Vicenza Silver Factory

When we embarked on our PERLAVITA line of jewelry, it involved many components which were not in production. We were looking for a way to produce the quantities we needed, not just a few each day as we had seen at various bead shows - sort of toy machines and guys with movies showing you how you cut the tubing one by one.   We knew the factories existed, in fact we spoke with those making millions each day for large clothing manufacturers - but they only in used base metals. We needed Sterling Silver.

 

This took some convincing the silver factories of Vicenza and Arrezzo that we had a product with a demand for production. Thanks in large part to our Italian partner who vouched that we weren't just crazy Americans and the fact that we were willing to pay a substantial sum for tooling finally persuaded them to work with us. It is very labor intensive (what isn't that we use?).  But my first trip to the factory was just such an eye opener.  We are used to the intensive heat and the painstaking labor of making glass beads, but when they start melting silver - wow now that's impressive.  So we thought you might enjoy seeing a little of the factory that makes not only our PERLAVITA linings for the Murano Glass beads and produces our PERLAVITA Bangle Bracelets, but produces other components for us like beadcaps and tubing.

 

Our PERLAVITA linings go through about a 12 step process.   It's hot work and the equipment is large and rugged. 

 

	The silver is melted and then forced through roller after roller until it is the perfect thickness.  It lays on the floor in ribbons awaiting the next process.  From here they can produce tubing, stampings, and how do we use them?  Well there are earrings, our PERLAVITA bangle bracelets are produced right here as well.  They can make our beadcaps in any design and with our own  logo as well.  They are magicians.
So now that they have made the ribbons, we can begin the production of our Sterling Silver.  Here's the magic PERLAVITA machine.  Keep your fingers back.	This is the tooling which produces in many steps the final product.  How they came up with the process I will never know, it sort of goes back and forth until the little pieces pop out. I am told there are about a dozen individual operations which create the final product. The end result seems like a simple piece of silver, but the steps and processes are quite complicated.
	You can see here that we only use a portion of the ribbon, all the excess goes back into the melting pot. We can't afford to waste the pure silver!
Our final product is either Rhodium plated (which makes it a little less bright but retards tarnishing) or Vermeil which is Gold Plating.  We can produce many thousand in one day (after a lot of work).   (On the right) All the work-in-progress is held in safes on the property.  There are bars on the windows and doors and you must be buzzed in to get anywhere near the production area, both because of the value of their product and because the equipment is quite dangerous.