I didn't come from jewellery. My background is oil and gas construction — I spent years working on refineries in the Canadian north, a world as far from fine jewellery as you can get. I came to diamond setting sideways, driven by a personal obsession rather than any professional trajectory.
I wanted to make my fiancée's engagement ring myself. Not have someone make it — actually make it. That desire, which most people in my life regarded as eccentric, sent me down a road that would eventually lead to Graff Diamonds in London and some of the most extraordinary stones in the world.
The Education I Had to Chase
Diamond setting — real diamond setting, not the hobbyist version — is not something you learn from books. You learn it from people who know it, and those people have historically been very reluctant to share it. The knowledge lives in workshops in Antwerp, in studios in St. Petersburg, in the hands of craftsmen who learned from masters who learned from masters, in an unbroken chain of deliberate obscurity.
I went and found them. That meant studying in Russia. It meant working in Belgium. It meant seeking out the people who actually knew what they were doing rather than accepting the instruction available closer to home. The journey was long and expensive and sometimes disorienting, but the alternative — learning from people who didn't really know the highest level of the craft — wasn't acceptable to me.
What I came away with was an understanding of diamond setting that almost nobody has access to. The techniques used at elite houses. The tool knowledge. The approach to precision that separates workmanlike setting from genuinely exceptional work.
Graff Diamonds
Graff Diamonds in London is one of the most prestigious jewellery houses in the world. The stones they work with are extraordinary by any measure — significant in size, in quality, in provenance. The setting work they require is correspondingly demanding.
I set the 41.69ct Meya Prosperity 2 — a D Flawless diamond, which is to say the highest possible colour and clarity grade — during my time at Graff. It's the kind of stone that most setters never see in a career, let alone work with. The trust required to hand a setter a stone of that value and rarity is a particular kind of credential that no school can confer.
Why I Teach
The frustration that drove me to chase my own education — the artificial scarcity of knowledge, the closed workshops, the deliberate mystification of craft — didn't go away. If anything, it sharpened. I had access to knowledge that could genuinely transform careers, and no good reason to keep it to myself.
The Microsetting Academy is the curriculum I built to share what I actually know — not a diluted version, not a simplified introduction, but the real knowledge. Structured progressively, so students build on solid fundamentals rather than attempting advanced techniques before they're ready. Designed to take someone from beginner to professional standard.
Over 200 students have come through the curriculum. They've landed positions at Hatton Garden studios. They've transitioned from retail to the bench. They've gone from hobbyists to professionals. Some have built businesses around skills they developed here. This is what the knowledge was always supposed to do.
Setting the Standard
This site — Setting the Standard — exists as something distinct from the Academy. It's a resource for everyone interested in diamond setting: students, working setters, studio owners, suppliers, and people who are just beginning to discover the craft. A place where the knowledge is shared freely, where the industry is discussed honestly, and where the community of people who care about this work can find each other.
The Academy teaches. Setting the Standard informs. Both are part of the same project: making the knowledge accessible to everyone who deserves it.