We believe great companies change something as well as make something. They have a purpose and it propels them forward.

We want to protect the communities hit hardest by the climate crisis. Like the people in Pakistan facing severe heat waves and flooding, and the people in Chad & Niger dealing with devastating drought.

The planet has reached a tipping point and keeping global warming beneath 2.4°C is a top priority.

This is our ‘why’ we are in business.

It’s good to know that. And it’s good for everyone else to know that too.

We measure things mostly in numbers. But there are other important ways to measure how well a business is doing. These are things like ‘Are we proud of it?’, ‘Is it loved?, Is it insanely creative?

But these are just as important as ‘Are we growing?’ ‘Are our margins good?’ ‘Are our customers happy? If we build something we are incredibly proud of, that is loved, that is insanely creative, you can be sure that it will also be a great business too.

We won’t second guess our customer. We are a small part of that creative, environmentally-conscious community. And we have been for over two decades.

So when we say ‘we will make unique rings for the modern, planet-loving couple’. We are also saying we will make rings for people like us.

For us, we feel the most comfortable when we are around creative people. We enjoy spending time with them. We trust these people the most. We are inspired by their ideas, by what they make, and by their passion. They create the solutions that change the world. We love how their ideas can change this world.

And we would love to make unique rings for them.

The great thing about ideas is they change things. They create new ways of doing business. They turn small companies into big companies, and the lack of ideas turns big companies back into small ones.

The important thing with ideas is to recognize which are the good ones and which are the great ones. You have to be a good filter. Say no often. The things you don’t do will define you just as much as the things that you say yes to.

Great ideas need be executed insanely well. Lots of great ideas die with poor execution.

The best way to be a guardian of great ideas is to work with great people. Simple, really. Let them bring them to life. The design of it, the feel of it, even the sound of it all matter. Yes, executing well is as important as the idea itself.

And lastly, don’t talk about your idea. Don’t tell your mum. Keep your ideas secrets. Then launch it on the world. Keep the element of surprise.

We love quality. We love longevity. We love good design. We love ideas. We love our planet. But most of all, we love that we can wrap all these things up into a ring that stands for something.

There’s just something about it. We love the way they stand the test of time, if they are made well. We love how each one is unique, a tailored pairing of stone, metal, setting & design. And we love how they’re always at arms reach, ready to cue a story.

If we can spend our days working on something that we love doing, then that spirit will soon find itself in the product that we make.

We’re a team of lifelong creatives that have had a passion for thoughtful design as long as anyone can remember.

We know a big part of the jewelry business is about how you tell your story. We will have to tell our story every bit as well as we make our rings.

The good thing is we have a great story to tell: Noor & Leila was born after one of our founders proposed to the love of his life. His struggle to find a unique, quality moissanite ring was our inspiration to craft unique, sustainable, and accessible rings for everyone.

To a greater or lesser extent our future will be determined by how well we manage our costs. The more efficient we are at running our business, the more we can afford to give to our customer in terms of quality and the more we can give back to our shared home.

We like a company that puts customers before themselves.

We will be strategic in both business and our creativity. We will control our costs. But we will not control our imagination. We fully understand the importance of maverick, scary, un-tried ideas.

We will set our systems up to know where every penny is being spent, what our margin is, and where our customers are coming from. Then we can manage the business with a clear understanding of where we are. We will start as we mean to go on. All costs known. All costs controlled.

These disciplines will mean we will run the company, and not let it run us. It will also allow the company to have the freedom to be as creative as it dreams of being.

It takes time to build a business. The first couple of years are inevitably tricky. The basic systems and the infrastructure all have to be built up from scratch, the customer will have to be found, and the product refined. It is a time when the business is both time and cash hungry.

But we should not be quick to judge the business. It should be given time to grow slowly. Patience is what will be needed. Hard work takes time to show the fruits of all that labor. We should view a young business as we would a young child. It needs love, time and a set of rules to adhere to. It will make mistakes, it will fall and it will need the parents to be there for it as it grows and becomes its own person. We should not make too many demands on it when it is young, let the child play for a while.

It will grow up before we know it.

The wrong stress is not good for a business. Or, for the people running it.

But we can minimize the wrong stress by planning for less sales than we hope for and for keeping our costs lower than the business requires. And we can put in systems so that the business is easy to run. Systems that work almost without thinking.

Then we can get on with the serious stuff of making the business as creative and as fun as we possibly can. The ideas that will come out of that culture will make us stand out. They will increase sales. Help us get known. And define us.

In time, that will produce good stress of ‘how on earth are we going to get all these orders out of the door’. And ‘how do we come up with another idea as good as the last one’. That is good stress.

We live on a planet with limited resources, but an almost unlimited appetite for consuming more and more things. Our best answer as a company should be to make things that last.

We want to make legacy products using superior quality materials and craftsmanship. Longevity, of course, doesn’t just come from the materials used but also from timeless design.

Things are thrown away because people stopped loving them. Great design is more important for the environment than lots of people give credit for.

The bigger issue at hand is global warming. At our current pace, we will blow past 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over the Earth’s preindustrial mean temperatures—the threshold, scientists say, for severe planetary damage. To stave off a climate catastrophe, our goal must be to prevent any additional greenhouse gas accumulation, drive CO2e back under 430 parts per million, and keep it there.

We have to do our part by operating our business with a negative carbon footprint and advocating for better climate policy. Our customers value the same climate goals as we do, and we have to push for our collective voice to make a rapid and significant difference towards reaching net zero emissions, so that we can be proud of the planet we pass on to future generations.

We should run our business knowing that there is a silent shareholder called planet earth. And we have to keep that shareholder happy too.