Exclusively for Wempe: Rose gold friendship and wedding rings inspired by original pieces from the 1920s are made at Niessing.

It is admittedly a very rare occurence indeed when a ring actually saves the life of the person wearing it — as in late 2007, when a bullet fired by a thief richocheted off the wedding band of an antique dealer in Mississippi in the U.S. But in every ring there is concealed one great hope: to keep precious emotions and sentiments alive through the ages.

This desire is fulfilled by the Heritage rings now being exclusively made for Wempe by Niessing, which are based on designs that date back to the 1920s. The masterfully chased decoration elicits a smile every time one studies it or runs one’s fingertips across its relief design, thus experiencing directly the beauty of blossoming roses, the joie de vivre of succulent grapes or the strength of an oaktree’s foliage.

A ring is a wish you can touch and hold. This piece of jewellery with neither a beginning nor an end perfectly symbolises the longing for eternal love or undying friendship.

These traditional rings had long been forgotten. A few pieces were gathering dust in the company’s museum, complete with the original jeweller’s tools of the period.

Then one day Thomas Nünning, head of marketing at Niessing, happened to remember the rings and showed them to Anja Heiden, Wempe’s jewellery expert. Heiden was thrilled, recognising that the rings would “beautifully complement our Heritage chains with the turned elements.” A decision was quickly reached to revive the production of the rings — exclusively for Wempe.

That’s because such free-flowing shapes are not typical of the current Niessing design strategy. “Retro is not on our agenda,” explains Niessing Managing Director Jochen Exner, a member of the fourth generation to lead this family business. The name Niessing is associated with cool platinum jewellery and the tension ring, which holds a diamond using tension alone rather than a conventional setting.

Today no one knows the exact year of the historic rings’ production, or which jewellery designer created them. “This pattern must be from the 1920s,” says Exner. “The design vocabulary is typical of Jugendstil.”

From a set of original rolling stamper dies that had spent decades forgotten in a drawer at Niessing, Wempe selected the four fi nest and most beautiful designs for its Heritage collection. Anja Heiden’s intuition old her that naturalistic motifs with a touch of nostalgia would become a popular trend.

The Heritage rings from Wempe are crafted using a special and very time-consuming process. With a decades-old knurling roller, a kind of female die that is itself cut by hand, the ornamentation is fi rst embossed and then carefully pressed onto the ring from the outside. It’s a very difficult process, because the correct proportions and scale must be maintained regardless of the ring size.

The men in the workshop explain that they achieve better results using their hand-operated knurling tools from 1931 than would be possible with modern hydraulics.But of every fi ve rings that they fi nish, only two or three are good enough to sell. Each chaser has his own discernible “signature,” so he always makes a pair of rings. Nevertheless, no two rings are exactly alike. Using various chasing tools, the chaser’s work takes several hours — partly because rose gold is much harder than yellow gold.

Finally the ring must be cambered — that is, rounded off on the sides and the inside surface in order to ensure a pleasing, comfortable fit — and the inner surface is then polished to a gleaming fi nish. Manually struck marks in the center of the ring’s inner surface indicate the gold’s purity (750), along with a “W” for Wempe and a heart pierced by an arrow, the mark of Niessing.

Whether the are worn as wedding rings, friendship rings, family rings or mother-daughter rings — the pieces can be named and used in whatever way an individual customer’s fantasy dictates. The Heritage rings from Wempe are a testimony of quality, tradition and romance.