Our story
How a bull from the Aubrac gave its name to a workshop in Estaing.
The morning the name arrived
There are two of us: Fred and Cornélia. Married, two children, a workshop in Estaing. Cornélia designs the jewellery; Fred designs too, and his posters now have a shop of their own, Poster de Blonde. Everything we make, we wore ourselves first.
One morning, high on the Aubrac, we were talking to a cattle farmer. He told us about his animals, about the cold that holds until May, about the climb to the summer pastures. And then he named his bull: Marcel.
Cornélia looked at the herd around him. Fawn coats, from pale blonde to deep tawny, eyes ringed with black as though made up. She said, without thinking:
With all those blondes around him, he can’t be bored!
We laughed. We walked on. A few days later the name was there and it never left: Marcel et les Blondes.
There is no more complicated story than that. One line said laughing in front of some cows, one morning, eight hundred metres from the workshop where everything is engraved today.
Why the blondes
Aubrac cows are not blonde by accident. Their fawn coat runs from pale blonde to deep tawny, with the muzzle and the eyes ringed in black — the look people call made-up, and which you do not forget once you have met it.
It is a hardy breed, selected over centuries on windswept, snowbound plateaux. It climbs to the summer pastures from May to November, between one thousand and fifteen hundred metres, and comes back down when the cold returns. It calves alone. It lives long. It holds.
Which is more or less everything you ask of something you wear every day.
Estaing, in the Lot valley
The workshop is in Estaing, one of the Plus Beaux Villages de France. A hundred metres away, the early sixteenth-century gothic bridge crosses the river; it is on the UNESCO World Heritage list as part of the routes of Santiago de Compostela.
The GR 65 — the Via Podiensis, the Le Puy-en-Velay way — passes under the windows. Every day, people walk through the village with a pack on their back and two hundred kilometres behind them, heading for Conques, then the Pyrenees, then Galicia.
That may be why we engrave places, dates and routes rather than logos.
- Le Puy-en-Velay
- The Aubrac
- Estaing
- Conques
- Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port
- Santiago
From Le Puy-en-Velay to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port: 752 km. As far as Santiago: 1,520 km. Two figures we measured ourselves on the track of the route.
What fits in fifteen millimetres
The engravable face of a bracelet measures fifteen millimetres by ten. The size of a thumbnail.
A child’s first name. A wedding date. Two initials and a sign. The coordinates of a place where somebody said yes. Everything you entrust to us has to fit in there, stay legible in twenty years, on an object that cannot be taken back.
Those aren’t examples picked at random: they are our own landmarks. A wedding date, two children’s names — we have both, and it was in trying to fit them onto fifteen millimetres that we learned this trade.
Which is why nothing here is judged by eye: capital letters are set at 3.3 millimetres and the stroke at 0.35 — figures measured on the workshop’s own photographs, to a tenth of a millimetre, not chosen by feel.
The posters have a shop of their own
Since 2025 the workshop has also designed personalised posters: the map of a place, the sky of one night, the moon of a date. They now have their own shop, Poster de Blonde — the same house, the same workshop in Estaing, a site of their own.
Here, only the bracelets remain. If a poster is what you are after, Poster de Blonde is the place.
Nothing sits in stock with somebody’s name on it
Every piece goes under the laser once the order is placed. That is a constraint before it is an argument: we cannot get it wrong, and we cannot take it back. A bracelet engraved with somebody’s name sells to nobody else.
Which is why you read your engraving back, spelled out, just above the buy button. And why we show no preview of the result: until it is perfectly faithful, an approximate preview on an object that cannot be returned is worse than no preview at all.
What we commit to
- Engraved and packed here
- In the Estaing workshop, to order. Delivered in a kraft box tied with string, no plastic.
- No ad trackers, no cookie banner
- This site sets no advertising cookie and has no banner to accept. The only audience measurement is cookieless and without identifiers, hosted in the EU; fonts and maps are served by us; the share buttons load nothing until you click.
- No invented reviews
- The reviews shown were left by customers from their own order page, read before publication to set aside what is not a review, never to sort the ratings, and signed with an initial. The average is calculated from them, never written by hand.
- Materials that age well
- Cherry wood and braided marine cord. The wood takes a patina, the cord loosens a little, and the bracelet comes to look like the person wearing it.
What we will not do
- No common first names engraved in advance, waiting for a buyer.
- No countdowns and no fake stock running out.
- No selling your address, and nothing sent that you did not ask for.
Since
- 2024The morning on the Aubrac, and the name.
- 2024The workshop opens in Estaing. The first bracelets are engraved.
- 2025The personalised posters are born alongside the bracelets.
- 2026They move to a shop of their own, Poster de Blonde.
- TodayBracelets engraved to order, in Estaing. Still the same workshop, the same hands.
A second site: My Custom Star Map
The same workshop also runs a second site, My Custom Star Map, devoted to one thing only: the star map of a date and a place. Same house, same workshop.
And Marcel?
He is still up there, somewhere between one thousand and fifteen hundred metres, surrounded by his blondes. He does not know a shop carries his name, and that is exactly as it should be.