Who are we?

AGUAdeORO is a family-run jewellery company founded in 2009 in Geneva, Switzerland. Its history goes back more than 70 years. Indeed, the profession of jeweller is passed from father to son within the family originating from Bolivia. The name "AGUAdeORO" refers in Spanish to the water "AGUA" and the gold "ORO", because water is a precious resource, like gold. At AGUAdeORO, we also strive to be transparent, like water, about the manufacture and provenance of all our products.

Our mission is simple:
We strive to offer luxury items created with respect for our society and our planet. We believe that luxury is synonymous with quality. Not only of the product itself, but also of the quality of life of the people involved in its manufacture.

At AGUAdeORO we offer a new vision of luxury jewellery that combines ethical awareness and ecological responsibility.

The scarcity of raw materials, used in part in jewellery, has always been coveted. The exploitation and extraction of natural resources, such as gold, nowadays causes many social and ecological problems. The jewellery world is confronted with these problems every day: deforestation, pollution, overexploitation, etc., destroying our planet little by little. Yet it is our duty to care for and protect it.
Small and large scale problems follow, sparing no one. From the use of toxic substances such as mercury by small-scale miners to local armed conflicts financed by these same natural resources. There are also long-term exogenous adverse effects, such as climate change.

 

“We believe that jewellery brings joy and happiness, but not at the expense of our environment and the people involved in the manufacturing process.”

 
 
 

Ethical materials


It is important to be aware of these issues and to be critical when buying jewellery. What are we consuming? Where does our product come from? Under what conditions was it produced? These are questions that every consumer should ask themselves before making a purchase. It is our duty, as an ethical jeweller, to inform all our customers of this essential information.
Each piece of jewellery has a symbolic value, a proof of love. It is therefore essential to be able to offer it and wear it with a light heart, knowing that it has been produced with the greatest respect for Mother Nature and all the workers involved along the manufacturing chain.

“Luxury is synonymous with quality. Not only of the product, but also of the lives of the people involved in making it.”

 

The same applies to the extraction of diamonds and precious stones from mines. The rough mining of diamonds is dominated by a very small group of players who have a monopoly. This results in a very long list of intermediaries, 15 on average, between the point of extraction and the final customer of the diamond, making them almost untraceable. It is then impossible to know the source of origin, as well as the conditions under which they were extracted. This is without mentioning the ecological problems associated with the heavy exploitation of precious stones.

That is why at AGUAdeORO we put the transparency of our raw materials first. From the mine to the hands of our customers, we are able to trace the components of our jewellery in their entirety. We also do our best to give our customers all the information they need to make their choice. We carefully study all the possibilities available to us, in order to select only those that seem to us to be the most in line with our ethical values. For our precious metals, we have therefore opted to use only socially responsible raw materials and to work only with suppliers officially certified as Fairtrade by Max Havelaar. We are regularly audited by FLOCERT, an independent institution for an objective control of good practices, corresponding to the Fairtrade standard. For diamonds we recommend laboratory-created diamonds and gemstones.

Through these principles, we can guarantee our customers a high degree of excellence, a personalised follow-up of each order and a better control of the origin and traceability of our raw materials.

 

Jewellery that is traceable from the moment of extraction

The illustration on the right shows the path taken by the raw materials to become the jewellery we offer in our shop. We make it a point of honour to use the most local and ethical suppliers possible

Thanks to our trusted partners, such as MaxHavelaar, we can provide you with a certificate of traceability for every piece of jewellery you buy.