Why I chose 8-micron plating in 2008
Goiânia, August 2008. I was a little over thirty, with two small children, a rented forty-square-meter room and three borrowed sample cases. The decision I had to make that week looked technical, but it was the biggest brand decision I would ever make: how many microns of gold plating the pieces leaving that room would carry.
My suppliers said three microns. That was the market standard. That was what produced wide margins, full display cases, competitive sticker prices. It was also what would come back tarnished six months later on the skin of the women who had trusted me. I chose eight. And that choice, made in silence in a room that did not even have a sign on the door, became the spine of Herreira.
This letter is about how to choose the expensive path when the market chooses the cheap one. And about why I believe that choice is still the most important work I do every single day, eighteen years later.
The choice nobody could see
Gold plating is a microscopic layer of gold deposited electrochemically over a base alloy. In demi-fine jewelry, that alloy is usually bronze or brass. The thickness of the layer is measured in microns — thousandths of a millimeter. A human hair is around seventy microns thick. Imagine painting a wall with a coat of paint that is four percent of the thickness of a hair. That is what is between the wearer and the oxidation of the metal underneath.
In 2008, the Brazilian demi-fine market was booming and operated mostly between 0.75 and 3 microns. The industrial logic was airtight: gold is expensive, thin plating uses less gold per piece, cheaper pieces sell more, scale absorbs cost, margin closes. Anyone complaining about tarnishing six months in would hear — and did hear — that demi-fine "is just like that," it lasts what it lasts, buy another one.
I sat with that reasoning for an entire night in my improvised home atelier and realized it had a hole. The hole was this: the market had learned to sell an excuse. The phrase "demi-fine is just like that" was not a technical fact — it was outsourced shame. The buyer kept a tarnished piece in a drawer. The seller kept the high margin. What lost was the entire category, which became a synonym for disposable.
I refused to build a brand on top of an excuse. So I did three things that looked small and that reoriented everything that came after.
The three founding decisions
- Eight microns as the catalog minimum. No piece would leave Herreira with less than that. The immediate consequence was a production cost roughly 220 percent higher than the average competitor — which looked like commercial suicide and was, for almost two years, a heavy weight on cash flow.
- Explicit twelve-month warranty against oxidation. In 2008, no one offered warranties on demi-fine. I made a yellow tag, printed at home, and tied it to each piece by hand. It was an informal document, almost naive. But it put in writing a promise the rest of the market made a point of not making.
- Visible technical sheet for resellers. Each reseller received, along with the piece, a card with the alloy composition, the plating thickness and the care recommendation. The idea was simple: if she knew, she would sell better — and she would sell with the truth on our side, not against it.
The three decisions together built a system. And the system did something I did not even expect: it filtered customers. The woman who bought on price left early. The woman who bought because she wanted to understand stayed. And the reseller who wanted to explain — not improvise — found in Herreira a brand that spoke her language.
"Thin plating is outsourced shame. The piece comes back tarnished on the skin of the woman who trusted you — and the seller pretends that is the nature of the material. It is not. It is a choice."
The difference eight microns make
Dry numbers convince no one. Whoever is on the other end of this letter — a reseller with a packed schedule, a careful client, a colleague at the workbench — wants to see what changes day to day. So I put together the table below the way I usually explain it to whoever steps into the atelier for the first time.
| Criterion | Thin plating (0.75–3 μm) | Thick plating (Herreira 8 μm) |
|---|---|---|
| Average durability | 3 to 8 months of daily wear | 3 to 5 years of daily wear |
| Production cost | Low — high display margin | 220% higher — slimmer margin per piece |
| Allergic reaction | Frequent after the plating wears off | Rare, skin in prolonged contact with real gold |
| Brightness over use | Fades in months, turns "dull yellow" | Holds an 18k gold tone for years |
| What the customer says by the second summer | "It is ruined. I will buy another." | "It still looks like the first day." |
The secret of this table is not in any single row. It is in the last one. The sentence the customer says by the second summer is the most valuable invisible asset of any jewelry brand. It decides whether you get organic referrals, whether the daughter wants the mother's piece, whether the reseller comes looking for you again. Eight-micron plating is not a technical choice — it is a choice about who you want speaking your name three years from now.
What I learned to pass on
Today, eighteen years after that night at home, I see that the 2008 decision had a specific nature I could not name back then. It was a countercyclical decision: made exactly when the market did the opposite. And I learned that every durable brand I admire made, somewhere at the founding, a choice of that type. Higher cost, slower pace, less crowded display — in exchange for a promise you can look someone in the eye and keep.
If you are starting out as a reseller — demi-fine, fine jewelry, anything that will touch another woman's skin — I want to leave you three things I repeat to myself when I have to choose between the fast path and the path that lasts.
First: the margin on the cheapest piece is an accounting illusion. You are pulling forward profit from a customer who will never come back.
Second: the technical explanation is a form of respect. When you tell her how many microns the plating has, you are treating your customer as an adult — and adult customers pay better.
Third: the brand is not built at the moment of sale. It is built on a Friday in the second summer, when the piece appears intact on the customer's wrist. Everything you did before served that instant.
That is why Herreira exists and why we are opening the Academy — so each reseller learns, with calm and technique, to make choices like the one about plating. It is not about selling more today. It is about still being standing eighteen years from now.
I will see you in fifteen days, with a coffee and another story from the atelier.
— Patrícia
Founder of Herreira Semijoias · Goiânia, since August 2008