How my store was born

I've always been a geek at heart, And of course a gamer - playing video game consoles from their first days throughout my childhood, including the first SEGA which I adored, the Megadrive, the NES and Super NES, Gameboy and GameGear were there as well of course. I have a warm corner in my heart for games like Sonic, Street Fighter IV, Legend of Zelda and many more.
When the consoles actually evolved further I've made the move to the PC, playing many many MANY hours of Warcraft and Quake and others.
Yes I've been to some Lan-parties, modded my PC, and actually started building my own PCs, became this hardware wiz and spent a lot of time in professional hardware forums, writing reviews for a local website and helping many others build kick-ass computers.

Somewhere along the way my father decided to buy a small water-jet machine to play around with in his marble factory, as I'm the only one of his sons that knows his way well enough around computers I've started helping them out on setting it up, learnt some basic CNC programming, and saw it was a pretty cool machine that can cut just about anything using WATER! Seriously, water combined with an abrasive substance cuts everything . My father decided to close his imported marble factory and focus mainly on the water-jet as these machines are pretty rare here in Israel, he bought a much larger machine (worktable scaled 6x3 meters or so), and also 2 simple laser machines.. all of which I was in-charge of programming and operating. The name of our new factory was Aquacut, you can checkout the website I've built and see samples of our work - www.aquacut.co.il
It was a small family owned business, us, my brother and another friend.

I'm an autodidact maker, and taught myself how to use the software needed to design parts for the machine, mainly using AutoCAD. I've also worked at the workshop for a few years, actually operating the water-jet, it's something that no one can teach you, only hands-on experience with cutting many different types of materials can achieve the knowledge and expertise required to work in such a field. And it's fascinating. I've cut pretty much anything - All types of metals, marbles, woods, glass, plastics, in many different projects, big and small, and it was lots of fun.

That time I started dating my future wife to be, Hila, and I started making her small gifts using these machines, each month a new necklace. The first one was an asterix symbol I've cut out of an agate crystal, The asterix symbolized a kissing emoticon on the facebook chat we used.
Then naturally came the idea to sell such and similar necklaces online and that's how my shop here on Etsy was finally born, and because of my history it's obviously a shop with a geeky personality, just like me.

So basically I started with a bunch of heavy gear industrial tools in my hands, but I wasn't familiar with jewelry making, luckily enough at the time I was living in Tel-Aviv, which is the center of the jewelry industry in Israel. Again I've taught myself what I needed to know by experimenting, trying different methods and suppliers, until I achieved my goals and was happy with the end result of high quality products.

It wasn't an easy start, I've had people who doubted me, and many non-believers, but my main supporter was my father - Hagi. My success made him super proud, he kept checking my sold items list daily, and each sale made him thrilled, even more than me :)
He loved hearing my stories, and see how I developed in the jewelry making industry, every new piece I would make I would bring for him to checkout.

Hagi was my pillar of light and guidance, such an amazing, honest, and decent human being. He passed away Jan 19 2013 after battling cancer - I miss him so very much, and I'm so sad that he didn't get a chance to meet my greatest creation so far, my first son - Ethan was born 4 months afterwards, and he brought new light and joy into my life.

This online store has become more than a hobby for me, it's my main source of income providing for our family, and I'm still a one man operation. It starts with a design which I normally do in a CAD software, goes to production in the machines, polishing and finishing by hand, assembling, packaging and shipping, everything done by me on a daily basis.

Customer satisfaction is my number one priority, above anything else - I'd hate to think someone is not pleased in any way with something I've made, I'm a perfectionist, and when my customers are happy, so am I.
I love hearing customer stories involving my items, and would greatly appreciate if you could share some with me :)

Thank you,
Ran