The CRED Story
Pioneering Ethical Jewellery Since 1996
CRED Jewellery began as an enterprise project to support the work of the CRED Foundation, a charity campaigning on Education, Poverty and Human Rights issues. The jewellery business was set up to reflect the values of the Foundation: values such as environmental sustainability, justice for the poor and the upholding of human rights. Begun in 1996 by Fair Trade campaigner Greg Valerio, CRED began by trading in silver but it quickly became clear that a company with ethical principles needed to understand the dynamics of the jewellery trade, especially the route from stone to store.
In 2001 Greg and his friend Christian Cheesman went to Rajasthan, India, to visit a garnet mine, as part of their journey to better understand where their raw material came from. What they witnessed there gave them mission and purpose:
“It was a horrendous parade of child and indentured labour and gender exploitation in a 110ºF degrees of heat with no clean water. Hell is a real place. It was worse than a trip through Dante’s Inferno.”
- Greg Valerio
CRED approached Greenwich University’s Natural Resources Institute (NRI) and commissioned independent academic research into the jewellery supply chain. When the NRI published their findings in 2003 their report Towards an Ethical Jewellery Business confirmed academically what CRED already knew anecdotally: the real ethical issue is the plight of the small-scale miner.
It was through the NRI report that CRED’s partnership with Colombian mining collective Oro Verde™ began. They were looking for a jeweller willing to pay an above-market premium for their certified Fair Trade gold. We were only too willing to do so. This, along with work on ensuring the transparency of our refining and manufacturing supply chain, meant that we were able to launch the first independently certified environmentally and socially responsible wedding rings in 2003. We are proud to still be the first choice destination for those seeking ethical and fairtrade wedding and engagement rings.
Our partnership with Oro Verde™ has only deepened with time. In 2005 we were both founder members of the Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM), and in 2006 CRED brokered introductions between Oro Verde™, ARM and the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation (FLO): another step towards industry-wide change.
We have had many firsts in this business: the first jeweller to use known origin gold; the first to have a fully open and transparent supply chain; the first website dedicated to the sale of ethical jewellery; the first boutique jeweller to do the same. We’re proud of what we’ve achieved, but we are not complacent - there is still much work to be done. It is unfortunately not yet possible to source silver, diamonds or gems of the same ethical standard as our gold and platinum. So we’re working on that.
Our ambitions are for the whole jewellery industry: we want all jewellers to sell ethical pieces that benefit indigenous producers while mitigating environmental damage. We have sought partnerships with producers, designers, manufacturers and retailers that share our values and launched sister organisation CRED Sources in 2007, in order to enable others to benefit from our ethical sourcing. And we continue to campaign, because we want this industry to be as clear and as transparent as the gems they sell.
