How to decide who to buy from - green flags, red flags, and what to expect.
Not all jewelers are created equal. We all have slightly different business models, styles, and values. And that’s okay - there’s a business or artist out there that you’ll vibe with better than others. So how do you find them?
If you want our biased opinion, talk to a bunch of different shops until you find:
Everything else is personal preference, but there’s also some important caveats and potential red flags in each of those aspects.
Marketing is powerful in jewelry. Lots of money gets spent to put a name in your head for you to call upon the first time you need to buy a ring. Be wary of people that proclaim themselves as experts too loudly.
Jewelry is interesting in that most buyers have no idea what they’re buying and how good (or bad) it is. You often have to trust someone to tell you that you’re making a good decision in your purchase, and when you need to find trust quickly, you equate it with familiarity.
But just because you’ve heard of the big box store doesn’t mean it’s right for you. Large companies get large by making lots of money, and those values don’t always leave room for the best client experience.
Don’t choose the jeweler who speaks loudest, choose the one who speaks to your values and makes you comfortable.
Let’s talk about the different types of jewelers that exist (in our experience in St. Louis) and break it down by different aspects of how these businesses present themselves and operate.
Size does not necessarily correlate to anything good or bad, but as with any business, there’s a bell curve of quality vs time.
Many small, young companies will be driven but inexperienced and many old, large companies will have any product you could want but may have forgotten their roots and may feel apathetic, bland, and corporate.
If a business is small, make sure you feel really good about the person you’re working with - they’re 90% of what will drive your experience.
If a business feels big, see how they rate on the aspects we discuss below. Time increases the chances that the business has outsourced the soul of their company.
Curation vs Kitchen Sink
Those are the two models you’ll often find in successful stores.
Small, designer- or brand-driven stores often choose to pursue a personal style and offer a subset of unique or popular styles for you to choose from. They may not have what you want, but everything they have will be pretty easy to digest. These stores make their sales by modifying or sourcing something if they don’t stock it.
A benefit to a client shopping small is the limited choice making it easier to say yes or no to a style or the jeweler as a whole.
Shopping small and curated, it can be more approachable to look at 30 styles and say “that one, but with an oval” than to look at 300 styles at a big store and attempt to choose a starting point.
Large stores have more money and more people, which means that many of them take the approach of stocking every style you could possibly want, as well as many that you couldn’t possibly want.
Some clients enjoy being able to see every option available to them in one place while others find it overwhelming. Feedback we’ve often heard from clients is that some large stores can have hundreds of different styles while having none of the styles they’re actually looking for.
That may be because these large stores often order their mountings from a supplier, and many suppliers are slow to keep up with trends or fail to offer products in certain artistic styles.
If you’re in the market for something generic or classic, you’ll probably find it with either shopping style, but if you need something in a unique, modern style, don’t be surprised if it’s not present among the hundreds of mountings that a big box jeweler stocks.
For more unique styles, you may have more luck seeking out a designer or artisanal brand. There are less of these artists than there are resale jewelers, so you may have to do some searching or look in a large city to find good options here.
Shop big to see lots of options really quickly, then shop small if you’re not finding a style that speaks to you or you want a more personal experience.
Salesperson vs Owner vs Jeweler vs Designer
One of these is not always better than the other, but a couple of these are often worse experiences for the client.
One could argue that jewelers can most often lead clients to well built pieces while designers and competent salespeople can most easily lead people to stylistic and aesthetically balanced pieces.
The tricky part here is that each of these people can be either very capable or very lacking, and there’s often a lot of crossover between roles.
Salespeople are often unfamiliar or unpracticed with the complexity that goes into making jewelry. They’re often very capable, but it’s very easy to never fully understand the intricacies of making jewelry if you haven’t been on the bench making pieces.
If they’re new to the industry, they tend to know very little beyond what you’ll learn in any “How To Shop For Jewelry” article, and if they’ve been around it for a while, chances are they still have to seek out a jeweler’s advice on tricky topics.
They tend to have a very good handle on trends and leading you to popular styles but may struggle to compose designs from scratch or advise you on styles that aren’t close to main stream.
While they can be very good at their job, they can also get away with simply pretending to be good at it, so proceed with caution if you’re hanging your hat on their advice.
Owners are either very knowledgeable, or very confident. They can come from a background in any other role, so it’s a roll of the dice where their expertise lies. They’re often spread pretty thin, so they may not have as deep of knowledge into any given area as one of the other roles we discuss has.
The main boon of talking with an owner is their ability to change pricing and policy on a whim. If you’re interested in negotiating, this person will be the one with the most power to make it happen.
If you care about the best aesthetic or technical advice, your experience with an owner may be a little less profound than meeting with a designer or jeweler.
Jewelers know exactly what they can and can’t pull off. They are less likely to sell products that are overly delicate or won’t stand the test of time. They’ll be well equipped to advise you on the potential issues with pulling off your requested design.
Having a competent jeweler advise you usually results in a piece that gets made without issue and is holds up over time. Their specialization into making things sometimes means they might be less familiar with styles outside their wheelhouse, and they may be less likely to expose you to a broad range of aesthetics.
Designers often often lie somewhere on the spectrum from sketch artists to CAD modelers to jewelers. If they’re farther into the art side of things, they’ll often have unique and innovative designs but may create concepts that are hard to build into viable pieces of jewelry.
If a designer has a background in making jewelry, they can be the best of both worlds - able to quickly draw and communicate ideas while also designing pieces that are durable and manufacturable.
Most designers you’ll find working with clients will tend to be more on the sketch artist side of the spectrum unless you specifically seek out a designer studio that bases their identity on creating their own pieces.
Like jewelers, they can also get trapped into thinking only in their style, so be aware that some designers are better suited to one genre of an aesthetic, and you may have to talk to a couple to find the one that’s best suited to designing your piece.
A seasoned designer can be an incredible facilitator in getting you to find or create the style you have in mind, and they’re the kind of person Noble tries to foster to make our client experiences as seamless as possible.
Jewelers usually order mountings or fully set pieces from their suppliers. Most jewelers do at least some of their own setting and fabrication, but many semi-custom or custom pieces will be at least partially outsourced. Only a minority of jewelers make a majority of their pieces in-house.
There’s a huge supplier network in the jewelry industry, with many styles already cast and/or set with stones. Most jewelers default to stocking pieces from these suppliers and ordering variants from them if you need something they don’t have.
If you need something custom, many jewelers are unequipped to or unexperienced with handling all of the work involved. You’ll often find that fully custom jobs with these jewelers take a lot of time or feel limited with what can be designed.
Off the shelf or slightly modified pieces that are available from most jewelers can be a very economical way to buy, but it removes a portion of your purchase from funding artists in your community, and buying from a set of stock styles can feel both limiting and overwhelming if you have a specific style in mind.
Shopping with jewelers that make their pieces in-house means more of the money from your purchase goes to supporting art, expertise, and people in your community. Every jeweler that orders their mountings from a supplier is shipping a percentage of your purchase to another state or continent. When it comes time to repair your piece, jewelers will only be as experienced as your purchases have allowed them to be.
But not everyone cares about shopping local - we get it. It can be expensive and quality can be hard to find. But if you care about price, then you should also know …
It’s funny - when you first start working in jewelry, you will inevitably have clients that ask to sell their ring/diamond/heirloom to you. And you might find that clients are surprised to hear you’re willing to pay less than half of what they paid, or what their appraisal says it’s worth.
Jewelry marketing has created this idea that jewelry’s price is directly equated to it’s material worth - you’re paying $5000 for $5000 worth of diamond and gold. But this is a business like any other. You drive the truck off the lot and it’s worth half of what it was, and jewelry is no different.
Every purchase has to build in enough profit to justify the time and expenses of the people in the business, and there are several ways jewelers can go about that.
If you ever feel like jewelry pricing is all over the place, let us tell you a little story about markups.
We as customers don’t like to think about it, but every item we buy is marked up. A lot of money has gone into marketing that proclaims diamond as a very valuable stone, so traditionally, diamonds have been the target of the most markup.
Need to make $2000 on this purchase to keep the doors open? Put that markup into the diamond - clients expect them to be expensive.
Over the years, businesses built their entire model on putting their profit into the ‘diamond’ or ‘materials’ line item. And that’s why markups for jewelry are all over the place. In a low cost of living area doing this as a retirement gig? Maybe a 1.5x markup is enough. Billing yourself as a high end jeweler in a high cost of living area? Maybe you want a 3x markup.
The tricky part is that a 3x markup is very different on a $2000 cost diamond versus a $50,000 cost diamond. Unless your box is the right shade of blue, it can start to feel pretty immoral to charge a client $20,000 extra for a diamond that cost you $10,000. So jewelers started coming up with variable markups - maybe a 2.5x default with 1.5x over $10,000; or maybe they charge $2000 per carat of the stone you buy.
The end result of these different markup strategies is a fragmented pricing scheme where everything’s made up and someone always feels like they’re getting ripped off.
If you go to a jeweler who says the mounting is $500 and the diamond is $5000, you’re dealing with someone who makes their profit from the diamond sale. And that’s okay, but it can make it really hard to cross shop.
Even different diamonds from one jeweler may have different markups, as they try to make sure they’re making enough money from the sale to keep the doors open and justify their time.
Arbitrary markup is still the most common way to price jewelry. Take every price with a grain of salt and realize that price does not necessarily correlate one-to-one with the intrinsic quality of a piece - it may just correlate with that jeweler’s cost of business or target market.
There’s often a ‘labor’ or ‘setting fee’ on your bill, but it usually makes up a minor portion of a jeweler’s profit on a new built piece of jewelry.
Few jewelers have lowered their markup so much that labor makes up a majority of their profit on a piece, but you may find that some jewelers have more competitive pricing on materials than others. This is either because they’re charging you more for labor, making their money on high-volume sales, or undercharging in general.
Our recommendation is that if you’re cross-shopping, total price should be somewhat similar across jewelers. If someone is way lower, odds are they’re not charging enough to spend the time on your piece that it deserves or follow up with good customer service if you have problems. If they’re really high across the board, odds are they’re serving a high end demographic or blindly marking up materials to a higher-than-average degree.
Noble has a unique model where a majority of our profit comes from labor. We markup materials just enough to cover processing and expenses, and make our profit from fair-labor pricing. This means that you’ll pay a straightforward price for the design, consultation, and production of your piece, while getting fair and consistent pricing on materials. It also means that we still make enough money to spend time getting your piece right even if you bring all of your own materials from e.g. your heirloom jewelry.
All of this is overwhelming, so let’s allow a little bias for our conclusion and give you some advice.
Do all of that and you’ll be in good hands and will probably pay an appropriate price for the jeweler’s skill and quality.
And if you’re ready to start looking, maybe give us a shot. If you like how we write, you’ll probably love how we talk.