Our Journey
The story of a childhood measured in carats, a journey across an ocean, and the founding of a bespoke jewellery house built to last.
A childhood
measured in carats.
Before there was Stara Designs — before there was any vision at all — there was a boy growing up in Surat, India, in a home where diamonds were simply part of life. Not treasures. Not symbols of wealth. Just the daily rhythm of a family that had spent over forty years turning rough stones into something extraordinary.
Surat, India. Approximately 90% of all the world's diamonds — lab or natural — are cut and polished in this one city. It is not simply where Dev grew up. It is where the world's diamonds are born.
He would visit his father at the factory. Watch the craftsmen. Learn the patience it takes to coax brilliance from something that looks, at first, like nothing at all. He collected imitation stones from the old, discarded jewellery and kept them like they were the rarest things on earth — not for their value, but for what they represented.
He didn't know then that he was falling in love with a craft that would define his life.
Leaving to find
the way back.
At twenty-one, Dev left Surat and moved to Canada — searching for education, for purpose, for himself. What he didn't expect was that the further he went, the more clearly he could see where he was always meant to go.
Diamonds kept finding him. Or more honestly — he kept finding his way back to them. Canada gave him the distance to see his heritage not as the past he came from, but as the foundation he was born to build upon.
At twenty-eight years old, carrying forty years of family knowledge and a city's worth of diamond heritage in his hands, he decided to build.
Stara — born from
the North Star.
Polaris. The North Star.
For centuries, the fixed point in the sky that guided travellers through darkness. The one light that never moves. To Dev — it was personal.
His own journey — leaving Surat, crossing an ocean, building something from nothing — had required exactly what the North Star represents. The resilience to stay oriented when everything around you shifts. The belief that if you hold to your purpose, it will lead you somewhere worth arriving.
Stara Designs was founded in Kelowna, British Columbia, as a private house of bespoke fine and high jewellery. A place where jewellery is not bought, but created. Not selected, but crafted from the ground up — around the person who will wear it and the story they carry with them.
Built to outlast
its founder.
Dev's belief runs through everything Stara does: fine jewellery should carry meaning beyond its beauty. It should mark something. Hold something. Carry something forward through time that words alone cannot.
Every Stara creation begins with a private, unhurried conversation and ends with something that has never existed before — and never will again. A vision for a privately owned high jewellery house where design, storytelling, and craftsmanship exist at the absolute highest level. Where every client is known by name, every commission held in complete confidence.
It is about the story the diamond was chosen to tell."
