✨🏵 DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR GOLD COMES FROM?

Systemic Impact in Gold Value Chains · Anouk

“You are what you invest in.” – Assarée

Our investments should align with what we care about. The idea is to move from Know Your Customer to Know Your Source — understanding where our assets come from and what impact they create.

Gold illustrates the challenge. Switzerland plays a major role in global gold refining, yet the supply chain remains complex and opaque. Most investors and jewellery buyers cannot answer a simple question:

Where does my gold come from?

Neither sourcing only from highly regulated countries nor relying solely on recycled gold solves the problem. Much of the world’s gold is still mined in emerging economies.

The biggest challenges include mercury use, poor access to formal markets for artisanal miners, and a lack of transparency created by numerous intermediaries.

The Assarée approach was to work within existing value chains to create better social and environmental conditions – connecting artisanal mining with mercury-free industrial processing and direct access to the Swiss regulated gold market, while reinvesting premiums into miners’ livelihoods.

On the recycling side, Assarée developed an urban-mined gold proposition, bringing gold from electronics back into the gold cycle.

The Assarée gold proposition no longer exists because the market was not yet ready for this level of transparency and more direct value chain impact.

But the question remains:

Ask where your gold comes from. If you buy gold, are you aligned with how it was produced?

🥬 DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR FOOD COMES FROM?

Theresa shared her personal journey into food, farming and soil health – and why knowing your source means going beyond the label.

“Organic.”
“Local.”
“Natural.”

Useful words, but they don’t tell us everything.

Who grew it?
How do they treat their land?
And how are they treated?

Her curiosity around soil health began early, when she created a permaculture garden at her boarding school, giving children the opportunity to learn where their food comes from and how to care for the earth.

Today, she continues exploring food systems from the ground up, including spending time working on a regenerative farm called Jucker.

Because healthy food starts long before it reaches our plates.

“Man -despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments – owes his existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.” – Paul Harvey

And because farming is hard, physical and often under-rewarded work, knowing our source also means knowing the people behind our food.

Simply becoming curious about soil health and sourcing from a local farmer is where it begins.

🍽 AROUND THE TABLE

We continued the conversation over a seasonal vegetarian dinner, home-cooked by Dorian and featuring vegetables harvested from Z’alpenblick, a regenerative farm near Horgen.

Food became another way of experiencing the evening’s theme — connecting what is on our plate to the people, land and systems behind it.

💎 ASSARÉE COLLABORATIONS

KNOW YOUR SOURCE

We wanted to make the gold conversation tangible — not through another presentation, but through desirable objects and collaborations.

For this Stammtisch, we brought together three designers:

Franz Marfurt X Assarée — Zurich
Kamushki X Assarée — Dubai
A Better Feeling X Assarée — London

Different perspectives. Different aesthetics.
One shared intention:

to open a door into the story behind the material.

🧺 A STORY OF PROVENANCE

We also brought another kind of material story to the table: antique Transylvanian textiles.

Around 150 years ago, women in Transylvania spent winter months embroidering linen with intricate motifs — sewing their hopes, dreams and stories into the fabric.

These textiles survived generations.

Today, they have been given a new life, transformed into bags by a Hungarian tailor using antique and upcycled materials.

Sometimes the most meaningful thing we can create is something that already exists.

BECASUE “KYS” IS A WAY OF LOOKING AT THE WORLD.