TIFFANY TIMES

CUMBERLAND - It's the stuff dreams are made of: A hand-etched, lead crystal vase. A sterling silver baby cup, embossed with the Tiffany & Co. logo. The company's signature heart tag charm bracelet with thick silver links.

And much of it is made right here in Cumberland.

Tiffany & Co. is based in Manhattan, but the company opened a manufacturing facility last year in Highland Corporate Park.

The facility is the jewelry company's highest-volume manufacturing plant.

Since the plant opened last June, it has gone from 130 employees to 330 and from making 100 different items to more than 3,000.Within five years, the company plans to make 75 percent of its products at the 105,000-square-foot plant, according to Steve Acello, the plant's director of engineering.

The items made here in Cumberland are mostly silver jewelry that sells in large numbers. Fine jewelry - pieces including precious stones - is made at a plant in Pelham, N.Y., and hollowware ‹ silver bowls, trays, and vases ‹ in Parsippany, N.J.

Much of the company's manufacturing is still by contract but Tiffany is moving to internalize most of its production, publicity director Linda Buckley said.

Buckley could not estimate the total dollar value of the products manufactured in Cumberland each year, but the company's net sales were $1.6 billion last year, she said.

On a wall in a hallway inside the plant hangs a photo of Tiffany's original manufacturing plant in Newark, N.J. In the photo, employees in an old warehouse sit on stools in front of wooden desks, their clothing making apparent a turn-of-the-century timestamp.

The name of that plant was Forest Hill, and for the sake of tradition, that's the official name of the Cumberland plant as well. The exterior design of the new plant mimics that of the original Forest Hill, with a single round turret forming the building's front corner.

But this Forest Hill's interior is a far cry from that of the original one.

The drinking fountains, equipped with sensors, automatically squirt water when someone steps in front of them - no buttons or switches required.

Before entering any of the rooms off the main hallway, employees must swipe an electronic identification card. They must do it again before leaving that room, or the system will deny them access if they try to enter a different room.

As they leave work each day, employees pass through upright metal detectors, then are individually inspected by a guard with a metal detector wand. Soon, Acello said, the plant will begin to use the shoe scrubbers - rotating nylon brushes - built into the floor of the entrance area, to remove anything that may be accidentally stuck to the bottom of a worker's shoe, be it an earring or a valuable scrap of raw metal.

Workers leave their uniforms - calf-length blue robes bearing their name and the words "Tiffany & Co. Makers" in embroidered script - at the plant. Soon, the company will ask that they leave their shoes there as well, Acello said.

But perhaps the harshest security measure, at least to female employees: Workers are not allowed to wear any metal jewelry.

Disappointed by the prospect of coming to work every day without so much as a pair of earrings, one employee found a set of plastic earrings at the mall.

Once word spread, almost every female worker at the plant had a pair.

Of course, it's not just the security measures that are high-tech.

In one workshop, a machine made a tool that would later make jewelry. Operating on a program that comprises 139,000 lines of code, the machine carved a golf-ball-shaped hole in a piece of metal. The piece of metal would later be used to form a keyring shaped like a golf ball.

Another machine, also operating on a computer program, carved the Tiffany & Co. logo on tiny silver necklace pendants shaped like kidney beans. To the side of the machine waited another tray with a handwritten yellow sticky note attached that read, "to be lasered."

Yet another machine wrapped a thin silver wire around a spit, twisting the wire in on itself and using a laser to melt the wire in certain spots. The product: a delicate silver necklace chain.

But some of the computers still need people.

Across the room from the robot-like machines, Isabel Silva soldered a rose gold spider onto a silver cuff bracelet with a raised spiderweb design. Viewing the bracelet through a microscope, she dropped a rivet onto a small hole in the bracelet with a set of tweezers, then used a foot pedal to release a pulse of laser energy that melted the rivet.

The 34-year-old Pawtucket woman worked in the plant's assembly department before being assigned to this task. She likes using the laser machine because of the complexity of the work.

"You have to focus," she said. "It makes the time go fast."

Acello called the factory "a blend of state-of-the-art technology and Old World craftsmanship."

The processes the company uses, he said, are thousands of years old.

"The only thing we've really done is refine it by computer," he said.

And some things are still done by hand.

At a stamping press, Ralph Dansereau cut small silver crosses out of a long strip of flat silver. The stylized crosses, with their rounded, bubble-shaped arms, were to become pendants for the company's popular Elsa Peretti collection. First, their edges would be rounded by another machine, their corners cut by hand, and a hole punched for the chain.

The 57-year-old Providence resident joined Tiffany's when he was laid off from his job last year, after 35 years of making metal boxes for a jewelry case company in Providence.

And then there are the things done entirely by hand.

In the wrapping room sat Elizabeth Santana, putting backs on silver earrings, small textured knots of silver.

The work looks monotonous, but Santana, 44, of Pawtucket, loves her job, she said, because her life here is peaceful and prosperous compared to life in war-torn Colombia, where she lived most of her life.

The perks don't hurt, either: Santana said she frequently visits the company store near the plant's entrance. No one would say how much of a discount employees get, but it's "substantial," according to Acello. In the year and three months she's worked there, Santana said she has already bought perfume, earrings and plates.

Part of Santana's job is to make sure the products are shiny and have no defects, although there are also "continuous improvement" - that's Tiffany-speak for quality control - workers performing spot checks.

From there, the products are wrapped in plastic and bubble wrap, sealed in cardboard boxes, and hauled, in an armored truck, to the customer service center in Parsippany.

Between 1.5 million and 2 million individual items are manufactured here each month, and the company does much of its design work here as well.

In the research and development room, blueprints and sketches paper the tables, some accompanied by plastic models or actual mock-ups of the new products, produced one at a time so executives can examine them and choose which ones will have a place in the catalog come fall.

The also-rans will be added to the company archive, sold in the company store, or melted down so the metal may be reused.

The plant's opening is "really a big event for Rhode Island," said Keith Spodek, manager of continuous improvement at the facility.

In the cafeteria at lunchtime, employees talk and sip drinks from Tiffany & Co. vacuum bottles.

For them, it's just another day of work.