Jewellery CAD from Retail to Manufacture: Our Talk at The Jewellery Show 2026

On 3 September 2026 we stepped onto the Innovation Theatre stage at The Jewellery Show in Olympia London, for Jewellery CAD from Retail to Manufacture.

I am writing this as CEO, not as a press release. Shows like this are where you feel whether the industry is moving or standing still. This year, in the National Hall, it was moving.

The Jewellery Show 2026, National Hall, Olympia London — 2–3 September.

Why this fair matters

The Jewellery Show is the UK’s premium trade event for buyers, retailers, designers, jewellers, goldsmiths, gemmologists and suppliers of fine jewellery. Free for trade professionals, it sits at Olympia as an international hub: fine and luxury, silver and contemporary designer jewellery, loose stones, and the retail technology that now sits next to the trays.

The numbers only sketch it: 3,500+ attendees, 200+ exhibitors, 50+ speakers, and the kind of networking you cannot fake on a Zoom. What you notice on the floor is the mix. Machinery next to finished collections. New designer podiums next to established houses. An India Pavilion and a South African Pavilion pulling manufacturing and design into the same aisle as British retail.

The programme was built around what keeps the trade awake at night: harnessing AI before competitors do, marketing that cuts through, crime prevention and protection. That is exactly the room you want when you talk about CAD that has to survive retail and the workshop.

Our session

Jewellery CAD from Retail to Manufacture — an AI Overview on day two of the show.

On stage with me:

• José Alberto López — Chief of Staff, RhinoArtisan
• Jack Meyer — Jewellery CAD specialist and educator, CAD Jewellery Skills

Three angles on the same problem: the model that sells on the counter has to be the model that casts, sets and ships.

Jack Meyer opens the session; José Alberto and I join the panel. Olympia London, 3 September 2026.

We did not come to wave a feature list. We came to talk about information flowing both ways.

Retail → designer → manufacturing, and back again. One model. One source of truth. Nothing lost when the client changes the stone at the counter, or when production flags a wall that is too thin.

The slide we put up: retail, design and manufacturing sharing the same model.

That is the CAD conversation this industry needs. AI is useful when it sits on that loop — when it helps with the tedious work, the summary, the next edit on real NURBS — not when it invents a dead-end mesh nobody can manufacture.

RhinoArtisan’s specialist AI assistant is built that way on purpose: make the heavy lifting lighter, keep the jeweller in control of the model.

What I took from the floor

Walking Olympia after the session, the fair felt like what the organisers claim and what attendees repeat in their own words: a connector. Conversations on diamond retail, IP, Kimberley, sustainability, e-commerce launches sitting next to people who still care about a shank meeting a head.

For a software company that lives inside Rhino, that mix is the point. Our customers are on that floor — retailers who design with the client in the store, manufacturers who inherit the file, designers who refuse to choose between craft and speed.

If you were in the theatre: thank you. The questions after the talk were better than the slides. That is how you know a show is working.

See you next year

The Jewellery Show 2026 closed on 3 September. The next edition is already dated: 1–2 September 2027, again at Olympia London.

We will be there. The industry conversation on AI and CAD is only getting louder — and it belongs in rooms like this, with retailers, makers and educators in the same aisle.