Ian Barnard.

Bench jeweller specialising in micro diamond setting. UK-trained, based in Mallorca. Founder of Carit, the jeweller's calculator app, and of Setting The Standard, the international training programme for bench jewellers and setters. This page explains who I am, what I do, why I built Carit, and why that might matter when you're deciding whether to trust the numbers in the app.

What I do at the bench

I take commissions from design, through CAD or hand-carving, through casting, through construction, through setting, through finishing, to final hand-polish and hallmarking - at a quality level suitable for fine-jewellery trade supply, not retail finishing. That's the threshold I work at, and it's the threshold the Carit calculations are tuned for. The numbers in the app are the numbers I'd use at my own bench, on my own paid commissions, with my own reputation on them.

Why I built Carit

The short version: I got tired of reaching for a paper chart.

The long version: a bench jeweller runs the same handful of calculations thousands of times over a career. What's a UK M in US? 6¼. What's the casting weight of this 1.2 g wax in 18k yellow? 18.7 g. How many 1.5 mm rounds around a size O band? Around 29. How much copper to mix 50 g of 14k rose? About 15.8 g. I could do all of these in my head in 2026 because I've done them thousands of times, but that's not the point. The point is that every one of those calculations used to cost me 30 seconds, a break in flow, and a reach for the Google tab or the paper reference taped above the workstation.

A junior goldsmith might spend five minutes looking each one up. A hobbyist might get it wrong. A retail jeweller might pull the nearest chart that's ten years out of date. All of which is fixable with a pocket tool that has the correct numbers in it, offline, instantly.

I looked for what existed. The options were spread across fifteen different iOS apps from the 2010s with UIs nobody had maintained, a dozen websites with thin content and intrusive ads, a handful of PDF reference cards you could print, and a couple of Excel spreadsheets passed around in Facebook groups. Nothing had all the calculations in one place, nothing was designed for a phone, nothing was designed by a working bench jeweller. So I built Carit.

Training and teaching

Most of my working life outside the bench is spent teaching. Through Setting The Standard I've trained thousands of working jewellers, hobbyists, and professional setters in the specific techniques of micro diamond setting - the kind of setting that requires a stereo microscope, a 00 size graver, and hand pressure accurate to the decimal. It's niche. It's demanding. It's also the set of techniques that produce the invisible, immaculate-looking pavé and halo work that customers assume must be "done by robots" because they can't believe a human can set stones that small, that tight, that evenly.

The training background is part of why Carit's documentation pages - the ones you're reading - are as detailed as they are. If you've learned to teach bench practice to a thousand people who all asked slightly different questions, you develop a feel for what explanations actually work and what questions lurk under the surface of "how do I calculate stone spacing?"

What I work on

• Carit - the jewellery calculator app. Main focus since early 2026. iOS, Android, 27 languages, the engine documented across these calculator pages.
• Setting The Standard - international training business for bench setters. settingthestandard.co
• Atelier Barnard fine jewellery - occasional commissioned setting work, plus in-studio development of techniques I later teach. Instagram: @barnardfinejewellery

Where I am

My workshop is in Mallorca, Spain, where Atelier Barnard SL is registered. Most of my trade clients are UK-based from my training years. Teaching clients are global. Carit is an English-first app with 26 other languages supported.

Why this matters for the calculations

Google calls this E-E-A-T - Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust. It's a ranking signal and, more importantly for you, a sanity check on whether to trust the numbers you're about to use at your own bench. Every figure in the Carit app - specific gravities, alloy recipes, stone-weight factors, ring-size conversions - is industry-standard and cross-checked against multiple professional references. But it's also checked against my own working bench. If the number Carit shows disagrees with what I'd reach for myself, it gets corrected before it ships.

There's no ghost-writer for Carit's tools or docs. The bench-tested examples in every page on this site are examples from actual pieces I've made, actual castings I've done, actual layouts I've set. The calculators aren't a content-marketing exercise. They're the tools I wanted, built properly.

If you want to reach me

For Carit app questions, feedback, feature requests, or bug reports: [email protected]. For press, speaking, training partnerships or collaboration: same email, or via Instagram DM.

I read everything. I can't reply to everything. But if something in the app is wrong or could be better, I want to hear about it.