Question and Answers

Do you make every Akaija yourself?

I’ve tried ! When we started with the Akaija (end 2005) I’ve made dozens of Akaija’s out of molten silver. I thought I had the time to do so and we were experimenting a lot to check if the Akaija really was what it seemed to be. This consumed many hours per Akaija, but that didn’t bother me. I saw it as a good training to become a silversmith, because in fact I was educated to be a teacher and becoming a silversmith was… er… that was  Linda’s idea, after she died 😉

I used her heritage to buy me the tools and materials a silversmith needs. Maybe when I’ve would have had a thorough education I would have found easier ways to have the Akaija produced in larger quantities, but apparently this was not my way to follow. So it took me several month to fnd out that normally when you want to reproduce a jewel, you go to a casting company.

But when we started asking these companies to do the job for us, we discovered that they had immense problems with this, by the looks of it, simple design. Endresult… after 6 casting companies and 2 dental laboratories, we’ve found 1 company that could do proper casting, with a good quality, but the next problem was the finishing… making a shining bright silver or gold jewel out of a rough cast object.

The first 1000 Akaija’s I’ve done all by hand, month after month. And again… I needed to learn something… because I was not going to be able to do this the rest of my live and be happy with it, not being able to do anything else anymore. That was the time that we discovered that we needed to find a permanent solution. We’ve found this solution in India, where we contacted several companies, and we have been there 2 times already, to meet the people, to see and ‘feel’ the companies, and of course to discus the work. We’re not ready yet, the manufacturing of the Akaija is a lot more difficult than we, and every company we’ve met, expected it to be.