With a valuable experience of more than 25 years in the jewellery industry, Roland Scheube was trained as a toolmaker in the watch and jew-ellery industry in Pforzheim/Germany and Birmingham/England. After fin-ishing his studies in machinery he was working as an engineer in a design office.
While living in Pforzheim (town for jewellery in Germany), he had a good chance to switch back to the jewellery industry. He could see many of the jewellery factories were struggling with the casting techniques. In 1973 Roland Scheube started his own casting house where he casted for the jewellery industry and the watch and spectacle industry.
He casted all kinds of precious metals, using his experience from the past. Roland Scheube was one of the pioneers who experimented and studied the technology of wax-setting and successfully casted with diamonds, precious stones and synthetic stones in the early seventies in Europe. In 1985 Roland Scheube started his second company specializing in consulting and machinery trading for the jewellery industry. In addition to his innovative and creative attitude, Roland Scheube believes in advanced technology.
He was a leader using the first automatic vacuum-pressure casting machine (Yasui) in the world, assisting and encouraging counterparts in the jewellery industry worldwide.
As he traveled the world, from Thailand to Japan, Saudi Arabia to India, Brazil to the United States, sharing his expertise with the industry, several people asked him why he did not use his expertise to set up his own factory and make his own Jewelry. “I started to think about the possibility and looked at several Jewelry manufacturing countries in Asia. Then the discovered Sri Lanka by accident in the late 1990s. I fell in love with its warm beauty and charming people and decided to set up a factory here. One of the important factors was that Sri Lanka allowed me to set up a wholly- owned venture allowing me to build and control the factory the way he wanted.”
He established RKS Lanka Pvt Ltd in the Export Processing Zone in Katunayake in 1998 and now has a state-of-the-art facility with 120 workers producing silver jewelry known for its white gold-like finishing, serving Germany, other European markets, as well as the USA.
“The factory is unlike any in the West- it is set in a green parkland and we have always focused on eco-friendly production here. For example we have had a treatment facility for waste water from the plating process from the beginning. When I explained this process to a manufacturer in another Asian country, he looked at me as though I was crazy and said “why go through all this trouble, just send it down the drain.” But we have always believed preserving the environment and the beauty of Sri Lanka is particular inspiration for ecofriendly process.
Roland Scheube’s unwawering commitment to quality, craftsmanship, and environmental responsibility has propelled RKS Lanka to become a renowned name in Jewellery industry.