Quality control.

Quality control is not an inspection at the end. By the time a finished piece reaches a final inspection bench, the money has already been spent on material, labour, plating and packaging.

The four inspection points

1. After forming or casting. Dimensions, wall thickness and weight against the specification. This is where a specification error is caught cheaply — a section that is 0.2 mm light will fail in polishing, and finding it here costs nothing.

2. After polishing. Surface inspection under directional light. Polishing lines, flat spots, residual marks at tight internal corners, and edge quality. This is the inspection most factories skip, and the one that determines how the piece looks in a photograph.

3. After plating. Colour consistency against the retained reference sample, coverage on edges and recesses, and adhesion. PVD failures usually first appear on high points and sharp edges.

4. At packing. Full check against the order: style, colour, size, branding, packaging, labelling, and quantity. This is the only inspection that protects the shipment as a whole.

What standard is used

Inspection follows an AQL sampling plan agreed with the buyer at the order stage — typically AQL 2.5 for major defects and AQL 4.0 for minor, sampled by lot. If you have a retail partner with its own inspection protocol, send it at the brief stage and we will inspect against that instead.

"Major" and "minor" are defined in writing for each order, because they are not self-evident. A 0.3 mm scratch on the back of a pendant is minor; the same scratch on the face is major. Agreeing the definitions before production avoids the argument after it.

Records

Each order produces a photographic record at each stage and a pre-shipment inspection report covering quantities, defect findings and the sampling plan used. Buyers who sell through retail partners increasingly need this documentation, and it costs nothing to produce if it was designed into the process.

What happens when something fails

If a lot fails inspection, the options are rework, replacement or rejection, and which one applies is decided against the agreed specification rather than by negotiation. Our position is that a failed lot is our problem to resolve before shipment, not the buyer's problem to discover on arrival.