In our office we are always do our best to find new ways to reduce, reuse and recycle. Everything from recycling paper for packaging to reusing plastic bags to lift sharing! We are really excited now too that we are able to not only recycle our own silver here, but also have our designs made from recycled silver. We collect all our returns, off cuts from creating new designs and breakages here and use a UK firm who recycle silver, we sent over a kilo off last week! Our manufactures are now able to source recycled silver form a variety of different sources including electronics, manufacturing and unwanted jewellery. This means we will be reducing our CO2 emissions, reduce water usage and reduce the environmental impact of mining. Both silver and gold can be recycled forever without losing any of their quality. We hope to be only using recycled silver by 2024 and will let you know how we get on!

#Recycling #RecycledSilver #UnwantedJewellery #ReduceWaste

In a normal year I spend a lot of my time away from home. At least twice a year I am visiting our factory oversees to check on production, new designs and collections, and also to ensure that the factory is running ethically and that every employee that produces our jewellery is valued and looked after extremely well in every aspect of their working day. It is also important to us to have that human contact with each of our amazing silversmiths that work so hard to produce our Reeves & Reeves collections, something that must never be taken for granted.

I really miss the interaction with our teams, whether we are working through a design tweak, discussing initial drawings which will soon come to life into real, physical pieces, or looking forward to having lunch together and getting to know about their families and loves in their lives, which usually revolves around food, sport and children, in that order!

These artisans are integral to our creative business, and there is nothing more exciting than spending hour upon hour working on a new collection with them from inception of a beautiful drawing from Caroline’s hand, to a cad image, right through to creating the finished piece of jewellery, a new best seller that is on the shelves of our fantastic retailers. This is something really magical about our industry.

So, as we hopefully start to come out of this extraordinary and difficult situation, I hope that we can all take a moment to reflect on how important and vital human interaction is; that we appreciate every moment shared with a fellow human being and we do not take anything for granted. We will always marvel at the skill and ingenuity of what can be achieved through teamwork.

Written by Heath Reeves

#teamwork #artisans #ethically #bestseller #food #friends #life #work #passion #jewellery #silversmiths #magical #skill #reevesandreeves

As we are so deeply embedded in the countryside, it’s second nature to notice the natural world, but we’re trying a bit harder to make sure that our activities sit more lightly on the planet, and make a few changes to make us that bit greener.

Reduce, reuse, recycle is a brilliant mantra to keep it simple. We reduce our packaging, both in & out, wherever possible, and reuse an awful lots of cardboard boxes, packing materials and bubble wrap. In fact, our friends give us so much, we never have to buy bubble wrap!

Our jewellery arrives to us in little plastic bags - these are incredibly useful, and get used for storing jewellery in the office (plastic bags are actually a brilliant way to keep jewellery in good condition), and are used again and again. Deliveries from India come in wonderful aluminium boxes, sometimes with a little padlock! We fight over these as they are very cool for storage, and are easily customised to make brilliantly quirky containers. All correspondence is shredded, and makes lovely cosy bedding for Caroline’s chickens (who were a Christmas present from the girls in the office, her previous bunch having met a sorry end with a marauding dog just before Christmas).

Our building is a very old converted forge, built into the hill below the gardens, so it could be cold & damp, but we are very lucky to have biomass heating provided by a system that warms the whole of Forde Abbey, using wood taken from maintenance done on the estate. We used to wear woolly hats in the office, but not these days!

Even getting to & from the office is getting greener - we all live locally, and Heath often walks down with Smudge the dog, and our newest recruit plans to walk along the valley through the water meadows in the summer. For our accounts lady, it’s literally about 50ft door to door! 

There is much more we can all do, but we’re taking it on bit by bit, and hopefully it will all add up to make a real difference. We are always looking for new ideas, so if there’s something you are doing to make your workplace greener, we’d love to hear about it!