The Accidental Jewellery Guy: A Tale of Itch Scratching or Why I started Tombo

Let me tell you a thing about frustration. I’ve always been in the school of ‘Make Your Own Luck’. For me that’s always been about makin’ movies, and making those movies without relinquishing creative control. The trouble with movies – generally – is that they’re not cheap to make; both financially and in terms of time. So I set out to make the money I thought I needed to make my movie by making corporate and commercial videos. Four years later, and I’ve just about got the money to make my movie, and the one thing I’ve learned in between, is that there is nothing quite like watching your creative ideas get mangled through 17 layers of corporate approval. Further deepening my inclination to never surrender After years of producing content for other brands (mostly brilliant, some... let's say character-building), I developed an itch that needed scratching. You know the one – that "what if we just... made our own thing?" kind of itch.

Enter Tombo Jewellery. Why men's jewellery? We wanted an industry whose margins were ripe for disruption, and it turns out charging men small fortunes for shiny things was exactly that. We found a supplier for British Navy-grade steel pieces plated in 18k Gold and Sterling Silver, and unlike movies, these pieces could cost less than your next trip to the pub... Plus, it meant we could finally make the kind of commercial films we love without someone telling us it's "too risky". With the jewels in hand, I began to climb what I feared would be a treacherous mountain: brand building…

Here's the plot twist – starting a brand in 2024 is hilariously… Accessible. That certainly doesn’t mean ‘easy’, but let me put it like this: Shopify lets you open a store in minutes, AI can basically assist you with anything bar making a coffee, and social media lets you find your customers better and faster than standing in a Westfields throwing flyers at people. What a time to be alive.

This really got me thinking. I've got mates who've talked about starting their own thing for years. But the older they get, the scarier leaving that 9-to-5 becomes… Indeed, running my own production company for the last four years has been a rollercoaster – some months you're drinking Dom P ’52, and others you're questioning your life choices over instant noodles. But the one thing I could never trade is the freedom. Want to take a random Wednesday off? Done. Fancy a six-week trip to Vietnam? Book it. As AI threatens to trade our jobs for universal income and challenge our understanding of ‘purpose’, maybe it's time we all took that leap? Tombo, whether we succeed or crash gloriously, is my attempt to inspire those friends – and anyone else sitting on a dream – that starting something is more possible than ever. Because if I can do it, any mug can do it.

Btw, Tombo ( or トンボ) means dragonfly in Japanese – a symbol of “change in perspective and self-realisation”. Fancy, right? But really, we're just here to prove you can build something meaningful without sacrificing your freedom or emptying your wallet. If our jewellery gives you the confidence to start your own thing, brilliant. If it just makes you look good whilst you're thinking about it, also brilliant. Ironically, I was never much of a jewellery guy. But there's something about wearing a piece that subtly says "Yeah, I make interesting choices." And now here I am, obsessed with making each drop better than the last, creating durable pieces that cost less than your next pub crawl and will outlast most relationships.

So in the words of Nike Just Do It. Or as we say at Tombo: Make Your Own Luck.