The Nature of Handmade

Always Handmade

RockLove's jewelry is handcrafted from start to finish!  When the company began in 2007, each piece was handcrafted and shipped by founder Allison Cimino's own two hands (the company was started in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens, NYC).  Since then, we've grown quite a bit, but our core values are unchanged: premium quality officially licensed handcrafted jewelry from the finest nickel-free precious metals, safe for our fellow pop-culture fans with metal allergies and sensitive skin.

Integrity of Manufacture

While each piece can no longer be cast, polished and strung by Allison herself, RockLove is handcrafted in Thailand by our women-run manufacturing partner.  The company and its skilled artisans undergo frequent audits to ensure transparency and integrity.  We are united in our commitment to respecting human rights, monitoring the safety and quality of products, and reducing the environmental footprint of the supply chain.

Photography

Due to the handmade nature of our jewelry, each item is beautifully unique, with slight variations per piece. We do our best to accurately represent our designs by featuring product images, lifestyle images, and modeled images, demonstrating the pieces in different lighting and environments.  The products photographed also vary across the production run - the model's item is not the same exact piece seen in the white background studio photos, again giving us further ability to spotlight the natural variance that occurs with handcrafted goods.

How Might My Product Vary?

Each step is by hand, however the techniques that incur the most natural variance are polishing, plating, enameling and antiquing.

  • Polishing precious metals involves buffing the surface with an abrasive compound at a high speed, removing a tiny bit of metal and creating a reflective surface.  While we strive for maximum detail to be preserved from piece to piece, each will look slightly different when compared.
  • Enamel is painstakingly painted by hand and for those items that do not include depressions or "wells" for the enamel to sit, the enamel is even more subject to variation.
  • Those items that are fully plated will not vary much, but for our more complex multi-finished pieces, the gold and rhodium plates are painted on by hand and will vary slightly across the production run.
  • Antiquing is the technique in which silver is intentionally oxidized or blackened through a chemical process or compound in order to enhance contrast and depth.  The blackener is applied to the entire surface and then polished off; the polishing wheel cannot reach into the crevices, leaving blackener behind in those depressions.  The amount of antiquing removed and remaining will vary slightly across every piece in a production run.

Quality Control

Our manufacturing team quality checks each item prior to shipping, and then our Washington warehouse team quality checks each item again. You can expect your products to arrive undamaged and match our photos and description to the best of our ability.

Products that do not meet our quality control standards are not sold at discount, but returned to our manufacturing team to improve.

Questions and Returns

Feeling unsure about how an item may vary? Contact Customer Service, our team is happy to answer questions before you purchase!

Please keep in mind the unique nature of your purchase when evaluating a product for a return or exchange. Variations are expected in handmade items, and we do not consider slight variations in finish, antiquing, enamel, etc to be valid reasons for exchange or free return shipping. You are welcome to return an item within the terms of our Return Policy, but you are responsible for the cost of shipping.