Robert Turner’s journey into gem collecting began innocently enough. As an Austinite in the early 1980s, he hunted for the mica, quartz, and other sparkly rocks a kid might find in a museum gift shop. But the more he learned about their chemistry and geology, the more his fascination grew. By the early 2000s, he had moved on to the finer stuff—diamonds, rubies, sapphires—and eventually amassed a collection of 90,000 carats in gems and minerals that defied explanation.  

Yet an explanation was exactly what his wife, Jill, wanted the day in 2017 when, in the midst of a spousal spat, she stormed into his studio in Austin. “She said, ‘What the f— are you going to do with all this s—?’ ” Turner recalls. Thinking on the fly, Turner—who already ran three companies, which specialized in housing, private equity, and entertainment—announced he was also going to become a jeweler. 

This spring, the jewelry company he founded with metal artisan Patrick Dobbs and named for his daughter, Jamie Turner, has made its retail debut at Neiman Marcus. Think organic lines, bold colors, and very large gemstones, which manage to be both sophisticated and fun. The Clara Statement Earrings feature rectangular pink rubellites, each 4.44 carats, anchoring pear-shaped, 26.6-carat tanzanites. When light shines through the purplish-blue stones, they twinkle like a midnight Texas sky. 

The jewels come from places as diverse as Arizona and Australia, but the company says the pieces are partially inspired by the environment of West Texas, from the curve of a mountain range to the lines in a dry creek bed. “I wanted to create things that had a very nonmechanical look to them,” Turner says. “We don’t have any sharp edges. Everything is flowing and curvy.”   

But the journey from Turner’s DIY studio to Texas’s swankiest department store was no breezy escalator ride. To start, the company’s namesake initially had some “honest, rough feedback” about her dad’s designs. “[She] wanted more feminine touches and sparkle,” Turner says. (Jamie insists she did like some early designs, but honestly: What teenager shares her dad’s taste?) 

Even more problematic, after he hired Dobbs to teach him fabrication, Turner realized that, despite being a math and science whiz, he lacked the innate talent required to beat a lump of metal into something customers would wear. But Dobbs, an exceedingly patient man who got his start making championship rodeo belt buckles in Sonora in the late 1980s, was also versed in computer-aided design, which enables jewelers to forgo the soldering torch and 3D print their designs instead. “You can make a necklace chain without ever having to assemble it,” Dobbs says. 

Turner proved a diligent student, sometimes staying up all night to master the program, occasionally calling Dobbs at 4 a.m. when he couldn’t figure something out. Finally, in 2020, Turner printed and cast a gold ring with an open structure and fluid lines that Dobbs found promising. He sat down at his bench and began polishing and texturizing it. “It started coming together,” Dobbs remembers. “I said, ‘I think we can really make some fantastic jewelry out of this.’ ” In 2022 they launched the company, naming it for Turner’s daughter, who shares his love of math. 

The duo now have it down to a science in their southwest Austin studio. It takes about eighteen hours to 3D print a design, which the machine squirts out in a solid hunk of blue-and-white wax. A bath in isopropyl alcohol dissolves the white wax, leaving behind a blue model of the item. That gets mounted inside a steel cylinder, encased in plaster of paris, and baked at 1,350 degrees Fahrenheit, melting the wax and leaving behind a cavity that serves as a mold. A vacuum sucks in gold, and when cool, the plaster comes off to reveal the rough jewelry. It’s smoothed in a polishing tumbler, then paired with a previously-selected stone from Turner’s collection before being handed off to an individual jeweler to be finished off.  

The studio has ten jewelers, many recruited from a jewelry school in Paris, Texas. They sit straight as reeds at their workbenches, eyes glued to the lenses of Leica microscopes as their hands set stones and file metal in teeny, precise movements. One, named Levi, stops to show me the clear bag of 54 teeny pink sapphires he’ll attach to a prototype set of pendant earrings. A project like this will take a few days, though he can finish a simpler stud in a couple hours. 

By using modern technology, Turner and Dobbs say they save on development costs and lead time. The process from design to casting can take as little as three days. It lets them take more risks, manufacture in the United States, and spend more time on the finishing process. “Ninety-nine percent of our competitors can’t do that,” Turner says. “They produce in China and India and Vietnam.”

The result still comes with a significantly steeper price tag than, say, jewelry by Kendra Scott or Nina Berenato. A thin, undulating eighteen-carat gold stacking ring, one of the company’s most accessible offerings (though “accessible” is probably the wrong word here) is priced at $950. The Canyon Cuff, a chunky gold bracelet, comes plain ($7,550) or diamond-studded ($14,450). Its curves evoke the boulders, crags, and fissures carved by erosion in places like Big Bend.

Another celebration of Texas, inspired by the total eclipse that cut straight through the state earlier this year, is the Eclipse Collar Necklace, which ka-chings at $55,300.  It features hexagon-shaped pendants in alternating satin gold and pavé diamonds; a hole at the center of each hexagon resembles the moon blocking out the scintillating sun. 

The celestial design comes in a variety of jewelry styles, including drop earrings and a cocktail ring. The latter is Jamie Turner’s favorite piece. Now 25 and studying law, she isn’t directly involved in the company that bears her name, but fortunately, she likes what it sells. (“I love how they dress up casual jeans and a tee or blouse during the day, but also complement a going-out look in the evening,” she says of the pieces.)

So does Jill, who in many ways deserves credit for barreling into Turner’s studio seven years ago. At the source of the company’s success is simply a wife wondering where to put all her husband’s gemstones.