About Us
We are a gemstone house in Idar-Oberstein, the German town that has cut and traded stones for roughly five hundred years. We have been part of that trade for twenty of them.
The place
Idar-Oberstein is not a coincidence of geography. Agate was mined in these valleys from the sixteenth century, and when the local seams ran thin, families from here emigrated to Brazil and sent rough stone back to the cutters they had left behind. The mining ended. The cutting never did. What remains is a town of a few thousand people holding an unusual density of skill in grading, cutting and polishing coloured stone, and the trading network that grew up around it.
AB Exim GmbH is part of that trading tradition rather than the cutting workshops themselves. We are dealers: we source, grade and sell stones from this address, working alongside the people who do the cutting Idar-Oberstein is known for. Being based here means we are close to that skill and to a market that has understood coloured stone for centuries, and everything we sell passes through our hands on Krähenhübelstraße before it reaches a customer.
A family business
Our founder built AB Exim GmbH from nothing, buying and selling stone by stone until there was a business worth handing on. Today, his two children run it with him, each carrying forward a different part of it.
Fine jewellery manufacturing
His son manufactures gold and diamond executive jewellery, turning material like ours into finished pieces.
Sales and e-commerce
His daughter studied at Babson College in the United States, known for entrepreneurship, and now runs the business's digital side — this website, and our stores on Etsy and eBay. She is also the person you are most likely to meet at a trade fair, where she sells and designs in person.
When you buy from us, you are buying from the people who built the business, not from a name on an invoice.
What we specialise in
Diamond beads
Cut and drilled diamond beads in strands and by the piece, in the full range of natural colours.
Rough natural diamond beads
Raw, uncut diamond in drilled form. The surface is left as it came out of the ground.
Coloured gemstones
Faceted stones, cabochons and bead strands across more than forty varieties, from tourmaline to larimar.
Our stock, in numbers
Where our stones go
We supply jewellery manufacturers, independent designers, retailers and private collectors, and a good part of our business comes from relationships that have run for well over a decade. Many of our customers we first met across a table at a trade fair, and still prefer to buy that way.
How we buy
We source worldwide, buying directly wherever we can rather than through long chains of intermediaries. That is partly commercial and partly practical: knowing the person who sells us a parcel is the most reliable way to know what is in it, and to know where it came from.
We buy from suppliers we have worked with for years, we keep documentation on the material we handle, and we will tell you what we know about the origin of a stone if you ask. Where a stone's provenance is uncertain, we say so rather than guess.
Every stone is one stone
Almost everything we list is a single specimen with its own weight, its own measurements and its own character. The photographs on this site are of the actual stone you will receive, not a representative sample. When a listing is a parcel of several stones, we say how many, and when two stones are sold as a matched pair, like the tourmalines here, we tell you that too.
Come and see them
Stones photograph badly. Colour shifts under different light, and a cabochon's flash — like the labradorite pictured here — cannot be captured in a still image at all. If you are in the region, or travelling to a fair we are attending, we would rather put the tray in front of you.
AB Exim GmbH
Krähenhübelstraße 34
55743 Idar-Oberstein
Germany