les Millionnaires

les Millionnaires occupies a narrow frontage at Storchengasse 13, in Zurich's Niederdorf old town, a street most visitors walk past without a second glance and only a few minutes from the Rosenhof, the small square where the business actually began. Francine and Urs Böhler, together with Ernst Baumann, started here in 1984, selling handmade jewelry from a market stall at Rosenhof before the family moved into the shop it still trades from. More than 30 years on, the next generation, Nikki Böhler, has joined the business, and the team today numbers 12 people across design, sales, and the bench.

For a couple shopping for an engagement ring, that unshowy setting is itself part of the pitch. There's no flagship window display or a booking system to get past, just a family shop that has kept designing and making jewelry on the same street since 1984. The site's standing offer, repeated across several of its project pages, is to drop in without an appointment: "Visit us at any time for a non-binding consultation," whether you're bringing an heirloom stone, a family crest, or an idea sketched on a phone.

The commission itself follows a documented pattern rather than a vague promise of "everything is possible." For a project built from an old ring or scrap gold, the site sets out 4 steps: bring the old gold in, the goldsmith proposes creations, the customer chooses a design, and the atelier makes the piece. For a signet ring it lays out 5 steps, from a family emblem through sketches and a model to the finished ring. Nothing on the site names a distinct engagement-ring package, but the same collaborative shape carries over: "If you have a specific wish or want to use herited materials we also design and create custom made pieces in collaboration with our clients." The one concrete timeline the site publishes covers all of this custom work: "The development of a new model takes 2 weeks up to 6 months or sometimes even longer, depending on the complexity of the creation." For anyone working toward a proposal date, that range is worth raising in the first conversation, since resetting an inherited stone and designing a ring from nothing sit at opposite ends of it.

Where the ring actually gets made

The shop on Storchengasse is the front door, not the workshop. The atelier is a separate address, also in the old town, which the site describes as "only a 10 minutes walk from our store," and it isn't staffed by one generalist doing everything: the team includes goldsmiths, stone setters, welders, modelists, gemologists, and watchmakers, each named as part of the in-house group. The business also makes its own packaging, shop furniture, and fittings on site, a more specific claim than most workshops make about how much of what they sell is genuinely produced under their own roof rather than bought in and finished with a house name. Watches joined the jewelry line in 2010, made by the same in-house team rather than sourced from an outside brand.

Materials and sourcing

les Millionnaires publishes more about where its metal and stones come from than most of its old-town neighbors do. Its gold is oekogold, a branded recycled precious metal supplied by the refiner Gyr Edelmetalle and certified by the Responsible Jewellery Council; the site describes the raw material as coming from "audited and supervised sources, far from conflict regions," refined "without the use of mercury and cyanide." Diamonds are bought under the Kimberley Process, the international certification scheme for rough diamonds that "was launched in May 2000 in South Africa and came into force in 2003." Even the packaging gets a mention: the wooden boxes have been made for "over 20 years in cooperation with a reforestation project in Thailand," with a new box design roughly every 2 years to use up what the project has left over. None of this is standard for a small goldsmith to spell out in public, and it's a reasonable thing to ask the workshop to confirm applies to the specific gold and stones going into your ring.

What an international buyer needs to know

The site runs in German and English with a plain DE / EN switch, so someone new to Zurich can read every process page in English without translating a word, which isn't a given among the smaller old-town goldsmiths. What the site doesn't do is publish the numbers a newcomer would need to plan around: no price list, no starting figure for a custom ring, no stated resizing policy, and nothing about shipping or export if a client leaves Switzerland before a piece is finished. That's not unusual for a workshop that prices every commission on its own merits rather than off a catalogue, but it does mean an expat working to a fixed departure date should raise timeline, resizing, and any courier arrangements directly in that first non-binding conversation rather than assume they're covered.

The workshop also keeps a short piece of background reading on its site for browsing customers, a history of the engagement ring tracing the custom from its Habsburg-era origins to the diamond industry's 20th-century marketing push. It reads more like general jewelry history than a description of this particular bench, but it's a sign the business thinks about the customer's homework before their first visit rather than assuming everyone arrives already sold.

Verdict

les Millionnaires suits a couple who would rather sit down with the same family that has run a shop on this street since 1984 than book a slot at a flagship boutique further down the Bahnhofstrasse. The trade-off is transparency on the figures that matter for planning: expect an actual conversation about cost and timeline instead of finding either published, and expect that conversation to move at the pace of a genuine commission, 2 weeks at the fastest and up to 6 months or longer for anything elaborate. For a ring built by a named team of specialists, in their own workshop, a short walk from where you'll pick it up, that's a fair exchange, and the 12-person atelier behind the shop window is doing more of the actual making than the quiet street frontage suggests.