In the latest episode of the unLTD Business Podcast, host James Marriott chats to brothers Luke and James Cottingham – the founders of Cahve, a Sheffield-born brand that’s reshaping the jewellery world.
From fashion and football to fingerprint rings and bottle-opener bands, the pair share the story behind a business that makes bespoke jewellery beautifully simple – whether you’re whittling wax at your kitchen table or designing something meaningful in their Kelham Island studio.
First of all, could you introduce yourselves?
JC: Sure! I’m James, co-founder of Cahve.
LC: And I’m Luke, the other co-founder of Cahve – and his brother.
Tell us a little bit more about what you do?
JC: Whenever anyone asks that question, Luke will give me the side-eye or a nudge under the table as if to say, you take this one.
I’ll give you the short-ish version: we help people create bespoke jewellery. We’re kind of glorified middle-men, without doing ourselves a disservice.
We’ve made the workshop and the process of making and designing your own jewellery accessible to anybody.
We sell kits all over the world that allow people to create bespoke jewellery from home and we also host workshops here in the studio and remotely across the UK and now in the US.
It’s a unique concept but it has been really successful, really popular across the UK, and now the US, and it’s something we deeply love to do.
No day is the same. There’s always a new creation, a new project, a new enquiry. At its core, we help people to create really meaningful jewellery.
When I think about making jewellery, I have this image of really hot machines and big hammers – something very specialist. How does it work, sending people kits so they can do it themselves at home?
LC: The kits have a range of tools – shaping tools, sandpapers, everything you need to whittle away blue pieces of wax into the desired jewellery piece.
Then you post it back to us, create an online submission telling us exactly how you want it, and we work with our production teams to batch-cast every single unique piece.
It looks a bit like a Brussel sprout branch, with each branch holding a unique piece. We cast that entire structure in a solid precious metal. We work in sterling silver as standard but also cast in gold, platinum and more.
We’ve had some wild requests like – was it tantalum? But yes, we’ve had some interesting enquiries. We cast the structure, hand finish each individual piece to the customer’s specification and post it back.
We open up the doors of a traditional jewellery casting facility, which can be chaotic and dirty, to anybody who wants to try it from the comfort of their own home.
JC: I would like to add that not all jewellers work in dire conditions, with black roofs and tools everywhere. They all have their systems.
But it’s very authentic – exactly how you imagine the workshop process to be. While casting and silversmithing are supremely specialist skills, the design part is subjective.
What’s beautiful to me might be different to Luke or to you. That’s the part we leaned into when we first started the business.
We had no silversmithing or design background. We had a perspective and felt we could make the expert part accessible to people with no experience but a desire to create something unique.
When I think of the jewellery world, you go into a shop and it’s all off-the-shelf. Why does that personalisation element matter so much to you?
LC: I always think of case studies when we host wedding ring events here in the studio or things we hear from customers.
One couple made plain polished wedding bands but had each other’s thumbprints mounted into the inside of the band – a hidden detail they could cherish.
On the other end of the scale, we’ve had wedding rings with spikes in them and all sorts of stuff. People want something meaningful that tells a story – something they can talk to and about with people.
No matter how traditional or off-piste you want to go, that’s something that we’re able to offer.
JC: From our perspective, it goes back to where we started. Prior to Cahve, Luke and I designed clothes. It wasn’t based on trends or styles; we made what we wanted in our own wardrobe.
In the same way with jewellery, it was: “What am I missing? What would I love to wear? What have I seen that I’d like to change a little bit?”
Many people around the world share that perspective – they see something they like but want to change it.
That process of creating something super unique and meaningful is just as memorable as the piece itself.
When people come in to design their engagement or wedding rings in here, the process is very relaxed and it’s very meaningful.
It’s double-pronged – the physical piece and the memory of designing it with your partner or a friend, a parent, a brother. Those times are eternalised in the piece as well.
One of the things I love saying is people are gloriously weird. So, what’s the coolest or weirdest design that someone has come up with?
JC: You could view our business in two camps: you have “make at home” and “make in person.”
For make-at-home you have heirloom kits, which is impression jewellery – you press into wax and create fingerprints of babies, toddlers, a parent, even dog nose prints!
Yesterday, Liam brought through a wax impression that had two rabbit’s nails pressed in, so there are some really cool impressions that are captured.
The jewellery-making kit though, that’s where people do tend to venture off-piste. People make pieces to celebrate a moment or a person, and the sky’s kind of the limit in terms of designs with that kit – rings, earrings, pendants, cufflinks – and what you do is entirely up to you.
We had a guy create a ring that also doubles up as a bottle opener once, which is cool.
LC: We had one that was basically like what I would imagine Mount Doom to look like on your finger!
I imagine now that with the weight on it, the arm they wear it on is probably now one inch longer.
We’ve had some absolutely incredible, show-stopping pieces through that.
You said “the sky’s the limit.” Is that true? Has there ever been a design you just couldn’t do?
JC: The other day we had a request for a Japanese-style ring that layers different metals – gold, silver plates, whatever concoction you want.
They’re compressed and rolled to create a rippled effect, showing the different layers of metal in there.
That’s a handmade process – that’s not something you can cast. You can’t CAD and cast that.
So there are designs like that which have to be handmade. That’s something that happens in the workshop by the guys and girls there. We had to say no to that one.
In theory, we could do it, but in terms of our wider business plan, taking on those edge cases isn’t something we do. We are casting items as single pieces or in batches – grouped items.
So, yeah, when you look at casting as a process and go, “Design-wise, what can I achieve?” – the limit is your creative ability maybe.
There are so many beautiful designs out there. Some people go, “Right, I’d love to create this,” and we say, “Yeah, that’s totally possible.”
The caveat being… you’ll have to make it. So can you make it?
LC: We normally say, “If you can draw it, you can carve it.”
When you have these super, you know, like Celtic cut-outs and really intricate styles, you think, if you can’t draw that, then you probably can’t make that.
But equally, I’ve seen it done. There’s been some incredible designs. And we have a tendency to shoot ourselves in the foot and say yes to everything, because we just want to please everyone.
But sometimes it bites us in the ass. However, there’s not much we can’t do.
This is how my brain works – there’s a warped part that wants to ask, what’s the rudest design that anyone’s ever come up with? But I’m not going to ask that. That’s a Friday night in the pub conversation.
JC: Just imagine it.
LC: Yeah, and that’s probably it.
JC: That’s about right.
Let’s swiftly move on. You gave us a few clues earlier – you hinted at a background in creating clothes and fashion. So I’m interested in asking you both about your background, but also about what was the moment where this idea kind of came up?
JC: Right. Luke – you can start first.
LC: I thought you were going to throw me under the bus with that. Right, so my actual background is music. I’ve always run a business. I’ve always worked for myself – all the way back from when I was 16 years old. I had a brief tenure at an online retailer for two weeks and that’s as much as I could last being told what to do before I quit. And then I’ve always had a business. So first one was a recording studio, which is why, you know, setting up microphones and stuff is all my jam this morning. So yeah, my background is in music. And if you’re really interested and want to search into the deep, dark depths of YouTube, I do have videos on there of me singing with my guitar. Singing soulful tunes like Rihanna and Justin Bieber. You know, all the good ones.
JC: Also on Britain’s Got Talent. Let’s just throw that one in there. You know, we’re here to share…
LC: I’m batting over to you now.
JC: So, yeah, Luke’s background obviously is music. He’s done himself a disservice, I would say – or he’s underplayed his hand there. You know, he had a recording studio at 16 and it was pretty successful. We have very different brains, clearly. And Luke is the tech guy – which, again, is underplaying his hand.
With me, my background is sport. I played professional football for Sheffield Wednesday, I played in LA, played in Spain. And I ultimately failed... there you go. We’ll cut that one there.
So, music and sport backgrounds. We tried our hand at a clothing line. When we first started that – I think it was probably 2012, 2013 – we were screen printing T-shirts. I’m going to say we were the first in the world to do the skull t-shirts around that time.
LC: Yeah, they all ended up getting ripped off and ended up in Topman and H&M.
JC: Alexander McQueen released a set of tees not long after us – clearly ripped us off! But we screen printed tees here in Sheffield. That got a bit of traction. And we then we produced hoodies and tees.
We got a bit more traction, and we thought, what do we actually want to wear? What are we missing? Because we now have the ability to create anything we want. We had a manufacturer in Nepal, one in Europe. We managed to source that through just blind faith. And so we were able to create anything we wanted.
So we flew out, I learned to pattern cut and sew. We did all the sampling. So yeah, that became a bit more of a ready-to-wear collection – a bit fuller-bodied. It was not so much T-shirts anymore, but jackets and pants and coats and all of that stuff. That was really good for a couple of years.
But that space is supremely competitive and you require a lot of funding in order to sustain it. We had a good run at it – had a showroom in London, did bits and bobs, made so many mistakes, just learned on the fly. Made no money, made loads of mistakes, managed to keep our heads above water, and just kept on pumping.
And the Cahve – previously Cast – crossover came when we began to get creative with marketing. With the old brand, we had a jewellery collection. Luke and I designed jewellery – so I’ve said we’re not designers, but again, nobody has to be a designer to design stuff. We took those designs to a local jeweller – a silversmith – and said, “Can you make these?” That was all done off Little London Road all those years ago.
He’d create those pieces, we’d sell them, go back, rinse and repeat. And we felt like – well, we’re doing this. Why can’t other people do this? It’s way more fun than buying a piece of jewellery. Why can’t we package this in a fun way and drop this into a retail space? So you come into the shop, design it with us, we go away, cast it, return it – it’s a good time.
We tested it – it was great. Mostly a female demographic. The brand was very male-centric – it was a menswear brand – so that didn’t quite align. But the traction seemed really good on the DIY jewellery side. So ultimately, we canned the brand – which had the worst name imaginable – and then we started Cast.
Our first event was with Tamper in town. The reason we picked there was because historically that building – and particularly that street – was steeped in silversmithing history. The room that we hosted our first event in was where the foreman would QC all the work, and then send it out the door.
So we thought, it’s got history, it’s got a story, we’re the kind of new breed – a modern interpretation of this. So we approached the guys at Tamper. They did a lock-in. We did an off-menu menu. We did it as a ticketed event – we said, buy a ticket, come in, all get round this one table. There’ll be food you’ve never had from Tamper before, there’ll be drinks and then you can create a piece of jewellery – and it’ll be a great time. That was the first event.
Final thing that I want to ask you – just give me an insight if you would into what comes next. What does the future hold?
LC: Bigger and more wonderful things for the brand. So we want to move into different markets and have operations out in different markets.
We’re wanting to extend the uses of the kit – so provide new products, and different ways and exciting ways of using the kits and accessorising with the kit. I’m trying not to give away too much.
JC: Well, the studio here in Sheffield has done incredibly well. It’s very new, I would say, but it’s done amazingly well. But what that does is localise your market to a point. We have lots of people travel up from London and the South West, but obviously it’s a long way to travel.
So next for us is to establish another studio and another space in another part of the UK to increase our volume and make it more accessible to more people. The same applies in the US. We have a base in Denver, Colorado, but no physical studio. The next phase for us this year – or the second part of the year – is to introduce a space and a person.
It sounds way sexier than it is, but either East Coast, West Coast – so LA or New York. That part of the business is where that will go.
And then with the kits, as Luke said – really fun new additions to the kits. We will introduce a loyalty programme that really does add layers to the product. And Luke – I say we, but Luke – will build an app that will be really, really cool and interesting.
Let me go with ‘revolutionary’. It’s a big word. It’s bold. But it’s a good word. And seeing as we’re being a little abstract – I can’t give too much away, but what we’re developing in the background has not been done before. We are reinventing the way jewellery can be designed. I’ll say that.
uk.cahve.com // @cavhe.uk
Studio Unit 9a
Merchants Court
43 Mowbray Street S3 8EN
