Jared James

I am Jared, and I run LILY DIA from Melbourne with my partner Brie. I have spent fifteen years in the jewellery industry, and along the way I helped start NZ Diamonds, NZ Moissanite and NZ Jewellers before Brie and I founded the studio we own and run together today. So when these guides explain a diamond or a setting, it comes from years on the trade side rather than from theory.

Much of that time has been spent close to the stones themselves, including sourcing trips to Hong Kong, China and India to find diamonds and rarer gemstones. What I care about most is craftsmanship. I believe a piece can genuinely be perfect, but only with the right people, so we work with highly skilled jewellers who love their craft and give them the room to design and build to the standard they would call perfect.

Alongside jewellery I have always worked in software and technology, and I still build in that space. Part of what we are doing at LILY DIA is bringing good software into the jewellery experience: to make buying calmer and lower risk, and to strip out the bloat and overhead that quietly inflates prices across this industry without adding anything to quality.

If something here is unclear, or you want a second opinion on a diamond or a ring you are comparing, the studio is easy to reach, and the questions people send through are usually where the next guide comes from.