It started with a ring we couldn't find.

When we got engaged, I knew exactly what I wanted: a solitaire. One stone, a simple setting, nothing in the way of the light. I asked for it more than once. We looked everywhere: jewellers, online, big names and small ones. Every solitaire diamond ring that was truly beautiful was far beyond our budget, and every one within budget wasn't the ring I'd pictured.

So we waited. And at our wedding, I asked again.

This time my husband didn't go back to the shops. We went around them instead. We found the diamond ourselves, a 3 carat lab-grown oval, chosen stone by stone rather than from a shop's tray, to sit alone as the solitaire. We found a jewellery designer we trusted to draw the ring around it, and a manufacturer who would make it exactly to that drawing: the oval at the centre, a line of small round diamonds on the band, in 18k gold. We managed every step between the three of them. When it was finally on my hand it was the most beautiful thing I owned. A three carat solitaire, and it had come in under the budget every jeweller had told us was impossible, because no jeweller was in the middle.

That was the moment STRAPSTYLE began. If we could do this for ourselves, with the right stone, a real designer, a maker who follows the drawing and nobody's margin in between, why not for everyone who'd been told the same "no"? I asked to run it. Today I do.

Every ring we make now is made the way ours was: the stone sourced for you, the design drawn for you, then cut and set by the makers we work with, in 18k gold or platinum. Every stone comes with its certificate: GIA for lab-grown diamonds, IGI for natural diamonds and GRA for moissanite. The report number is yours to look up on the lab's own site before the ring is made. Re-polishing is free for life. A straight answer to what your budget actually buys, rather than a quietly smaller ring.

We started with one 3 carat oval solitaire we were told couldn't be done. We'd love to make yours.