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 Post subject: Freakingcat is here
PostPosted: Mon Aug 01, 2011 8:19 am 
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Joined: Sat Aug 25, 2007 9:29 am
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Location: Thailand
Hello to everyone! My name is Arthur, owner of Freakingcat.com - some of you might have met us at the various gemstone shows which we did all over the world. We have just started our new website which is just out in Version 1.0, but will gradually be expanded with a wikipedia part for information about rare gems, tips and tricks from the cutting table and other stuff.

We have been very busy the last years and expanded our collection to over 900 different gems, in total we have 10.000 gems in our collection. Some gems hardly have been facetted before. We love the challenge to cut even the most crazy materials and have ventured last year even to cut salts like glauberite, gems with an extreme low hardness and other crazy stuff. I will try to engage in this forum more actively in future and present some of the most unusual gems with tips and tricks of how to facet them.


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 Post subject: Re: Freakingcat is here
PostPosted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 8:51 pm 
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Joined: Sun Oct 16, 2005 12:22 pm
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Welcome.
Do you do your cutting yourself?
How did this obsession start with you? To cut the un-cuttable? To sell the unobtainable?

What started this madness? :wink:


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 Post subject: Re: Freakingcat is here
PostPosted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 9:09 pm 
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Joined: Mon Oct 06, 2008 6:13 pm
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LOL you in replay mode Barbra? :lol:
Welcome freakingcat.

_________________
Keep em comin!!! :)


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 Post subject: Re: Freakingcat is here
PostPosted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 10:04 pm 
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:oops: I originally posted most of this response with phlogopite and then realized it would be better here....just forgot to remove the first post.
Well, I fixed it.


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 Post subject: Re: Freakingcat is here
PostPosted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 10:52 pm 
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When I started my little company 8 years ago, had no cutting workshop but had to buy my gems from other dealers in order to resell them, I was only interested in the less common ones. Usually they were ugly, really bad cut gems, with parts even missing, for an insane high price because they were "rare". If I asked the seller where the gem comes from, the answer usually was "Africa" as substitute for "I have no bloody idea". I realized that there were other people who were interested in rare gems, but most of them faced the same problem. If they acquired a "rare" gem, usually the price per carat was insanely high and the cutting quality a nightmare. More important, there was no guarantee what the gem really was and only a few gemmological institutes who had the reference datas could identify the gem, for a very high price.

Venturing deeper and deeper into the business I finally met my first cutter, an amazing woman, who cut gems for 20 years. We are still working together. She brought not only the love for gems on the cutting table, but also shared my enthusiasm constantly try out new things and push the edge a bit further.

But she only had cut the traditional gems like rubies and sapphires, a few amethysts and tourmalines before, all in standard oval cut, which only guarantee maximum size out of a crystal.

It took us months to be able to cut the first softer material (at that time we were fighting with hardness 3 to 4). Now after years we have built up a small cutting team and keep our team small. They are all specialized and love their work. I constantly try to acquire new materials and together with my main cutter we discuss sometimes many hours trying to find new methods of how to cut certain materials. We ventured also in the radioactive and poisonous gemstone area, as some of the material are just beautiful, but of course are completely aware of the dangers and use all precaution and safety measures.

In order to establish a market for rare gems and make them more accessible for everyone, we created a price per piece system and banned the oval cut (we reintroduced it only recently again upon customers demands). From our suppliers we demanded to get out as good information about the origin as possible to pass it on to the buyer. Many buyers are gemologists, who, when they bought a gem from us, immediately tested us and reported back if we made a mistake with the gem classification. It's still a niche market, but recently we were contacted by bigger distribution channels who are interested to introduce rare gemstones to the jewelry industry and to a wide variety of gemstone enthusiasts, not only collectors.

We are not in the process of trying to find partners, who share the same enthusiasm and patience with rare gems. It is still a small but very fascinating market. Every gemstone needs attention and cannot be mass produced. That's why we decided to give them a distinct cut to get out the best of those gems. We recently opened our new website which gives a very good overview over the 900 different varieties and 10.000 gems which we have brought together, the biggest collection worldwide. Gemological institutes bought sample gems from us to build up a reference database so that they are able to identify rare gems for their customers. Slowly beside precious and semiprecious gems, a market for rare gems, which don't have to be necessarily expensive has started to emerge. That's were our fascination lies and that's exactly what we want to do. This is also the reason why I decided to start introducing more unusual gems in this forum

arthur


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