Régine Giroud

Régine Giroud is a small antique jewelry shop on In Gassen, a side street just off Bahnhofstrasse. It has traded under the same name since 1984, specializing in European jewelry from the Art Deco, Belle Epoque, Art Nouveau and 19th century periods. If you have looked this business up before and found an older profile with the founder's name on it, one thing worth knowing straight away: the shop changed hands in 2024, and it kept trading under the same name at the same address. More on that below, because for a newcomer to Zurich trying to work out whether a listed shop is still a going concern, it is the first thing to check and the easiest thing to get wrong.

The stock is split into three sections on the site: Antique Jewels, Modern and Vintage Jewels, and Engagement Rings. The antique side is the heart of the business, rings, brooches, earrings, necklaces and bracelets worked in platinum and gold, with some natural pearls (rare enough now that the shop calls them out specifically) and a run of signed pieces by names like Cartier, Lacloche Frères, Georges Fouquet and Tiffany & Co. This is not a shop that photographs a handful of pieces and calls it a collection; it reads as genuine dealer stock, bought, sourced and sold under its own roof, rather than a listings page aggregating other sellers' inventory.

The engagement rings section

For this site's purposes, the part that matters most is that Engagement Rings gets its own category alongside the antique and vintage jewelry, not a stray mention buried in a general listing. The site's own description of it: a selection of Art Deco and Belle Epoque diamond single-stone rings in platinum. That is a genuinely different starting point from most Zurich jewelers, who sell new-cut stones in new settings. Here the setting itself already has a history, which is exactly the appeal of shopping this category: you are not paying for a fresh cut, you are paying for a design nobody makes anymore.

The site is careful to note that this is not the only option. Alongside the antique single-stone rings, "a classical modern individual production belongs to our assortment," meaning a custom commission sits next to the vintage stock rather than replacing it. Every engagement ring listed comes with a diamond certificate, which matters more than it might seem to someone who expects to move on from Switzerland after a posting ends: a certificate travels with the stone, and it is the paperwork an insurer or a jeweler in your next country will actually ask for.

The 2024 handover

Régine Giroud, the founder, built the business from a single proprietorship she registered in 1984, working at first out of her mother's antiques shop before eventually moving the business into central Zurich. In 2024 she handed the shop to Reto Schmidlin, a gemologist who was 39 at the time of the transition. Before taking over here, Schmidlin spent 13 years at Edigem, a Swiss jewelry retailer, and then led the jewelry department at Koller Auktionen, one of Zurich's established auction houses, for two years before Giroud approached him directly.

This is documented in a trade-press piece on Gold'Or Nachfolge, a Swiss publication covering jewelry business successions, published in February 2025 and not affiliated with the shop itself. It describes the handover as a deliberately gentle one: both of Giroud's long-serving staff kept their jobs, Giroud herself stayed on part time (40 percent) through the rest of that year, and she remains available for client events and appointments by arrangement even now. None of that reads like a distress sale or a business winding down. It reads like a founder timing a retirement well and picking a successor who already knew the trade from the auction side of it. The shop's own homepage today still names Schmidlin as the person curating the stock, which is a useful confirmation that the handover held and the business is still operating under him.

For a reader who found an old writeup of "Régine Giroud" the person and wondered whether the shop closed when she stepped back, the honest answer is no. It changed hands, kept the name, kept the address, kept the staff, and kept the same specialty. That is a better outcome for continuity of service (repairs, provenance questions on a piece bought years ago, a follow-up appointment) than most ownership changes in retail produce.

Visiting as a newcomer to Zurich

The site runs in both German and English, with a full English version at the /en path, which is a reasonable proxy for a shop used to dealing with clients who are not native German speakers. There is no walk-in retail counter implied anywhere on the site; it is explicitly appointment-based. The homepage's own line is "we would love to personally advise you, to find the right piece of jewelry. Make an appointment with us now." That framing suits antique stock well, since a lot of what is available is a single physical piece, not a design you can reorder, so a conversation before you turn up beats a browse.

What the site does not publish is worth being direct about, because a shop like this should be judged on what it actually says rather than on what a reader might assume. There is no pricing on the engagement rings pages, no stated lead time for a custom commission, no published policy on resizing, and nothing about shipping or customs duty for a client who buys here and later leaves Switzerland. None of that is unusual for a boutique dealer working by appointment, but it does mean anyone weighing a purchase from abroad, or planning to leave the country within a few years, should raise all of it directly when booking the appointment rather than assume an answer either way.

Opening hours are published and worth knowing before you call: Monday to Wednesday 10.00 to 18.00, Thursday and Friday 10.00 to 18.30, and Saturday 10.00 to 17.00. The shop is closed Sundays, which is standard for this end of the Zurich retail world.

How it compares, and who it suits

Within this category, the useful contrast is with the auction houses. Koller and Schuler run scheduled jewelry sales with public viewing days, so a piece you like is available on their calendar, not on demand, and the final price depends on who else is bidding. Régine Giroud sells the way a dealer sells: what is in the case is available now, at a price set by the shop rather than an auction room, agreed one on one in an appointment rather than in a saleroom. Interestingly, Schmidlin has sat on both sides of that line, having run the jewelry department at one of those same auction houses before taking this shop over, so the difference is not one he arrived at by accident.

This suits a buyer who already knows they want something from a specific period rather than a specific carat weight, who is comfortable booking a viewing rather than browsing a shelf, and who wants a diamond certificate in hand at the end of it. It suits an expat buyer particularly well if they read German or, failing that, are happy working from the English site and asking direct questions in the appointment about anything the site itself does not spell out.

The genuine caveat here is the one above: nothing about cost, timeline or cross-border logistics is published, so this is a shop you research first and then talk to, not one you can fully evaluate from the website alone. That is a minor friction next to what the shop actually offers: specialization in exactly this kind of ring since 1984, a dedicated engagement rings selection rather than an afterthought, and an ownership change that, on the evidence available, went about as smoothly as these things go.