The Designers Behind LOTTEDS
The Designers Behind LOTTEDS: Where Roman Inspiration Meets Modern Alchemy
Behind every LOTTEDS piece is a question — one that most jewellery designers never ask, because it makes the work harder and the materials more expensive. The question is this: "How do we honour this silhouette while making it better for the person who will wear it?"
It's not the question the jewellery industry typically starts with. The traditional approach begins with aesthetics — proportion, sparkle, visual impact. Comfort and skin safety are afterthoughts, if they're thought of at all. But LOTTEDS was founded by someone who spent 12 years listening to what happens when comfort is ignored — the rashes, the green marks, the women told they "just couldn't wear jewellery." So our design process had to be different. It had to begin not with the eye, but with the skin.
This is the story of the people who make that process work — the design collective led by Bob, a designer whose obsession with Roman jewellery architecture is matched only by his commitment to reimagining it for the bodies of today.
Meet Bob: The Architect of Our Aesthetic
Bob
Lead Designer & Co-Creative Director
Bob's education in jewellery design didn't happen in a classroom. It happened in museum archives across Europe — the Vatican Museums in Rome, the Prado in Madrid, the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna. He spent years studying the architectural jewellery of antiquity and the Renaissance not from photographs, but from the pieces themselves. He examined heritage pieces under magnification. He traced the evolution of specific motifs — the serpent, the roller band, the quatrefoil, the fan — across centuries of craftsmanship. He asked the question that most people never think to ask: why does this shape feel timeless?
His answer, developed over years of study, is that the most enduring jewellery forms share a common origin: they are derived from architecture. The proportions of a Roman column. The curve of a Baroque dome. The geometric repetition of a mosaic floor. These forms feel "right" to the human eye because they follow mathematical principles of harmony that we recognise intuitively, even if we can't articulate them. Bob's genius — and the reason Livia sought him out — is his ability to translate those principles into wearable pieces that honour the original language while being entirely new.
From Study to Sketch: How a LOTTEDS Piece Begins
Every LOTTEDS design starts with what Bob calls "the reference phase." He'll spend weeks — sometimes months — immersed in a particular motif. For the Snake Collection, he studied serpent imagery across cultures: ancient Egyptian cobra bracelets, Greek snake rings from the Hellenistic period, Roman serpent armbands, Victorian serpent necklaces (popularised by Queen Victoria's engagement ring, which was a serpent with an emerald head). He looked at how different eras interpreted the same form — sometimes realistically, with scales and eyes; sometimes abstractly, with smooth coils and geometric heads.
Then comes the translation. This is where Bob's approach diverges from traditional jewellery design. A conventional designer might look at a Roman serpent bracelet and think: how can I replicate this? Bob thinks: what makes this form compelling, and how can I reinterpret it using materials that didn't exist when the original was made?
The answer usually involves simplification. Classical jewellery was often highly ornate — detailed scales, intricate engraving, multiple textures on a single piece. That level of ornamentation worked in solid gold, which is soft enough to carve and engrave with hand tools. But Bob isn't working in gold. He's working in 316L stainless steel — a material that's harder, stronger, and more resistant than gold, but which requires different techniques. The detail that was possible with a hand graver on 22K gold isn't achievable on 316L steel with the same tools. So Bob adapts. He simplifies the line. He focuses on the essential curve — the gesture of the serpent rather than its individual scales. The result is a piece that feels classical but looks contemporary. It references the past without being trapped by it.
The design philosophy, in Bob's own words: "I'm not interested in making reproductions. A reproduction is a dead thing — it has no relationship to the present. What I want is to understand why a form has survived for two thousand years, and then ask: what would it look like if it were designed today, with today's materials, for today's bodies? That's not copying. That's continuing a conversation."
A Collective, Not a Single Vision
Bob leads the creative direction, but he doesn't design alone. LOTTEDS is built around a collective of independent artisans — each with their own specialism, their own perspective, and their own reason for joining this mission. The collective structure is deliberate. Livia wanted a design process where no single ego dominated — where pieces got better as they passed through more hands, not diluted.
Here are the key members of the collective and what they bring:
The Metalsmith
Before joining LOTTEDS, she spent eight years in medical device manufacturing — designing and fabricating components for orthopaedic implants. She understands biocompatibility at a level that most jewellers never need to: which alloys release ions under prolonged skin contact, which surface finishes minimise bacterial adhesion, which manufacturing tolerances are required for something that will be worn inside a human body. At LOTTEDS, she oversees material selection and prototyping. Every new design goes through her hands before it goes anywhere near production. If a surface isn't smooth enough at the microscopic level — if there's any texture that could trap moisture or irritate skin — she sends it back. Her standards were forged in an industry where failure meant a patient getting an infection. Jewellery isn't life-or-death, but she treats it with the same rigour.
The Gemologist
She spent the first decade of her career in the traditional diamond industry — grading stones in Antwerp, the global centre of diamond trading. She left because she couldn't reconcile the beauty of the stones with the opacity of the supply chain. "I could tell you the cut, colour, clarity, and carat of any diamond that passed through my hands," she says. "But I couldn't tell you which country it came from, whose labour extracted it, or what happened to the earth where it was found. That information simply wasn't available — and almost nobody was asking for it." At LOTTEDS, she oversees the sourcing and grading of every lab-grown diamond and moissanite stone. Every stone is fully traceable. Every stone is certified. And she's finally able to answer the questions she was never allowed to ask in her previous career.
The CAD Designer
He trained at a Swiss watch company — one of the ones you've definitely heard of, though he's contractually prevented from naming it. His background is in micro-scale precision: watch components measured in microns, tolerances that would seem absurd in any other industry. He brings that obsession with precision to jewellery. Every LOTTEDS design is modelled in 3D CAD before it's ever prototyped physically. He runs stress simulations on clasps and hinges — testing how many thousands of open-close cycles a mechanism can withstand before failure. He analyses stone settings under virtual load to ensure prongs won't loosen over time. It's an approach borrowed from mechanical engineering, applied to something as personal as a ring. The result is jewellery that looks delicate but performs like machinery.
The Surface-Finishing Specialist
He spent over a decade in the PVD coating industry — applying gold, titanium nitride, and diamond-like carbon finishes to everything from watch cases to medical instruments to aerospace components. He knows more about the behaviour of vaporised gold in a vacuum chamber than almost anyone outside a semiconductor fab. At LOTTEDS, he oversees the PVD process — managing the temperature curves, the plasma density, the deposition rates that determine how deeply the gold embeds into the 316L steel surface. It's his expertise that ensures our gold finish lasts for years rather than months. And he'll talk about it for hours if you let him — the relationship between chamber pressure and colour uniformity, the way slight variations in argon flow affect adhesion strength, the specific shade of "warm gold" that took 47 iterations to perfect.
The Livia Protocol: Where Design Meets Reality
The final — and most important — member of the design team doesn't have a jewellery background at all. It's Livia, our founder. Before any new design is approved for production, it goes through what the collective calls "the Livia Protocol." Livia wears the prototype. Not for an hour. Not for a photo shoot. For days — through workouts, through hand-washing, through sleep, through the chaos of parenting two children.
If it irritates her skin, it goes back. If it catches on clothing, it goes back. If it feels heavy after a full day, it goes back. If the clasp is difficult to operate one-handed, it goes back. Livia's skin is the final testing ground — because she made a promise in 2020 that every piece that leaves this workshop must pass the skin test first. She intends to keep it.
The Livia Protocol has killed more designs than any other part of the process — and that's exactly how it should be. A design that looks beautiful on a sketchpad but doesn't work on a real body isn't a success. It's a sculpture. And LOTTEDS makes jewellery — not sculptures.
The collective's shared belief: "A piece of jewellery is not complete when it leaves the workbench. It's complete when someone puts it on and forgets they're wearing it. That's the standard. Comfort isn't a feature — it's the foundation."
See Bob's Work
The Bob Collection is where heritage design meets modern alchemy — original pieces in 316L steel with lab-grown stones, all hand-finished.
Bob Collection → · Snake Collection →
The Snake Collection: A Study in Flow
Bob spent months studying serpent motifs across cultures before designing the Snake Collection. The result: fluid, sinuous pieces that move with your body.
Snake Collection → · Cobra Collection →
Architectural Precision: The Rollers
The Rollers Collection draws from the geometric bands of Roman engineering — reimagined in 316L steel with a mirror polish that lasts.
Rollers → · Gear Collection →Where the Inspiration Comes From — And Where It Doesn't
This is important, and we want to be completely clear about it: every LOTTEDS piece is an original creation. We don't produce replicas. We don't use moulds taken from other brands' pieces. We are not affiliated with any third-party luxury house.
What we do is study — deeply — the design principles that make certain forms timeless. The curve of a serpent's tail. The spacing of geometric bands on a Roman column. The way light catches a sculptural fan motif on a Baroque cathedral. These are design languages that belong to no single brand — they are part of our shared cultural inheritance. They've echoed through history for millennia. And every generation of designers has the right — arguably the responsibility — to interpret them anew.
It's the difference between tracing a painting and studying the artist's technique to create something original. The former is copying. The latter is learning the language — understanding the grammar of proportion, the vocabulary of form, the syntax of light and shadow — and then writing your own sentences in that language. Bob and the collective are fluent in the language of classical jewellery. But the pieces they create speak in a contemporary voice — with modern materials, modern production standards, and a modern commitment to skin safety that the original masters never had to consider.
Our designs are inspired by the great jewellery traditions of Rome. They are executed with materials and standards that those traditions could only have dreamed of. And they are worn by people who deserve jewellery that honours both the past and the present — without irritating their skin in the process.
About LOTTEDS → · Meet Livia → · Behind the Shine: Our Atelier →
Laissez un commentaire