Gold & Wood is a brand of wooden glasses frames, which handmakes its glasses in precious wood or buffalo-horn. The brand's headquarters is an hour's north of Luxembourg City. Launched in 1995, Gold & Wood has since become a pioneer in wooden glasses frames.
Wood sheets are cut and then plated with different colours and textures before being carefully polished and varnished. These frames come to life through the expert hands of some 20 employees, with some combining wood with titanium or stainless steel.
Maurice Léonard, the brand's founder, explains how the employees get to their level of expertise. First of all, they must have technical, mechanical, or electromechanical aptitudes. Finishing and polishing tasks are trained on the job. It usually takes six months to train an employee. As Daniel Filieux explains, you have to know how to position the branch in order to correctly polish it. Filieux is 57 years old and has spent 22 years with Gold & Wood.
He is a cabinet maker by trade and has taught his colleagues some of the minutious work required into crafting glasses. His colleagues have also come from completely different backgrounds, one of whom was trained as a hairdresser.
Employees need to be well-versed in versatility, rigour and precision to create the glasses. The finished items start at €500 and some can cost more than €10,000, the latter being models set with diamonds. Léonard admits that the brand will never compete with other large brands, claiming the wooden glasses are certainly a niche.
The entrepreneur also wishes to highlight the Luxembourgish identity of the products, describing it as having both a 'French kiss' and German rigour. Ranging from noble veneers to frames adorned with hand-painted silk, Léonard highlights his commitment to working with local suppliers. Nevertheless, the origins of the products remain further afield. Notable examples in the range include a tanganika wood, an amber wood originating from equatorial Africa, as well as the bolivar and speckled maple of Northern America and European walnut.
For the past twenty years, Gold & Wood has also offered a buffalo horn range, as buffalo horn is a particular interest for certain markets. As Léonard puts it, 'it is very chic, it's luxurious, and each product is unique because of the different veins, drawing, and colours of the horn. You could never reproduce an identical match.'
The firm had a sales turnover of €4 million last year thanks to distributing the frames in Europe and North American, the latter representing almost 40% of Gold & Wood's market. The clientele of the glasses brand features some famous faces, such as actor Sylvester Stallone, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and rapper Snoop Dog.
Crafts weave their web in Luxembourg, offering a number of jobs - more than large multinationals, banks and other international institutions do, despite the latter being the stereotype of the Grand Duchy. To date, there are 7,303 small and medium-sized enterprises of a craftsmanship nature. According to the Chamber of Skilled Trades and Crafts, this figure has skyrocketed by 80% since the start of the century.
Trade and crafts have become the largest employer in the country, representing one out of five jobs - a figure twice the amount of the financial sector.
