Goldschmiede Richterswil (Goldrichtig)

Goldschmiede Richterswil is a one-person goldsmith workshop on the lake shore in Richterswil, a Gold Coast town between Wädenswil and the Schwyz border, run today by master goldsmith Thomas Peric Schauer. The business predates his ownership of it. Bruno Troller Senior founded Goldschmiede Richterswil in 1982, the same year Peric Schauer completed his own goldsmith apprenticeship with a Swiss federal diploma, and Troller hired him as manager and apprentice trainer the year after. Peric Schauer bought the workshop outright on 1 January 1990 and has run it since as a sole proprietorship. Switzerland's commercial register lists it as Goldschmiede Richterswil T. Peric, UID CHE-106.516.691, seated in Richterswil and still active, which is worth checking on a small single-owner business like this one: nothing about the site, the workshop's own Instagram account, or the local business directories that also list it looks abandoned or stale.

That continuity matters more than the workshop's size suggests for anyone weighing where to commission a ring around Zürich. This isn't a showroom with a sales floor or a chain outlet with a house style. It's one goldsmith making pieces to order, from a single Damenring built around a customer's own stone to a full pair of wedding bands, and treating each finished piece as a one-off rather than a catalogue number. "Trends wechseln, Stil bleibt," trends change, style stays, is the workshop's own tagline, printed on the homepage and again on the engagement-ring flyer.

What you get

Peric Schauer's own site describes the work as handcrafted, individual jewelry in platinum and gold, and the ring pages back that up piece by piece. Wedding rings (Eheringe) and rings more broadly, including a large gallery of women's rings, alliance bands and solitaires, come in yellow, white and red gold at 750 fineness or in 950 platinum, sometimes paired with 999.9 fine gold, as in a "Lava" wedding-ring set that mixes platinum with a fine-gold inlay. A separate Edelsteine & Perlen (gemstones and pearls) section runs through diamonds, ruby, sapphire, emerald, aquamarine, tourmaline, tanzanite, opal and pearls, including Tahitian, South Sea and Akoya varieties, and the site states plainly that Peric Schauer, not the customer, carries the production risk on any stone or pearl bought through him until the finished piece is delivered. The metal itself is recycled: the site says the workshop has used reclaimed precious-metal alloys from the start, drawn from its own workshop scrap and from old jewelry bought back from customers, refined again into gold, platinum and silver alloys under Swiss environmental rules. Earrings, pendants and necklace-and-bracelet pieces round out the catalogue, all described the same way, handmade and one-of-a-kind, with a full custom commission on offer if a displayed piece has already sold.

What stands out

The most useful thing on the site for an engagement-ring buyer specifically is a downloadable PDF flyer built around exactly that piece. It opens with a line that frames the whole category before it lists a single stone: the engagement ring, it says, is the promise a man makes to marry the woman he loves, and the ring should be as individual as that moment, whether that means the fire of a diamond or the color of a sapphire, a ruby or another stone, in yellow, red or white gold and platinum. Two of the flyer's own examples give a sense of what that looks like in practice: a yellow-and-white 750 gold ring set with a 1.88 ct trillion-cut tanzanite alongside five brilliant-cut diamonds at 0.15 ct, and a white 750 gold ring built around a 0.70 ct princess-cut diamond graded F/vs2 alongside two sapphires at 0.16 ct and two brilliants at 0.06 ct. The flyer, and the site more broadly, are also candid about what a photograph can't do: Peric Schauer writes that a screen can't reproduce how a stone catches light or how a piece sits against a customer's own skin, fingers, eyes and hair, which is why he asks for a booked appointment rather than a walk-in for any real engagement-ring consultation, so he can give it the time it needs.

How it's organised

The site itself is a simple, mostly static build: a Schmuck (jewelry) section split into wedding rings, rings, earrings, pendants and a combined necklace-and-bracelet page, plus the separate gemstones-and-pearls pages, and a Kontakt & info section covering hours, location, an about page, download links and the legal Impressum. Three flyers sit under Download, one each for wedding rings, engagement rings and pearls, and there's no shopping cart or checkout anywhere on the site. The workshop is open Tuesday to Friday from 09:00 to 12:00 and again from 14:00 to 18:30, and Saturday from 09:00 to 16:00, closed Monday, with appointments available outside those hours by arrangement, a schedule an independent Richterswil business directory confirms rather than leaving it resting on the site's word alone. Contact runs through a landline, +41 44 784 86 88, and a named email address rather than an online booking form, and the workshop sits at Dorfstrasse 44 in the town centre. Its own site lists several ways to reach it: by car via exit 37 off the Zürich-Sargans motorway toward the lake, by lake boat, or by S-Bahn or the Zimmerberg bus, and it says the parking, boat pier, train station and bus stops are all within about five minutes on foot of the shop.

How it compares

Within this category's cluster of small, often one-person Gold Coast and Oberland ateliers, Goldschmiede Richterswil sits toward the smaller and more traditional end: no showroom collection to browse beyond the photo galleries, no separate stone-cutting bench mentioned anywhere on the site, and no customer reviews yet logged on the directories that carry it. What it does have that several peers in this category don't publish at all is a specific, named commitment to recycled precious metal going back to the workshop's earliest years, and a piece of marketing built specifically around the engagement ring as its own category rather than folded into a general rings page. For a reader comparing several ateliers before booking a consultation, that combination, continuous trading since 1982 under two owners, plus a design philosophy stated in the goldsmith's own words, is a reasonable amount of evidence to work from even without a public price list.

Who it suits

The catch for an international or newly arrived buyer is language and price transparency. Every page on the site, the flyer included, is in German, and nothing on it or in the business's public listings indicates that a consultation can run in English, so anyone who needs that should ask by phone or email before booking. There's also no published price list, deposit requirement or standard lead time for a commission anywhere on the site, so a buyer working to a fixed budget or a tight timeline before a proposal should raise both directly with Peric Schauer rather than assume a figure. What the site does spell out is aftercare: Peric Schauer writes that fit and comfort get individual attention, that customers can try on a commissioned piece before it's fully finished so small adjustments are still easy to make, and that service after the sale, tightening a stone, resizing a band, matters to him as much as the original sale. That suits a buyer who already knows roughly what they want and is comfortable booking a real appointment for the rest, less so someone who wants to compare prices online first or handle the whole process in English by email.

The verdict

For a genuinely handmade engagement or wedding ring in platinum or gold, made by the same person who will also be the one you call if it needs adjusting, Goldschmiede Richterswil is a solid, verifiably still-open choice on the lake shore south of Zürich. It's short on the things a browsing shopper wants most, published prices and English copy, but long on the things that matter more once you're actually commissioning a ring: recycled metal handled the same way since 1982, a specific and thoughtful engagement-ring flyer rather than a generic rings page, and a business address, phone number and commercial-register entry that all line up with a workshop still genuinely open for appointments.