Meet G — The Maker Behind True North Forge

Like a lot of people, we assumed wedding rings meant gold until we realised very quickly that “traditional” didn’t necessarily mean practical, comfortable or right for us. G started researching alternative metals, initially just to make me something I could actually wear comfortably every day, and what began as one ring slowly turned into a workshop, a business and years of teaching himself how to work with some of the most difficult metals used in modern jewellery.

There was no jewellery background behind any of this.

Before rings, G worked as a mechanic before later spending many years offshore. He’s always been one of those naturally hands-on people who likes understanding how things work, fixing problems and making things properly. Long before True North Forge existed, he was building furniture from scratch including a ten-seater dining table complete with benches and tractor seats simply because he wanted one and decided he could make it himself.

That mindset never really changed.

Every ring at True North Forge is still made entirely by him from start to finish in our Scottish workshop.

No factory.
No outsourcing.
No production team.
No catalogue rings arriving from overseas.

When somebody places an order, that ring begins as a solid bar of metal on G’s workbench.

Most Mondays start the same way. Orders are grouped by metal, slices are carefully cut from the bars and laid out in rows ready for the week ahead. From there each ring is bored, shaped, refined, finished and polished individually by hand. Thursdays are usually engraving days, another process he taught himself from scratch through plenty of trial, error and persistence.

The workshop itself is rarely quiet.

The lathe is loud, there’s normally Britpop, indie or some newly discovered artist playing in the background, and there is almost always either a coffee or an energy drink sitting somewhere nearby. G tends to work from around 9am once the kids are at school, taking regular breaks throughout the day to avoid fatigue during detailed finishing work. Finish time depends entirely on the workload and how demanding the week’s rings have been.

He also has an impressive tool cabinet he built himself.

His actual bench, however, still somehow ends up covered in tools constantly.

While machinery forms part of the process, a huge amount of the final shaping and finishing is still done by hand because he prefers every ring to feel individually made rather than machine-stamped into identical copies. There’s no CNC production line here and no shortcuts hidden behind clever branding.

If he isn’t happy with a ring, it gets remade.

Thankfully that’s rare these days, but when somebody is trusting you to create something they’ll hopefully wear for the next fifty years, “good enough” isn’t really acceptable.

Damascus Steel is probably the material he enjoys working with most. As a long-time Forged in Fire fan, there’s still something satisfying about the acid etching process and watching the patterns slowly reveal themselves in the metal. Even now, after making hundreds of rings, that part never really loses its appeal.

One of the things that matters most to us is proving that alternative metals can still be premium, meaningful and built to last.

Over the years we’ve spoken to too many customers who spent huge amounts of money elsewhere on poor-quality mass-produced Damascus rings that later rusted or failed. One groom even phoned us from his honeymoon in India after sea swimming twice with a Damascus ring he had paid nearly £2,000 for, only to discover it had already started corroding.

That sort of thing genuinely bothers us.

For us, handmade should actually mean something.

Our rings are made in Scotland using carefully selected British-made materials wherever possible, and because we operate as a small independent workshop rather than a large corporate jewellery brand, customers are paying for the craftsmanship and materials themselves rather than funding warehouses, agencies or layers of unnecessary overhead.

Even now, every order still feels personal.

Whenever a review comes through, G still asks who left it first and almost always remembers exactly which ring they had made. Seeing photographs, reviews and messages from people who chose him to create something they’ll wear for a lifetime is still one of the best parts of the entire process.

That part never really becomes normal.