Hi, I’m Andrew, the designer and maker behind Ginima.
My route into jewellery design isn’t an entirely conventional one. I spent more than 30 years working in the space industry, in a world built around technology, precision and solving problems. But alongside that, I’ve always had a creative side and a love of art, design and making things.
Ginima grew from wanting to give that creative side more room.
Today I create contemporary jewellery that is distinctive, personal and designed to mean something to the person wearing it. My Scottish heritage is an important influence, but rather than creating traditional Scottish jewellery, I’m interested in combining that sense of place and identity with modern, expressive design.
Some pieces begin with my own ideas and become part of Ginima’s collections. Others begin with someone else’s story.
That is one of the things I enjoy most about commissions: taking an idea, a word, a memory or something that matters to someone and working out how to turn it into a piece of jewellery that feels completely their own. The Sgathan collection grew directly from that idea, allowing a personally meaningful word to become the starting point for an individual design.
Alongside the collections shown here, I welcome commissions and adaptations of existing Ginima designs. You don’t need to arrive with a finished idea; sometimes the most interesting pieces start with little more than a conversation.
If you’d like to discuss something, please get in touch at hello@ginima.design and let’s have a chat about what you have in mind.
The name Ginima was inspired by verlan, a form of French slang that plays with words by reversing their syllables. The word verlan itself comes from l’envers — French for “the reverse” — turned around. Think of it as saying “backward” as “ward-back”: it’s about how the word sounds rather than simply spelling it backwards.
When coming up with the name for the company I liked the idea of using imagine in the name, because I use my imagination a lot! I was living in Belgium at the time and listened to a well-known singer there called Stromae, which is verlan for…. well you can work it out. So the inspiration comes from there: Ginima is simply a little play on imagine.
Member of the Guild of Jewellery Designers
