Jewellery boutique owner and designer Chin Saw has opened a school to train young jewellery designers. SYIDA LIZTA AMIRUL IHSAN pays a visit.

Chin Saw.

THE first time I met local jewellery designer Chin Saw was three years ago at his show, where he told me about the rising demand of made-to-order jewellery, one-off pieces made to the specifications of the buyer.

Three years on, Chin Saw’s business is thriving.

He moved his shop from KL Plaza to Starhill Gallery last year, catering to a more upmarket crowd.

His collections have grown but they retain their intricate workmanship.
He has two designers to help him but he finds it difficult to hire able hands to design jewellery, so he took the next logical step — establish a school for jewellery design so he can impart his knowledge and, at the same time, get a pool of skilled designers.

Chin Jewellery Art Centre at Menara UOA in Jalan Pinang is a culmination of the designer’s dream.

“I design jewellery for manufacturers in Hong Kong and China and I find that there’s a lack of jewellery designers in Malaysia. The talent is abundant. They just need proper training.

“I hope I can train more designers so the jewellery industry in Malaysia can grow. Schools of gemology had some courses in jewellery design.

My school is all about design,” he said during an event to announce Chin Jewellery Art Centre in Starhill Gallery recently.

The centre recruited its first batch of seven students last year and the next batch will commence classes at the end of this month.

Two courses are offered: a six-month basic course and a 12-month advanced course.

“Graduates can either work with jewellery retailers or start their own business,” Chin Saw said.

For the basic-level course, students will be introduced to the fundamentals of jewellery, including the history and types of pearls and gems, colour application, drawing dimensions and settings.

The advanced level includes lessons in intricacies of designing jewellery: from designing, crafting, pricing and even marketing.

“We don’t only teach designs. We also teach about gemstones and diamonds, how to value them, how to be creative and how to derive ideas. We take the students to our factory in Sungei Way to give them a first-hand knowledge on how the pieces are made.”

Most designers, Chin said, only know how to draw, leaving the production entirely to the manufacturer.

“But if you want to be good at this, you need to know everything, from start to finish.”

Chin said his syllabus focuses a lot on drawing. They are the only aids from which the manufacturer would interpret the design, he says.

Most drawings now are two-dimensional.

“You need a three-dimensional drawing to get the manufacturer to see accurately what you want. Two-dimensional drawings of top and side views are insufficient. That’s why I emphasise three-dimensional drawings in my syllabus,” Chin said.

The 39-year-old Taiping-born designer has been in the jewellery business for the past 18 years.

In 1991, Saw, then a jewellery design student at the Malaysia Institute of Art, won the Diamond Today jewellery design competition with his creation of a bird fluttering above a fish in a pond.

He continued his gemstone and jewellery design studies in Hong Kong before returning to Malaysia and joining a jewellery retailer.

He went to Italy to learn crafting and manufacturing techniques from artisans there.

The dream of establishing the school started when he taught his staff and friends about jewellery design and realised that he needed a proper syllabus to teach his skills.

“That’s when I got the idea to open a school.”

If everything goes well, he hopes to recruit students from other countries like Indonesia and China and maybe introduce his syllabus in other gemology schools.

For more information about Chin Jewellery Art Centre, call Chin Jewellery Designer Boutique in Starhill Gallery at 03-2145-8220.