Robert Turner has had a passion for gemstone collecting since childhood. He amassed an admirable private collection – that may have stayed that way, if not for a challenge from his wife – that planted the seed for what has blossomed into Jamie Turner Designs.
“I’ve been a gemstone and mineral collector for over 20 years,” Robert shares. “I’ve always been fascinated with them, even when I was a kid growing up in Dallas. I was fascinated by what could come out of the earth, because it’s so crazy! So, I collected over 90,000 carats and I categorized them in my studio. One day my wife came out to my studio and asked me what I’m going to do with all this stuff, what’s my endgame? And I just said, ‘I want to make jewelry,’ and she said, ‘Then you need to start.” Afterward, I realized I just committed myself to making jewelry.”
Cut to six years later. I’ve just toured a lab in Westlake where I watched a combination of printers, machines and skilled artisans with the steadiest of hands create the most detailed fine jewelry. Now I’m sitting down with Robert and Patrick Dobbs, a master jeweler and Robert’s partner in Jamie Turner Designs, learning about the journey from idea to today and where they want to go from here.
For his first step, Robert says, “I called over to Creative Side, which was a jewelry school, and asked them to send over a teacher because I needed to learn how to make jeweler. They sent over Patrick, a master jeweler with like a hundred years worth of experience, and within a short period of time he told me I was truly horrible at this.”
He explains, “There are two ways to make jewelry, fabrication and casting. Fabrication is handmade, where you’re twisting and bending and firing and hammering. I’m awful at it. So, Patrick asked me if I knew CAD (computer-aided design) and I started learning that. I’d stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning designing things, printing them out on a 3D printer and trying to figure it out.”
That’s how Robert created The Curve, now the signature in nearly all of JTD.
“I was trying to break the program,” he says. “I was trying to make the program make a continuous curve of a ring without any variation in the loops and ultimately I figured out that the program would go to seven decibels but the math inside the algorithm get never go to zero. In that process, I came up with what I call The Curve. It’s all math, algorithms in a CAD program trying to find the most efficient way of going around in a circle.”
From there he learned he could create other things with The Curve. “Bangles are just big rings, so I did it with bangles and stacking bangles and stacking rings...I was trying to create jewelry that was 100% designed in a computer environment, but that no one would say looks like a computer made it. I wanted it to look as flowy and natural as I could, but still, I wanted to put things into it which were pure math-based.”
The foundation of math led to the name Jamie Turner Designs. “My daughter Jamie Turner is a math major, so I named the company after her, because there's so much math that's baked into this,” Robert shares.
The technology allows them to be made in Austin.
“In order to maintain our margins and be able to manufacture in Austin, which is a very high-cost labor market, we have to invest in technology, we have to make it as efficient as possible, so that we can still have the talent we need to make it right,” Patrick says, explaining, “A typical arrangement is for the labor to be done in China. The technology we have significant offsets costs so we can do everything in Austin. The way we’re doing things with technology allows us to be competitive and versatile. We pair the best people, who do the stone setting, assembling and finishing, with cutting-edge technology that other places don’t have.”
JTD is rolling out a retail program where they’ll be in select stores in a few markets before the end of the year, but they’re primarily focusing on eCommerce, with many pieces made to order. Robert has created hundreds of designs, of which they launched with about 150, so with his primary part in the process done for now he can focus on his real estate business, funds management company and artist services VIP business. But, he’s still hands-on, his office is on the same floor as the jewelry production and he hand selects every single gemstone. “I’ve purchased all the stones from people that I know, that are either from the mine or from the country the mine was in. I don’t buy from middlemen or wholesalers,” he says. His favorite gemstone are Zircons. “They’re the oldest substance that you can touch on the face of the planet. They average between two and four billion years old. I also love the fact that the refractive index of the stone is at the same level as diamonds. If you were to put them with diamonds, they sparkle the same,” he says.
As for his wife’s thoughts now that his hobby has materialized into a cutting-edge jewelry collection he says, “She doesn't take credit for this company, she's probably been my biggest critic,” adding, “I think she wants to blame me if it doesn't work, but she is withholding judgment.”
Find Jamie Turner Designs at jamieturnerdesigns.com