The hands, the story, and the standard behind Gince & Roy.
The name
Gince & Roy is two family names side by side — Gince, my partner’s name, and Roy, mine. There is no legend behind it and no marketing story: put together, the two names simply sounded right, the way a piece of metal sometimes sounds right under the hammer. For now, the workshop behind the name is one man, one bench, and one pair of hands. Everything on this site passed through them.
The hands behind the work
He came to jewellery through the stones. Long before it was a trade, it was a fascination: as a child he collected stones, painted miniature figures, and lost hours in finishing work and small details — the parts nobody notices until they are wrong. He will tell you he never really found his path in life. Jewellery found him.
In 2022, an advertisement for a gemmology course crossed his path. He enrolled, studied, and earned his official diploma as a diamond gemmologist from the World Gem Foundation. At that time he was working in a hospital. He left that job on an impulse — his words — to work in a jewellery store, and it was there, handling pieces and caring for them day after day, that admiration turned into a single, stubborn question: how are these things actually made?
He decided to learn the answer with his own hands. No school, no master — by himself, piece by piece.
His first workbench was the end of a kitchen table. His first tools were a work peg, two files, and a pair of Mastercraft pliers never intended for jewellery. His first real challenge was an ambitious one: building stone-setting baskets out of wire thinner than one millimetre, trying not to melt the wire away. It took him roughly two months of weekends — testing, failing, understanding, testing again — before he could do it well. It was work of very great precision, attempted with tools that had none. That stubbornness is still the workshop’s method: nothing is “good enough” until it is right.
Over the following three years of self-taught practice, the kitchen table became a real bench, and the skills accumulated one by one. He learned to melt metal completely and to make his own alloys. He learned the rolling mill, and how to draw his own wire — square profile and round — instead of buying it. He built a complete chain by hand, link by link, and its toggle clasp as well. He tried pendants. He bought an inside-ring engraver and learned internal engraving. He worked his way through the finishes: a flawless mirror polish, satin surfaces, embossed and hammered textures. Today he solders with a hydrogen torch he can safely use indoors — cleaner, steadier, his own.
He does not buy his wire. He makes it. That one sentence explains most of what this workshop is.
Two finishes, one standard
The first collection, DUOS, is built on duality — the same duality as the two names on the door. Within a single piece, a mirror finish, polished until it reflects like glass, meets a surface deliberately left matte and satin. Neither side decorates the other; each one proves the other. It is a quiet idea, and it is harder to execute than it looks.
Because here is the workshop’s real standard: a form that looks simple is the least forgiving thing in jewellery. A smooth circumference, perfectly flat faces and clean, sharp edges leave absolutely nothing to hide behind — every tenth of a millimetre shows. His first ring was chosen for exactly that reason: a plain band, no ornament, no distraction. In his own words: no fluff. That discipline — apparent simplicity, earned through precision — governs every piece that leaves the bench, whatever its form.
Made for one person at a time
Every Gince & Roy piece is made to order, by hand, in solid sterling silver, in a small workshop in Québec, Canada. Nothing is cast in series. Nothing comes off a production line. A piece begins when it is ordered, and it is made for one person — the one who will wear it, or the one who will offer it.
The collection will open with pendants, offered on their own, without a chain: the piece itself is the work, made to be worn on yours. And because a workshop like this is built slowly, in the open, the Journal on this site follows the making as it happens — the wire, the torch, the finishes, the collection taking shape at the bench.
This is slow work, done properly, by one maker who taught himself until his hands knew.
— Tom
Maker and founder, Gince & Roy
Québec, Canada