Editor’s Note
This week marks three years since high-end manufacturer Facet established operations at the Córdoba Jewelry Park. The Catalan company continues its expansion, recently unveiling enlarged facilities that now employ approximately 100 workers across the full design and production spectrum.
It has been three years since Facet, one of the leading manufacturers in the high-end sector, arrived at the Córdoba Jewelry Park, and the Catalan firm has not stopped growing. This Thursday, it presented the latest expansion of its facilities, where around a hundred people now work across the entire process, from design to production in all its phases.
Facet arrived in Córdoba in the autumn of 2020 with fewer than fifty professionals, as noted by the firm’s Commercial Director and Vice President, Ángel Iborra. Since then, it has expanded three times due to the successful progress of its work, and the latest expansion now unveiled is the definitive one.
Many of the workers in this factory are from Córdoba, but students from the Official Jewelry School also pass through its facilities, having the opportunity to train and do internships in a factory with the best processes and a very demanding quality control system.
The firm faces the challenge of continuous improvements and guaranteeing “the highest possible quality,” because its clients are important brands. They cannot reveal the names, but they are among the most prestigious, and the orders have significant requirements.
The Facet factory in Córdoba features traditional jewelry making, but also that which is done with robots and state-of-the-art machinery, such as the one that selects the precious stones that must be set in the pieces and automatically rejects them if they are not the same size as the others to find the most suitable ones.
The demand and control are constant, and when Facet acquires a batch of brilliants, diamonds, and colored stones, the weight, quality, and natural origin are checked, because some artificial ones cannot be distinguished with the naked eye.
Traceability is important for them: the gold they work with is recycled (because extraction has a much larger ecological footprint) and the precious stones always come from countries where it can be certified that they have an ethical origin.
The tour of the facilities continues through the stone-setting work, which has a set time for each type of piece, or polishing, which can be done in the traditional way or through different processes using elements like walnut shell powder.
There is also a design team that shapes how the jewelry will look and studies whether what clients request is technically feasible. Quality control, recalled Ángel Iborra, is very important. Several professionals examine each piece and, if necessary, order it to be rechecked and point out its possible defects.
Customer service is entirely international, with professionals from Australia, Portugal, France, or Italy, but also German speakers. The idea is that the client has on the other end a person who not only masters their language but also belongs to their culture, with whom understanding is very high.
Facet was founded almost forty years ago in Barcelona and has factories in India and Córdoba, and although they have their own brand, it is the least important: the bulk goes to major brands.
The Córdoba factory, due to its location in Europe, has provided a significant boost, as shown by the fact that its installation in the Jewelry Park has not stopped growing since it arrived three years ago. Its offices are in Paris, Germany, New York, Israel, India, and Barcelona.
