Author
Laura Chavez
Founder, Lark & Berry · London
Laura Chavez founded Lark & Berry in 2018, shortly after completing an MBA at London Business School, where a history of jewellery course first introduced her to cultured diamonds. She had previously studied economics and managerial studies at Rice University in Houston, and run a restaurant in Buenos Aires — an unusually outside route into a trade that tends to recruit from within itself.
That outsider's view is the reason this site exists. Coming to fine jewellery without inherited assumptions made it obvious how much of what customers are told is convention rather than fact, and how little of the trade's working knowledge — what a commission genuinely costs, what can and cannot be done with an inherited piece, when a jeweller should say no — is written down anywhere a buyer can find it.
Lark & Berry built its work around cultured diamonds and coloured gemstones from the beginning, and its craftsmanship was recognised by the Goldsmiths' Craft & Design Council in 2019. The studio's day-to-day bespoke and redesign work — the consultations, the commissions that run smoothly, and the ones that teach harder lessons — is the material these guides are drawn from.
Every guide here is reviewed against current UK trade practice before publishing. Where something is contested or varies between workshops, it is described as a range rather than a rule.