions. It’s the two of us, which means that we can offer a very personal service.
It’s been lovely to go to the Birmingham Jewellery Quarter to meet the people that we're working with. We know the chain of people who make our products. The Quarter has been renowned for the quality of its jewellery for about 150 years. The place is incredible, and we have all that history on our doorstep.
If the world continues mining silver at the rate that we are now, I read that we've only got about 20 years of resources left. Yet silver is everywhere, and it can be recycled from absolutely anything — mobile phones to batteries, and obviously old jewellery.
We buy our silver grain from trusted ethical industry suppliers. After going through a refining process so that it can be used again, silver — previously used in other products — is recycled to produce the silver grain which we use to make our jewellery.
From start to finish, from the design right through to the team in Birmingham who make the finished product, even the packaging we use, we’re all about being sustainable and eco-friendly. We can trace where the silver grain comes from, and we know where it goes to and how it’s manufactured. It is massively important to me to be able to be confident in where our products come from.
There's an app which a funeral director can use which takes a wonderful fingerprint. There's no pressure on the finger and it gets all the detail. If you use ink to take a print, it can smudge. Yet, even when sometimes we receive images that are not excellent, our goldsmiths in Birmingham are brilliant and they manage. We don't want to manipulate the image, because then it's not authentic. We want it to be polished, but not to rub anything away. It has to still look like a fingerprint.
Each piece of our jewellery is uniquely hand-cast using a laser engraver. It’s so delicate that it can capture the smallest detail. They're not cast flat — the fingerprint is more protected because it is in a recess. With flat pieces, the fingerprint can wear off in time. We give a lifetime guarantee.
I wait with bated breath to hear from the funeral directors that the customer is happy. That’s the reward for me. Feedback has been amazing. We can pretty much turn our hands to anything, for example, we've done pendants with two fingerprints touching to remember two people who have died, a pendant with the footprint of a pre-term baby, or a guitar pick with a fingerprint on for a woman whose husband was a musician. It’s limitless.
We also offer lab grown diamonds which give the look and beauty of a diamond, without the worry about how it’s been mined. The birthstones are beautiful too. They make each piece a little bit more personal. They are all from ethical suppliers, accredited by the ICA, a non-profit worldwide organisation created to maintain ethical standards in the global coloured gemstone industry. We can also add engraving, even using someone’s original handwriting. Everything is bespoke.
Our ethos is to keep it simple — to provide a bespoke service with quality pieces. We want to make jewellery that people love to wear, as well as to keep forever, rather than something that sits and gathers dust, and we want to be sustainable through the whole process.
A few years ago, I never thought that I would be doing something like this. But I have met some lovely people and learned such a lot. This is what I want to do. And I’m definitely going to be doing it for the foreseeable future.
View the jewellery options in Poppy's catalogue or read about some of our other sustainable suppliers for woollen shrouds or willow coffins, as well as local, seasonal flowers.
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