Dark Silver Jewelry · Handcrafted in Bali
About STRUGA
STRUGA is an independent dark silver jewelry brand founded by Dmitry Strugovshchikov and Ekaterina Strugovshchikova in 2018. Every piece is hand-cast in our Bali workshop in 925 sterling silver, with no rhodium plating and no shortcuts. We make jewelry that records the life of the person who wears it — silver that scratches, darkens, ages, and remembers.
This page is the long version. Who we are. How the workshop works. What we believe about silver, time, and the body. What we will not do, no matter who asks. And how to reach us if you want to talk about a piece, a wedding band, or anything in between.
The Founders
Dmitry & Ekaterina
STRUGA was founded in 2018 by Dmitry Strugovshchikov and Ekaterina Strugovshchikova — two founders who share every part of the brand equally, from the first design decision to the finished piece.
I started STRUGA in 2018 because I wanted jewelry that did not exist. I was not a trained jeweler. I had no workshop, no inheritance of craft, no degree in metalsmithing. What I had was a clear picture in my head of the kind of objects I wanted to wear and could not find anywhere — heavy in the hand, dark on the skin, made by people, not factories. Sterling silver shaped by tools you can hear. Pieces that looked older the longer you owned them. The opposite of polished, plated, identical.
The aesthetic came from a few specific places, and I am deliberate about naming them. Soviet brutalism — the concrete buildings I grew up around, where weight and rhythm were the design, and ornament was a moral failure. The architecture of Tadao Ando — silence as a material, light as the only ornament a wall needs. Rick Owens — fashion that treats the body as architecture, not as a billboard. Industrial workshop tools, fasteners, locks, carabiners, surgical clamps — objects whose function was their beauty. Out of those references, the STRUGA visual language took shape: blade geometries, signature links, brutalist slabs, ritual crosses and thorns, hardware-as-jewelry.
I found Bali in 2018 and stayed. The reason is simple: nowhere else in the world can you walk into a workshop, sketch a piece on paper, and have a master silversmith pour, file, and finish it by hand within a week — at a level of craft that has been refined on the island for over a thousand years. Bali silversmiths inherit a tradition older than most European jewelry houses. They cast by hand. They finish by hand. They sit at low benches with a few simple tools and produce work that no factory can copy. I spent months walking workshops, watching, learning, before finding the people I now work with. That relationship is the foundation of everything STRUGA makes.
I am involved in every piece. I draw the design. I oversee the wax model. I sit with the silversmiths through casting and finishing. I sign off on each batch before it ships. STRUGA is not a brand built on stock molds and a logo. It is two founders, one workshop relationship, one lineage of decisions that goes back to a sketch on paper. When I say "we" on this page, I mean the small team of artisans I work with daily, and my wife and co-founder Ekaterina.
I do not chase awards or exhibitions, and I will not invent any. STRUGA grew through word of mouth, through people who wore one piece and came back for the next, through a few retailers who understood the work and stocked it. That is the only credential I trust — somebody wears the silver for a year, the patina settles into their hand, and they want another piece. Everything else is marketing.
Ekaterina Strugovshchikova co-founded STRUGA in 2018. The brand has two founders who carry it together — every design, every decision, every piece is shared between them. You can read more about both founders on our founders page.
Inside
The Workshop
Every STRUGA piece is born in our Bali workshop. The process is the same as it has been for centuries on the island, with one modern step: most designs begin as a digital model or a hand sketch, then get translated into a physical master — a hand-built model in metal or wax, finished to the exact form of the final piece. From that master we make a silicone mold. From the mold, wax copies. From the wax, the silver.
The casting flow is the traditional one: wax model, plaster mold, molten silver — the oldest way humans have to shape precise metal. Each wax copy is encased in plaster, the plaster is heated until the wax burns out, and molten 925 sterling silver is poured into the empty cavity. The plaster is broken away, the rough silver piece is cut from the casting tree, and then the real work begins: filing, sanding, hand-finishing, soldering on details, setting stones, oxidizing the recesses to bring out the form, polishing the high points so light catches them. A single piece can pass through five or six pairs of hands before it is ready to ship.
This is the part that cannot be automated. A factory can cast a thousand identical rings in a day. It cannot make any of them feel right in the hand. The asymmetry of handwork — a slightly thicker shank here, a tool mark caught in the light there — is exactly what makes a STRUGA piece readable as handmade. We do not hide it. We design for it.
The silver itself is 925 sterling — 92.5% pure silver alloyed with 7.5% copper, the international standard for jewelry-grade silver. Raw wild-growth stones are set the way they came out of the ground — no faceting, no enhancement; most often tourmaline, aquamarine and quartz, with heliodor among them. Beside silver we also work copper, brass and stainless steel, joined into the material compositions of the MOSAIC family. For meteorite pieces in the RITUAL world we use Seymchan — the single meteorite STRUGA works with today. For carbon there is a six-palette house line of signature carbon: Classic, Bloody, Toxic, Arctic, Winter and Fused Graphite.
Every piece leaves the workshop uncoated. This is not an oversight — it is the philosophy we call Living Silver. The bright sterling you receive on day one will not be the silver you own in five years. It will darken in the recesses, brighten on the high points, and develop a patina that maps the chemistry of your skin and the rhythm of your life. No two pieces age the same way. The patina is reversible — any jeweler can polish it back — but most owners stop wanting to. The silver becomes a record. That record is the whole point.
Structure
Five Worlds
Every STRUGA piece belongs to one of five worlds. The worlds are not collections that come and go — they are permanent design territories, each with its own grammar.
CODEX — the brand DNA: signature links, blade geometries, asymmetric forms, heart motifs. RITUAL — the dark territory: crosses, thorns, meteorite, oxidized carbon. LAB — the experimental edge: pills, mushrooms, carabiners, hardware-as-jewelry. DARK UNION — alternative wedding and engagement rings for couples who reject the polished diamond playbook. ISLAND ARTIFACTS — collector pieces and gifts that carry the spirit of Bali.
Within these worlds live our eleven design families: Signature Asymmetric, Blade, Thorn, Brutalism, Signature Heart (in CODEX); Amulet, Carbon, Mosaic (in RITUAL); Experimental, Fused (in LAB); and Dark Union (the ready-to-buy ring line). Each family has its own rules. Each piece in a family is a member of a vocabulary, not an isolated product. You can browse the full set on our families page.
Principles
What We Do Not Do
STRUGA is defined as much by what we refuse as by what we make.
Plated silver looks identical on day one and day three hundred — the opposite of what we want. Living Silver only works if the silver is allowed to live.
We do not release a new "collection" every quarter to chase trend cycles. Our worlds are permanent; the catalog inside them moves slowly.
Every piece is hand-cast and hand-finished. We do not buy in stock blanks from factories and stamp our logo on them.
Every piece is signed by hand and by reference — the STRUGA logo, a serial number, and, when relevant, a family code. Provenance matters.
Contact
Get in Touch
The fastest way to reach us is by email. Direct messages on Instagram and Telegram are also read by the studio, usually within a day.
Email: contact@strugadesign.com
Instagram: @strugadesign
Telegram: @strugadesign
Pinterest: @strugadesign
For wedding rings and engagement bands, start at Dark Union. For one-off commissions and custom designs, see Custom Order. For retail partners and stockists, see our contact page.
Available in person at Hedonist Store (Seminyak, Bali) and Barefoot Aristocracy (Canggu, Bali). Worldwide shipping at strugadesign.com.
Questions