It’s not every day that a Vogue Business journalist dons a hard hat and hi-vis vest, but that was my look du jour last week, when I visited Lundhs in Norway, the world’s only extractor of the Norwegian natural stone larvikite. I was there with Oslo-based brand Tom Wood, which recently struck up a partnership with Lundhs to turn the quarry’s waste into high-end jewelry.

Larvikite is traditionally extracted in large blocks, used for facades, monuments, and kitchen countertops. But only 8-10% of what Lundhs extracts get used for its main product, stone blocks, with some put towards coastal protection, landscaping stone and dry stone walling. The rest is ground down to crushed stone or gravel. Rather than breaking virgin ground, Tom Wood uses a small percentage of Lundhs’s waste to make ornamental stones for its unisex jewelry, part of an effort by Lundhs to find alternative uses for its waste. There are beaded larvikite bracelets and looping larvikite necklaces, dainty larvikite earrings, and a larvikite iteration of the brand’s signature androgynous signet ring. It’s the jewelry equivalent of deadstock, using leftover larvikite that would otherwise be ground down into gravel.

Beyond products, the partnership is part of a broader push for supply chain traceability in a notoriously opaque industry riddled with red flags. Traditional jewelry supply chains are near-impossible to trace. Even the most well-intentioned brands struggle to navigate the swathes of middlemen obscuring the true origin of metals, mined diamonds, and gemstones. But larvikite — the national stone of Norway — can only be found in one place: the Norwegian municipality of Larvik. The dark gray or black stone has shimmering flecks of silver, blue, and green, and is often dubbed ‘Norwegian moonstone’ or ‘blue pearl granite’.

When Tom Wood’s founder and creative director Mona Jensen first tried to source larvikite, she was directed to suppliers in Thailand, which led her further upstream to China, where the suppliers in question claimed that the larvikite came from Norway, but couldn’t trace where it had been in between, or how it ended up there. Actually tracing this supply chain is very costly, she says, which is why Tom Wood now goes direct to the quarry. “There are many levels to transparency and traceability, but for me, it’s about people,” she explains. “It’s about knowing who was involved, how they were treated, what they were paid, and what type of facilities they work in.”

The so-called mine-to-market approach isn’t a new one: Monica Vinader has done similar when sourcing aquamarine from Zimbaqua, a Zimbabwean mine owned and operated by women. De Beers Group also has long-standing mine-to-market programs. But Tom Wood has outsized ambitions for a brand that makes just 100,000 products per year (for context, Pandora, which is the world’s largest jewelry company by volume, produces around 112 million per year). As of 2024, it only uses recycled metals (gold, silver, and rhodium) and lab-grown diamonds made in renewable energy-powered factories. It has been around since 2013 and is carried in retailers like Dover Street Market, Selfridges, and Browns, but it’s still a small, independent brand. And traceability at this level is a huge undertaking, especially for a material like larvikite, which is rarely used in jewelry.

“A lot of this is about working against the system and pushing the industry forward,” says Jensen’s husband and the brand’s CEO, Morten Isachsen. While traceability is far from the industry norm, Isachsen says more and more wholesale retailers are demanding it, in line with incoming regulations. “For centuries, the jewelry industry has been very protective, from mines to middlemen. Traceability is the missing link, but it’s still a very rare thing. That is what’s needed, so that is what we do.”

Traceability benefits beyond sustainability

By working directly with Lundhs, Tom Wood says it has pushed the aesthetic boundaries of larvikite. It has Lundhs team members scouring the discarded larvikite for shades and cross-sections that would work particularly well in its jewelry, and has identified a particular corner of the quarry where the larvikite is darker, for use in beaded bracelets. As a result of the collaboration, it is now also able to source blue larvikite and another stone called anorthosite from Lundhs’s quarry on the western coast of Norway. On the day I visited, a member of the Lundhs team excitedly ran over to Isachsen to show him a section of larvikite streaked with a stone never seen before in the quarry, which the brand could use. This kind of close collaboration and reactive planning is only possible with full traceability, says Jensen.

When it comes to full traceability and transparency, some suppliers can be hesitant to participate, worried about scrutiny from competitors and pushback from the more cautious brands they work with, who demand their partnership be kept under NDA. For Lundhs, there wasn’t too much additional work needed to comply with Tom Wood’s requirements. The company already applies a unique number to each large slab extracted for its main product line, so it can trace where in the quarry it was sourced, and which of the 70 landowners involved needs to profit from that particular piece of larvikite. These numbers are sprayed onto slabs with paint and logged on a digital traceability platform. For the smaller stones Tom Wood uses, the company simply hand-picks and sets them aside, and Tom Wood traces them on its own platform.

With larvikite already traced to its source, the next stage is to apply the same method to the other stones Tom Wood works with: blue hawk’s eye, black onyx, mother of pearl, and tiger’s eye. Right now, these supply chains are mired in mystery, with stones often sourced from untraceable markets or middlemen. “We just need to find a mine that is big enough, that has the right type of stone, and the time to invest in the right certifications,” says Jensen. She thought she had found a source of traceable tiger’s eye in Australia, but the samples they sent were not up to scratch. “The tough thing with stone is not being able to see what’s inside the huge rock. That’s why it’s easier to buy smaller, pre-cut stones, because you get what you see and you don’t scrap much. It’s a big equation to balance, but we know it will be solvable eventually.”

A small brand with big ambitions

Rather than shoe-horning traditionally revered materials into sustainability, Tom Wood prefers to side-step anything overly problematic and find the beauty in alternative materials instead, says Jensen. “Diamonds are beautiful, but they are just like glass with some shine. There are other stones that show the history better, because they have inclusions and blends inside them. Larvikite has sapphire inside, for example. When we use those types of stones, it’s a different ballgame. They’re also not as expensive as diamonds, so we can offer our rings at a better price.”

While there is an abundance of leftover larvikite to choose from (Tom Wood uses less than 0.001%), this particular stone won’t work for every jewelry brand, at least aesthetically. But Tom Wood’s open-minded approach could. Take Monica Vinader, for example. Like Tom Wood, the brand switched to 100% recycled metals and lab-grown diamonds, and is applying the mine-to-market model one stone at a time, using traceability as the bedrock for deeper sustainability transformations. “It’s pretty much impossible to drive meaningful sustainability action in material sourcing, where most of our footprint is, without traceability,” Monica Vinader’s chief product officer, Megan Shearer, told me last year. To date, the brand has traced just over 50% of its gemstones to their mine of origin and published digital product passports for around 75% of its range. These early outliers will soon become the norm, as traceability regulation heats up.

Underpinning Tom Wood’s traceability efforts is a robust business that has earned its stripes among the fashion crowd as much as sustainability professionals. “You have to be successful to be credible,” says Isachsen. “You need the profitability to invest in these programs, but you also need the volumes to bring your suppliers along with you. We have been working with the same suppliers for between six and 13 years. They have grown with us, so now they have the same certifications we do, and they apply those practices to their other customers too.”

It’s not just suppliers Tom Wood wants to bring along on this journey. Last year, the brand started an annual summit in Japan called Accelerating Change Through Meaningful Conversations. Its second edition, which took place in March, included industry leaders from the Norwegian Embassy in Japan, the founder and former executive director of the United Nations Global Compact, and the Watch & Jewellery Initiative 2030. Representatives from LVMH, Hermès, Goldwin, and Patagonia were in attendance. “This isn’t a marketing arena for us, it’s a space to connect with our peers and share learnings,” says Isachsen.

Alongside traceability, one of its main sustainability goals is decoupling financial growth from material resource use, a radical concept that many mainstream brands balk at. In 2025, Tom Wood says it emitted 297 tonnes of CO2e, a significant reduction from 324 tonnes in 2024 (when it switched over to 100% recycled metals and ceased using mined diamonds), 345 tonnes in 2023, and 456 tonnes in 2022 (when it stopped producing clothing to focus solely on jewelry). Its production volumes have steadily increased (roughly 23% from 2024 to 2025), but Tom Wood says it has been laser-focused on reducing its emissions intensity, keeping absolute emissions on a downward trajectory. According to Isachsen, the most material changes in the past year were a packaging overhaul (from recycled plastic to recycled aluminium, and from more spacious boxes to the smallest size DHL allows), an investment in sustainable aviation fuel for air freight, and a significant reduction in business travel (Tom Wood’s biggest market is Japan, where the brand has three stores and counting).

“It’s tricky, because bigger companies tend to get a bigger voice, but carbon emissions usually come with growth,” explains Isachsen. “For us, the challenge is: how low can we get our emissions, and still operate as a modern, cool, profitable jewelry brand of the future? That’s how far we want to take decoupling, so there really is no end of the line. We have showcased strong financial and profit growth for 13 years in a row and, at the same time, invested more than ever in sustainability and responsibility. You meet a lot of fences and resistance in this work, but it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”