About
Behind the coin
The Next Gold is built by Asteroid Metal Manufacturing, a second-generation foundry in Gujarat that has shaped copper, brass and steel for thirty-seven years. This is the story of why we made a coin.
Chapter one · The workshop
In 1989, we opened a workshop on the edge of Jamnagar. A few benches, a small furnace, and the conviction that metal was a craft worth taking seriously. We made parts for industries that needed them done well: copper bus-bars, brass fittings, steel components, the unglamorous bones of larger machines.
For thirty-five years we shaped metal we never saw again. Our work travelled out into the world wearing other names. We were happy with that. Quiet hands. Honest work.
Chapter two · The question
After 2020, our customers grew quieter. Orders thinned. The afternoons stretched out, and so did our conversations. We started asking each other a question we had never quite asked before.
If we have known this metal for thirty years, what have we made for the people we love? For our own homes? For the morning, the kitchen, the hand?
It was not a market study. It was a small, patient question, the kind that visits you at lunch and stays through tea. We did not have an answer right away. We had to go home to find it.
Chapter three · The practice
On a visit to one of our villages, we noticed something we had walked past for decades. In the corner of the kitchen, water in a brass matka. Filled the night before. Cool and soft by morning.
Nobody called it wellness. Nobody called it anything. It was simply how the day began, and had begun for as long as anyone could remember. Copper-touched water, drunk slowly, without ceremony.
We also saw what had happened in cities. The matka had quietly disappeared. Copper bottles filled the space the matka used to take, but they were expensive, fragile, often left at home. The practice was being priced out of the lives that used to hold it.
Tradition is valuable, we realised, only when it is accessible. So we set about making it small enough to be carried, simple enough to be used, and honest enough to be trusted.
Chapter four · What we believe
A ritual that costs five thousand rupees is not a ritual most people can keep. We are working in a price bracket that lets a young couple, a school child, a retired teacher all hold the same coin.
99.99% pure copper. No coatings, no shortcuts, no compromises. The same metal our grandmothers held, in a form they would recognise.
A coin you drop in once and forget about. No batteries, no refills, no app. The best objects in a home are the ones you stop noticing, because they have always been there.
Chapter five · The family
Asteroid Metal Manufacturing was started by our parents and is run today by their children. The same workshop. The same metal. A new question to answer with it.
We are a small team. Not because we believe small is fashionable, but because copper is patient, and patient work is best done by people who know each other's hands.
If you order from us, your coin is shipped from the same address that has stamped invoices since 1989. Some things, we feel, are worth keeping in one place.
Chapter six · What's next
The Next Gold begins with a coin, but it does not end there. We are slowly drawing brass jewellery in the workshop, sketching kitchen objects that have not been made well in a long time, and learning what else might fit into a contemporary home from our shelves.
The thread holding it all together is the same one that has held us since 1989: a quiet respect for the metal, and a desire to make it useful in a way that honours where it came from.
If you've read this far,
— Asteroid Metal Mfg.