Armet
Design Your Own Jewellery
A system that lets anyone become a jewellery designer—no experience needed. Currently building the digital configurator that brings infinite combinations online.
PythonHoudinithree.jsReact
Infinite Combinations, One Interface
The Configurator
In person, Armet jewellery is very tactile: slot pieces together, swap gear colors, experiment until you find something you love. The configurator brings that same freedom to the browser.
Design a piece by placing components, see it render in real-time, and know that what you create can actually be built. No guesswork, no impossible combinations.
Real-Time 3D Preview
See your design from every angle as you build it. Spin it, zoom in, watch the gears mesh.
Guided Customization
The interface tries hard to only shows combinations that physically work. There's a lot happening behind the scenes to make that feel simple.
From Screen to Hand
The designs you create can be built. The configurator ensures physical feasibility while you focus on aesthetics.
Why This Is Harder Than It Looks
The Challenge
A simple pendant might have a dozen components. A complex one can get closer to 50 or more. Each piece has to physically fit with its neighbors—gears need to mesh, plates can't overlap, rivets need clear paths.
The solver handles all of this invisibly. You drag a gear into position; behind the scenes, the app figures out what spacers and washers are needed, checks that nothing collides, and adjusts the design to be buildable.
Physical Rules
Gears mesh at specific ratios. Plates have thickness. Components stack in specific ways. The digital system enforces the same rules as physical reality.
Automatic Assembly
You place the pieces you care about. The system adds the structural hardware—washers, spacers, rivets—that holds everything together.
Live Validation
Before you checkout, the system verifies your design is complete, structurally sound, and ready for fabrication. Preset design structures are automatically approved, and custom structures get a human review before purchase.
Billions of Options
Every combination of plates, gears, and gemstones creates a unique piece. Because the system is built on rules and constraints, you can visualize all of them.
Where This Started
The Constraint
Armet offers billions of possible combinations... but Etsy allows two customization options per listing. Shopify allows three without third-party apps. The gap between what we can make and what platforms let customers choose was the problem that started this project.
We worked around it for years with guidance images showing what is allowed where, renders next to coins for scale, simplified presets that captured the most popular combinations. It worked, but it wasn't the full vision.
The configurator is the real solution. A purpose-built tool where the interface matches the product's actual flexibility.
Tools for Tool Making
Built to Evolve
When you're used to node based software, it is easy to forget that code doesn't create natural breakpoints the way nodes do. A solver with hundreds of rules needs proper diagnostics. I built tools to track variable changes, isolate execution phases, and surface problems early.
These help me track what's changing, isolate which phase broke, and catch problems before they cascade.
Change Tracking
Variable modifications can be selectively logged with where they changed. When something breaks, the log tells you exactly where to go.
Isolate Solver Steps
Is the problem in this step or the next one? The solver can be partially run, or each phase of the solver can run separately to find the origin of problems.
Persistent Logging
Houdini's console only holds about 200 lines before it starts dropping them. I write to files instead with configurable log levels per module.
Visual Feedback
Errors map to colors and attributes on the output geometry in Houdini. Red means broken, yellow means adjusted, green means good.
Connecting the Dots
Sales & Inventory
Partially Implemented
Armet sells on both Etsy and Shopify, and some listings involve collaborations with other artists where revenue splits differ. I built a system that pulls sales data from both platforms weekly, normalizes it into a unified structure, and tracks what's owed to whom.
The next step is connecting this to the configurator. Once individual components are trackable through orders, we can see which plates are popular and stock accordingly.
Unified Sales Data
Orders from Etsy and Shopify get normalized into a single database. Artist collaborations are identified automatically for accurate payout tracking.
Automated Payouts
The system generates periodic emails showing how much is owed to each collaborating artist based on their sales.
Component Tracking
Future: individual components will be trackable through orders, showing which plates and gears are most popular.
Inventory Forecasting
Future: popularity data feeds into ordering decisions. Stock what sells, not what we guess will sell.
30 Years in the Making
Origins
Jeff de Boer is known for his museum-quality armour for cats and mice—sculptures collected worldwide. Armet is a different kind of project: making his design sensibility accessible to everyone.
The system started in 2012 with the Gearing, a ring with a gear set to spin around the edge. From that single design came the modular system—plates that define shape, gears that add motion, gemstones that catch light.
Your job is to have fun. Our job is to fabricate it.
