Fretz

Fretz – Brand Review & Overview

Fretz is a premium jewelry and silversmithing tool brand created by designer and metalsmith Bill Fretz, best known for beautifully balanced hammers, stakes, and forming tools made from hardened stainless steel with sculpted hardwood handles. The company’s tools are designed specifically for metal artists, offering refined profiles and highly polished working faces that move metal cleanly and predictably while minimizing surface marring.

On this site, Fretz would typically appear as jeweler’s hammers—planishing, raising, forming, embossing, chasing, texturing, and goldsmith hammers—along with miniature and mid-size forming stakes and mandrels ideal for bezels, rings, cuffs, and small hollow forms. These tools are widely regarded as “bench upgrades” that give goldsmiths and metalsmiths finer control over shaping, stretching, planishing, and texturing operations on silver, gold, copper, and other nonferrous metals.

As you browse this brand, think about whether you most need texturing hammers for surface design, classic planishing and raising hammers for structural forming, or companion stake sets to support more advanced silversmithing techniques. Choosing the right Fretz tools helps you achieve cleaner curves, sharper textures, and more comfortable, fatigue-reducing hammer control, elevating both the precision and finish quality of your metalwork.