About Eksterling
Hello,
Welkom to Eksterling. On this page you’ll find the story behind Eksterling. How it was born and what we stand for.
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As a graduate industrial product designer(Bch), I was always attracted by traditional handcrafts. In contradiction with what I was studying for, which was focused on mass production. It felt to me that it was hard to find work that allowed me to do all stages of designing products. It seemed that most jobs just included designing the product in 3d modelling programs. But I wouldn’t have so much of hand-sketching or building prototypes, and production was always done in big amount by other companies.
In the end a did some nice projects down the road to where I am now. Two of my favourites are this project in Afrika, and this project that I did in my minor. But I was looking for something else…
When I was traveling in India in 2017 I stayed in Pushkar for a while, it’s a holy city in the middle of the desert. In the middle of the city there’s a holy lake. When, in a moment of clarity, I came to the conclusion that making Jewellery held all the solutions to the problems that I experience in other jobs. Sitting in my cheap rooftop room, which was indeed hot but super awesome, I researched where I could learn jewellery making from a good teacher. After some time scrolling down websites and forums I found a name of a teacher, Gurudutt, who apparently was a very different jewelry-maker from what you’d normally expect in India.
I got excited, and in my excitement I quickly checked where to find this Gurudutt. I found out he just started something in Pushkar. What a coincidence! I got more excited. I went to see which street, and the maps showed me my position. I checked again. It showed my position. I went outside on the rooftop, the monkeys in the tree next to me where sleeping high up in the treetop, which was at my level. I looked down. Then I saw that the road I already walked down for two weeks had a very small shallow entrance to an ally.
The next day, I woke up, went straight to the ally to check. And there it was. Gurudutt Designer Jewellery.
At first guru had to think about teaching me, he used to have a big school up in the mountains in the north of India, but decided to quite teaching and hadn’t teached for a some years. After some thinking he said oke, you will be the first one again in years that I will teach. In a matter of three weeks I spent every day inside the shop, getting lessons and observing guru while he was working.
I learned so much in these three weeks. Before I left I bought all my tools to start making jewellery, that added fifteen kilograms to my backpack. It included everything I needed to get started and he said; you will still make a lot of mistakes, but you will manage if you keep on going.
Years later I can say, he was right and I kept on going. In 2020 I started Eksterling Jewelry.
