TOCT
CONVERSATION WITH
MS. Nakamura (Director) and MS. Miyake (Designer)
WRITTEN BY
Sakura Yamamoto
Chapter 1
It all started before the company
TOCT did not begin as a jewelry brand. It began with a private practice. Before the company existed, Miyake had already been practicing kintsugi for some time — purely as a personal interest, the kind of thing you take up because you want to slow down. She liked the patience of the technique. The waiting. The way a cracked bowl, after weeks of careful work, returns to use with a thin line of gold running across it.
When Nakamura began talking about starting a jewelry line, Miyake brought up the idea almost casually. What if the gold line wasn't on a bowl, but on a ring? That conversation became the brand.
What is interesting is how Nakamura talks about her starting point — not in terms of innovation, but in terms of memory. "When I think about traditional crafts today," she told us, "I get the feeling they've become something you only see in museums. Something too special to touch." For most of Japanese history, she points out, craft was the opposite of that. It was the bowl on the family table. The cup someone used every morning. Daily life.
TOCT begins from a desire to bring that closeness back.
Chapter 2
Why Jewelry, And Not Anything Else
We asked Nakamura why she chose jewelry, of all the possible canvases for kintsugi. Her answer was disarmingly simple.
She loves jewelry. She wears it every day. For her it's not decoration, it's a piece of how she dresses — almost a part of her, in her own words. So when the question of what to make came up, jewelry was already the natural answer.
But there is a sharper logic underneath the personal preference. Kintsugi pieces, like most Japanese crafts, tend to end up in places of reverence. A shelf. A glass case. A box at the back of a cabinet. They are admired, but they are rarely in motion.
A piece of jewelry lives differently. It moves with the wearer through the city, the office, the dinner, the airport. It accumulates a person's days. For Nakamura, that is exactly the point. "If craft only lives on a shelf," Nakamura san said, "it stops belonging to anyone. We wanted to make something you could actually wear into your life."
Chapter 3
A JEWELRY HOUSE THAT THINKS OF ITSELF AS A CRAFT HOUSE
Miyake puts it directly. They describe their work as making craft pieces — kogeihin — that simply happen to take the form of rings, earrings, and ear cuffs.
The distinction matters, and it shapes every decision the brand makes.
A jewelry company optimizes for collections, trends, seasonal launches. A craft house optimizes for something slower — the relationship between an object and a person, drawn out over years. That intention is right there in the brand's own taglines: Art you wear. Beauty in imperfection. With you, forevermore.
Read together, the lines spell out a single ambition: to make something a person will keep, and keep wearing, for a long time. Perhaps even pass on.
Chapter 4
Quality Is Not A Spec Sheet, It Is A Relationship
Materials matter. The cleanness of the silver matters. The line of the gold matters. The weight in the hand matters. But none of these elements alone decide whether a piece becomes meaningful.
One person may care about the irregularity of the kintsugi. Another may notice the precision of the silver. Another simply wants something that feels right when worn.
The final judgment belongs to the wearer. A piece can meet every technical standard and still fail to belong to someone's life.
The question is not whether the work is beautiful in isolation. The question is whether it fits the rhythm of the person who chose it.
“If we shaped the silver by hand, the work would start looking old almost without us noticing.”
Chapter 5
Where 3D Precision Meets The Human Hand
When you first see a TOCT piece, it does not look traditional. The shapes are clean. The circles are mathematically perfect. The lines are precise enough that, if you assumed handcraft, you would assume wrongly.
That precision is intentional. Every TOCT piece begins as a 3D model. The silver structure — the ring band, the earring base, the cuff — is designed digitally and produced with the kind of geometric accuracy only modern fabrication can provide.
Then kintsugi is applied, by hand, on top of that engineered surface. The gold line is irregular. It catches the light differently on every piece. It carries the small, unrepeatable signatures of a maker's hand.
The contrast is the whole point. A perfect circle, broken by an imperfect line of gold. Two opposite logics — industrial precision and human gesture — leaning on each other.
That tension is what makes TOCT pieces feel quietly contemporary rather than referential.
Chapter 6
The process behind TOCT
STEP 1 | DESIGNING THE SHAPE IN 3D
Every TOCT piece starts on a screen. The silver structure — the ring, the earring, the cuff — is modeled digitally until the geometry holds its balance. Circles, lines, proportions: this is the part of the work that lives in precision.
For TOCT, the digital model already carries an intention. The piece is being designed for a specific kind of presence on the body.
STEP 2 | CASTING THE SILVER BASE
Once the model is finalized, it is cast in silver. The base is then carefully finished and polished — clean enough to read as a modern object, prepared enough to receive what cannot be designed digitally.
At this stage, the piece exists as a structure. It is not yet a TOCT piece — only its skeleton.
STEP 3 | APPLYING THE URUSHI MIXTURE
This is where the process shifts from machine to hand.
Natural urushi is mixed with different traditional binding materials depending on the stage of the process, creating a natural adhesive used for restoration. The mixture is then carefully applied by hand into the grooves and chipped areas of the jewelry.
This step is carried out by Miyake herself.
At this stage, what is being applied is not yet gold, but the urushi itself — materials such as kokuso (urushi putty) and sabi-urushi (urushi sabi paste), traditionally used in kintsugi restoration.
The surface is slowly shaped and refined over multiple stages. It rarely reaches completion in a single application. Instead, delicate adjustments and repeated layers gradually bring the piece toward its final form.
These quiet accumulations of handwork are what create the unique lines found in every piece.
STEP 4 | THE WEEK OF WAITING
Urushi takes around a week to harden between applications. There is no way to accelerate it. The piece sits, untouched, while the lacquer settles into place. Several rounds of this slow rhythm may be needed before the surface is ready.
The pace cannot be compressed. The piece becomes itself through waiting.
STEP 5 | GOLD FINISH AND INSPECTION
Gold powder is laid over the cured urushi, completing the line. Each piece is then inspected individually — knowing it is being made for a specific person, and that it will live on their hand for years.
This attention is part of the way TOCT understands Japanese craft. It is not about perfection. It is not about claiming Japan as a label.
Quality appears in the care taken toward the person who will wear the object.
Chapter 7
Japan, Not As A Claim
We asked Nakamura what being a Japanese brand actually means to her. Nakamura’s answer was careful, and a little resistant.
Nakamura and her co-founder are clear that being Japanese is not, on its own, a value. Plenty of brands lean on the label. TOCT prefers not to.
What they are pointing at is something subtler. A way of paying attention to objects. A reflex to repair rather than replace. A consideration for the person on the other side of every transaction.
These things, Nakamura said, were not learned formally. They were absorbed — at home, in school, in the small everyday gestures of Japanese life. That invisible inheritance is the real reason the work feels the way it feels. Not the gold. Not the urushi. The way they were taught to treat things.
"I can't make twenty of these in a day. I make one at a time, and I prefer it that way." - Miyake said.
For her, the process is not about efficiency, but attention. Each piece requires repetition, waiting, and careful adjustments over time. The value does not come from perfection, but from the care embedded into the making itself.
Chapter 8
Made-to-Order, by Necessity
"Kintsugi takes time," Miyake said, almost apologetically. "I do every step myself. There is no way to scale this." The economics of volume simply do not apply.
But the constraint quickly became the philosophy. When an order comes in, Miyake knows exactly who the piece is for. She thinks of their hands. Their fingers. The moment they will first wear it. That awareness, she insists, travels into the work.
And the customer receives the piece differently when they have waited for it. There is less consumption, more recognition.
Increasingly, TOCT sees this as one of the brand's quiet differentiators. In a market that often promises faster shipping and bigger drops, they are offering the opposite — and the people drawn to it tend to understand why.
Chapter 9
Bringing Kintsugi Back Into Daily Life
We ended the conversation by asking where TOCT sees itself in ten years. Nakamura did not hesitate, even if she laughed at the timeframe first.
Her answer came back to the opening idea — that traditional craft in Japan used to live inside daily life, and has quietly drifted away from it.
She would like to help reverse that drift. Not alone, of course, but as one of the brands trying. TOCT's particular contribution, she hopes, is to introduce people to kintsugi as something they wear — and then let curiosity carry them deeper into the broader world of Japanese craft.
There is also a more concrete vision. Today TOCT sells online only. In ten years, the founders would love to have a physical store — in Japan or anywhere in the world — with a fully trained kintsugi artisan on site, making and repairing in front of visitors.
Importantly, that artisan does not need to be Japanese. "If someone has carried this practice forward seriously enough to belong to it," Nakamura said, "they belong to it. That's enough for us."
Kintsugi is having a moment internationally, often reduced to a tourist workshop — something you try once and bring home as a story. But kintsugi was never meant to be an art class. It is a practice of repair. Its point is what people do after they learn it: what they choose to mend instead of throw away. That, for them, is the quieter ambition behind everything TOCT makes.
Honmo.
notes
What stayed with us was the way she kept returning, almost without realizing, to the same idea. An object should belong to a person, not to a season. Everything else the brand does — the made-to-order rhythm, the single pair of hands behind every piece, the refusal to scale — follows from that conviction.
The 3D modeling was the part we hadn't expected. From a distance, the rings look almost archetypal — gold catching light in something old. They are, in fact, engineered to a precision the human hand could never reach. The kintsugi is then layered on top, deliberately uneven, alive in a way machines cannot produce.
Inside the studio, that contrast becomes obvious. The silver comes off a machine. The gold goes on by hand. Two opposite logics — industrial and human — sit beside each other on the bench. It is an unusually honest way to make jewelry, and you can feel it in the finished piece.
Worn on the body, the pieces carry a doubled message. The shape says modern. The gold line says broken and repaired. Together they whisper something Miyake said more directly when we asked her about it: imperfection, once accepted, is not a flaw. It is a way of belonging to your own life.