Celtic Talisman

Anglo Saxon & Viking Talismans

Art Crosses I make and the ideas & symbology behind their designs.

Australasia Dive Jewelry review

Australasia Dive Jewelry are by far the worst thieves of intellectual property I have encountered within the jewellery trade and the company’s owner, Yvette Cotton, is probably the most dishonest person.

To anyone considering doing business with either Australasia Dive Jewelry or Yvette Cotton I would simply give this age-old piece of advice: ‘Lock up your silver’. Particularly your silver jewellery designs.

I became aware of Australasia Dive Jewelry’s criminal tendencies when, while browsing the internet, I saw a misshapen replica of one of my own jewellery designs. I followed the image back to its source (the australasia dive jewelry website) where, to my horror, I discovered almost half of the jewellery designs in their catalogue had been stolen from my own argentaqua.com website. The Australasia Dive Jewelry copies were very, very poor-quality imitations of my work, but obvious and blatant copies nether the less.

Crooks like Australasia Dive Jewelry are an underacknowledged, but very serious, threat to craftspeople, like myself, who are struggling to feed our families. Cheap forgeries of our work deprive us of an income we have worked extremely hard for.

The spiel on the Australasia Dive Jewelry website claimed the copies of my jewellery were being sold by a collection of skilled Indonesian artisans. Although these ‘artisans’ were quite clearly not skilled in making jewellery a brief glance seemed to give this claim some credibility. Photos on the site clearly showed impoverished labours operating dangerous machinery with no protective equipment what so ever – surely a western company wouldn’t be stupid enough to post images like that?

However, some other things about the Australasia Dive Jewelry website looked more like a scam: For instance, the girls featured modelling the jewellery were white-skinned Europeans. You have to wonder why Australasia Dive Jewelry doesn’t seem to think that Indonesian women, some of whom are slaving away to make the jewellery, have the right ‘look’ to model it. 
In addition, most of the text on their site was the nauseating, virtue-signalling nonsense amateur marketing men spew out when targeting Millennials – picking up litter, caring about animals etc, etc. Basically, the type of thing decent people do anyway and don’t expect applause for. 
Finally, the photos that adorned the website, while of no real merit I cold appreciate, were clearly taken using equipment far beyond the financial reach of an indigenous worker who is too poor to buy a simple pair of safety goggles. 
So, I dug a little deeper.

I looked up the company owner on social media and, in addition to finding some of the most utterly unprofessional 'party' photos I’ve ever seen posted by a so-called business person, I found that, as I suspected, the owner of Australasia Dive Jewelry isn’t Indonesian at all.
Yvette Cotton is a South African emigrant, living in Darwin, Australia, which is where her company is registered. 
I have absolutely no doubt she does exploit cheap labour from the developing world to make the junk jewellery she sells. But, can you honestly believe that a person who is willing to steal someone else’s design work, rather than pay an Aussie student a few dollars to draw some, really cares about helping Indonesian workers more than simply saving money by not engaging the skilled Australian silversmiths she could be employing?

I contacted Yvette cotton via a perfectly polite email and after a day’s delay received a, presumably fake, ‘out of office, limited internet’ message in return. However, despite allegedly having no internet connection to use email, she was still managing to busily delete all the negative comments and poor reviews (all the reviews were poor reviews) from the Australasia Dive Jewelry facebook page.

In further correspondence Yvette Cotton’s deceit, dishonesty and refusal to accept responsibility for her immoral activity grew and worsened. From sending me a list of gibberish legal terms, seemingly collected at random from Wikipedia, to blaming her failure to remove the stolen designs on everything from her designer and QC manager, to Ramadan and Eid.

It is a sad fact that the majority of new business will fail, but some condolence that Australasia Dive Jewelry will be among these failures. A business selling such shockingly poor-quality goods and being run by such a hapless crook as Yvette Cotton doesn’t stand a hope of survival.
Unfortunately, by the time it finally goes under, this sorry excuse for a jewellery company may have done immeasurable damage to myself and the other designers it has stolen from, and the sad truth is that lowlife scum like Yvette Cotton rarely, if ever, face justice.

#australasiadivejewelry #adivejewel #yvettecotton #intellectualpropertytheft