After Trouble said he was interested in the project we met and looked at some visual references he had. He has a really good aesthetic, so there were a lot of ideas we were all interested in exploring. We went back and forth just a few times until we thought of the switchblade. After a quick study it started to feel really good to us. We immediately broke down the technical and design details to look at the manufacturing and explore variations.
We ended up with four colorways that had a single diamond in the main button. We wanted to try another version where we applied a good number of black and white diamonds to define the piece a little more. Instead of staying with the same size we worked it out a bit smaller. That allowed us to round out the total weight of the diamonds and add a second size to the collection. The manufacturing here requires us to set the diamond layout. That means we need to detail prong size, stone size, and illusion size/placement at the design level. This is very difficult as the technical needs to work with the design side. Plus, setting in steel is very different than working in gold, or silver.
The next stage involved working out the details for the signatures on the back. This is the first round which ended up being scrapped. The stars felt like overkill and the flourish under Trouble’s name had to be removed.
This is the line art for the second version which we all agreed on. It was actually hand drawn by our good friend VLXO before being converted to the technical files.
After we felt the technical details were worked out we sent the files out for 3D printing. This process works like an ink-jet printer depositing a soluble and non-soluble material down on a grid. Once the printing is complete, the soluble material is dissolved and we have these blue, plastic examples of size and shape. At this stage, we packed everything up, including the proposed colorways and presented it to Trouble. He was super stoked on the whole thing, as were we, so we immediately sent the technical files off to the factory. From this stage we need to wait 2 to 3 months for the first samples. Luckily, they came in looking even better than we could have hoped.