Maeve Gillies brings platinum LPBF to luxury jewellery with custom workflow

Maeve Gillies, founder of the eponymous luxury jewellery brand, has integrated platinum additive manufacturing into her production workflow, using laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) to create complex, organic ring and bracelet designs that would be impossible with traditional casting. The process involves printing in platinum 950 alloy on an undisclosed industrial LPBF system, followed by hand-finishing by master jewellers in the brand's New York atelier. Gillies positions the technology not as a replacement for handcraft but as an enabler of geometric freedom in a metal that is notoriously difficult to work with due to its high melting point and density. The first collection featuring AM-produced platinum pieces is now available, with prices reflecting the hybrid of digital fabrication and artisan labour.

This development sits within a narrow but high-value niche: precious-metal AM for fine jewellery. Unlike the consumer-electronics titanium pull-through seen in Apple Watch cases, platinum LPBF addresses a market where material cost and finishing labour dominate, not unit volume. The technical challenge is real — platinum's melting point of 1768°C and its tendency to absorb hydrogen during printing require tightly controlled atmospheres and post-processing that few AM service bureaus offer. Gillies is effectively building a custom process chain rather than adopting an off-the-shelf solution, which aligns with the IP lock-in grind pattern: the moat here is not the printer but the qualified workflow, material handling, and finishing recipes. The broader jewellery AM market remains small — dominated by wax-pattern printing for investment casting and a handful of direct-metal producers like Cooksongold and Legor Group — but Gillies' move signals that the frontier is shifting from prototyping to end-use precious-metal production.

For the AM industry, this is a reminder that high-margin, low-volume applications can justify custom process development where aerospace-scale qualification costs are irrelevant. The practical takeaway is that platinum LPBF will remain a boutique capability until a materials supplier standardises a pre-qualified powder and parameter set — something neither EOS nor Trumpf has prioritised. Buyers considering precious-metal AM should expect lead times of weeks, not days, and should verify that the finishing partner understands the metallurgy of printed versus cast platinum, which behaves differently under stone-setting and polishing.