If You Like It, Buy It.

18k yellow and white gold wedding bands

I had one of my non local blog readers call me recently about getting an emerald for a ring for his wife.  Needless to say I immediately asked him if he had read my articles on emeralds in rings.  He had but his wife had a strong hankering so he was going ahead with it anyway.  He called primarily to find out if there was a place on online he could post a picture of an emerald and find out whether it was a decent stone or not.  Unfortunately there isn't and it wouldn't really work even if there was.  First of all everyone's cameras and computers read colors slightly differently and even very subtle differences in color can make a huge difference in price. Also there is no way to truly see the types and quantities of inclusions in a stone from a picture.

However what came up was that he had found a stone he liked, but he was uncertain that he would be getting a good stone.  But here is the thing you should remember about all colored gems, regardless of what else is said (either by me on my blog or elsewhere):  If you like the stone then buy it.  It doesn't really matter if it isn't considered a "fine" color or "perfect" or anything else.  If you like it and it makes you happy then just buy the darn thing. You may be overpaying or you may not.  But technically if you like what it is and you think it's a fair price for it then you're not overpaying for it because YOU like it.
 
A good example of this is some of the lighter toned blue sapphires I buy.  Generally speaking the darker colors (not too dark or they look black) are considered more valuable.  But the fact of the matter is that I have found the lighter colors to often be more sparkly.  I like sparkle in my stones!  So while I always have beautiful, intensely colored and darker blue sapphires, I also have some lighter colored ones because they just happen to strike my fancy.

Sometimes you just have to go with your gut instinct on these things.  Of course that always assumes that you are dealing with a reputable source, so please make sure you have checked out the company you are buying from.

The wedding bands in the picture above are kind of special to me.  I just made them up for my younger son's wedding this coming weekend.  His has a pink diamond in it that I bought for him (it's his birthstone) when he was born.  I can, of course, always make you something similar!

Sale Time

Custom 18k ring in process

I confess to being absent from my blog for quite awhile.  However I have a good reason.  I have been so inundated with work that despite working 7 day weeks I am still running 4-6 weeks on most custom jobs.  So even though I haven't been on lately, please be assured that I am still here and working my tail off. 

In current news:

 The state of Massachusetts decided not to help out the little guys and is not having a tax free weekend this year, however we ARE having our annual sale which is going on all of this week.  You must be an existing customer to take advantage of this opportunity.  Please come on by and see what's out these days!

I have gotten very active on Instagram and would suggest that you follow me on there if you want to see my most current work. The pictures aren't always great as many of them are phone snaps but it's a way to see what is coming off the benches as soon as it does as well as work in progress (like the picture above). 

I am currently working on a new body of work and I am releasing it a bit differently than I have in the past.  Usually as soon as I finish a new piece it goes out in the cases.  However I am now only doing that with designs that I have made up before (or made something very similar to before).  I have a group of pieces (that is getting larger weekly) that are finished except for polishing that are going to be released all at once.  They will be shown on this blog awhile before they are actually released and anyone reading the blog can come in and see (and purchase) them before they are actually put out in the cases.  As it stands now they won't go out until sometime in November but pictures of them should be up on the blog in October.  This will be an opportunity for my regular readers to get first choice on some new jewels.  

I'm going to try to get back to the story of how I got where I am today in the next article.  This presumes, of course, that 1) I get time to write something in the near future, 2) something more interesting doesn't come up to write about and 3) that I actually feel like it!

Please keep checking back.  I will be trying to write more soon.

Work, work, work. And a little bit on scrapping your gold.

An engagement wedding band set and the men's wedding band.

I know I said I would continue more of my autobiographical story in this posting but I'm heading in another direction today instead (because it's my blog and I can do what I want to!).

First of all I want to warn any of you who are my customers that I will be closing for most of the week following July 4 (I'll be closed July 3-8).  I'd like to take it as some vacation time but when you work for yourself a lot of times, time off becomes work time (something those of you who want to work for yourself should keep in mind).  In fact I will be in the store working but only on pieces for the case that I want to make up.  It's the stuff I enjoy the most working on and I rarely get any large block of time to actually do this (actually I can't remember a time when I could do this in the last 30 years) so I'm going to take advantage of what is usually a pretty slow period and do what I enjoy the most here at work.

Many of you know by now that I will take in scrap metal towards work I do or pieces from the cases.
I don't do anything with the scrap myself. I just bring it to a guy who buys scrap metal from jewelers like me.  I don't have acid testing equipment myself (too dangerous) but this gentleman was doing all of his testing with acids.  However recently he purchased an X-ray machine that determines the karat of gold in a much more accurate fashion.  Please don't ask me to explain how it works.  I haven't really looked into it but I have been hearing about the machines for awhile and I do know they are far, far more accurate.

This is what is interesting however from my standpoint. You would be amazed at how much jewelry is stamped 10k, 14k, 18k but is not that at all.  Now some of this is because of an old law that was removed a number of years ago that allowed a half karat tolerance when stamping gold.  So you could stamp something 14 kt but it could only be 13.5 kt and it was legal to do this.  The law has since been changed (quite some time ago now) and no longer allows this tolerance.    So the fact that some of these older pieces come in a half karat shy is not that surprising (because you can be sure that almost all of the jewelry manufacturers shot for the low end on the scale because of how much money they would save--and how much more they would make on it).  However not all of the material I'm scrapping is that old.  But even if it was the under karating going on out there is pretty incredible. On my most recent batch of gold the settlement sheet included 9.5 kt, 10 kt, 13kt, 13.5 kt, 14kt, 17kt, 18kt and 23.5 kt. Multiple pieces fell into each of these categories.  Now some of this material wasn't stamped but a good deal of it was and not one of those stamps said 17 kt, 13 kt or 9.5 kt. This is also not the first batch where I have seen such large discrepancies.

So what are the take aways from this?  Well first of all, I go back to what I say all the time.  Buy local, using small jewelers who are dedicated to producing a quality product.  My gold supplier is one of the best in the country and are 100% honest (when my scrap guy bought his machine I brought in a number of pieces of metal from them to see how the machine worked and every one of them was exactly on the money).  I have never in my life bought or used under karated gold and most small jewelers tend to be like me. When you buy product that is made overseas, especially by large manufacturers, you always run the risk that they will be underkarating their jewelry.  Why would they do this?  Because if they reduce the amount of gold in a piece by even 1/10 of 1% a large manufacturer can save huge amounts of money.  When you buy in a chain store, the vast majority of their product is made overseas now and most of them do not do routine purity checks on the metal coming in to them.  I'm sure many of them do it to begin with when working with a new supplier but it's easy to assume that everything will stay the same.  Even smaller jewelers who buy their product from larger manufacturers may be unknowingly selling you goods that are under karated.  No one can test every piece they buy.  On the other hand I make everything I sell so I know exactly what is going into it.

The second take away from this is that when a jeweler is buying scrap gold from you, you need to be aware of why they pay what they do.  You may have a pile of stuff that is marked 14k, so you think the pure gold content is 58.5% of that and you may assume that you should get pretty close to that amount (remembering that everyone has to make money on the transaction).  But the reality is that the buyer knows that not all of those pieces are going to yield 58.5% pure gold and has to pay out accordingly.  Acid tests, which most jewelry buyers use, are not nearly as accurate as the X-ray machine so they have to adjust things accordingly so they can make money on the purchase.

So as always, buyer beware.  But buy your wares from someone you can trust fully!

My Life as a Jeweler Part 1

At work at 18 years old

A new reader asked me in my previous posting how I got into this business.  A few of you may know about this but I figured it's as good a topic as any so I might as well tell you.  When I was in middle school one of my classmate's mother and father owned a jewelry store in Stamford, CT.  I believe I was 14 when I went into the shop one summer day and asked if they had any work for me to do and they gave me a broom and told me I could clean up the store.  I didn't go in because it was a jewelry store.  I went in because I knew them and I figured it was as good a place as any to earn some money (something I had been doing in the summers since I was 12). 

I worked on and off for them for a few months and got to know them a little bit.  When I was 15 I happened to go in one day just to say hi and the owner (his name was David Goldfarb) asked me if I wanted a job since a young lady who had been helping them out in the store was heading off to college.  Again, I was always looking for work so I jumped on it. But this time Dave decided to actually teach me how to make jewelry.  At the time he made most of what he sold and the vast majority of it was in silver.  Dave, and his wife Liz, had been in retail most of their lives and had previously owned a clothing store.  But Dave was an extremely talented man in a wide variety of ways.  He was an artist, he had a very creative bent in many ways and he was adept at processes, by which I mean he could see a design in his head and then figure out a way to make it up in quantity with the least amount of effort and the most consistency. 

That was how I started, by learning some of the techniques and a whole lot about how to produce an item.  Dave taught me a number of extremely valuable lessons, some of which it took me decades to fully absorb, but the most important one was this:  It doesn't matter how great a design you have.  If the piece isn't made right and finished properly it won't look good.  And, conversely, you can have a pretty ugly design but if it's made right, it will look good.  Now I think at the time he may have said it will or won't sell, but it has become apparent to me over the years that there is plenty of actually horribly made and/or designed jewelry that does sell, but his basic lesson that you better make it right has always stuck with me and I have always tried my best to do just that with my jewelry. 

Dave taught me how to work in sterling silver but he rarely, at the time, worked with gold so I got no experience with that.  I worked for him for 3 years during which time I also began acquiring my own tools to make jewelry at home.  When I finished high school I stayed at home for the next year, continuing to work for him.  At 19 I moved up to Boston to go to college part time at UMass Boston.  But I needed to support myself so I made up a small line of sterling silver jewelry that I decided I would try to wholesale to stores.  It was really pretty silly when I look back at it now but I remember going into these places with a half dozen black velvet pads with pieces U pinned on them in a paper shopping bag!

So this is taking a little longer than I thought. I'm going to call this part 1 and I'll continue the tale in my next article. 

Shop Local. Again.

Blue sheen moonstones in 18k and 22k gold

When even my wife Kathy says that it's been too long since I've written a new blog article I know I've been absent from the pages here.  My apologies.  I don't have a regular assistant these days so I'm forced to do pretty much everything and I've been working 7 day weeks most weeks so if it seems that it has been awhile, it's true, but you'll just have to forgive me.  I'm returning to a topic I've discussed before because it cropped up again recently.  I am always unsure how this topic is viewed as it is, by necessity, self serving but it's a fact of life these days. 

So I had a gentleman come in my shop a few days ago and he asked me if I would look at the inscription on a diamond to see if it was the one he was actually sold.  The first thing I said to him was what I always say to these visitors.  Why oh why would you buy a product from someone you don't trust????  And he said what they all say when I ask them this.  Oh no, I trust them but could you just please look at this and tell me if it's the stone on the certificate.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who can see the fallacy in this statement.  If he trusts them, why does he need me to confirm it?  And if he doesn't trust them then why did he buy from them?  Now I'm a nice guy most of the time so I was going to look at his stone for him anyway so I figured I might as well go all the way and bring up the second part of this article. 

I then asked him where he got the stone (and ring).  I already knew what he was going to say but I just wanted to make sure. Of course he got it online.  I then pointed out to him that people like me (you know, the bricks and mortar small retailers) were going to go out of business and not be here anymore to verify his purchase if everyone just bought their products on line.  I asked him what he would do then?  What would he do the next time if there were no more jewelers on the street like me that he could go to for this kind of thing?  I got the usual, well everyone else was too expensive.  I looked at him and said, look I know I'm expensive, but I also know that there are plenty of bricks and mortar jewelers who will match the price of stuff bought on line because they've been forced to in order to stay in business.  He was very apologetic but being apologetic doesn't solve the larger issue here.  The larger issue is that you all need local shops for something but by shopping exclusively on line you are driving many of them out of business.

Everywhere I look I see things about "shop local".  I'm curious then why there are so many, who when faced with making an expensive purchase, throw away this option?  Remember, next time there may not be that hands on, actual person there to help out. 

And now I have a question for my readers.  My wife thinks I should charge for this service even though it only takes me a few minutes.  I have mixed feelings about it.  What are your thoughts?  And if you think I should charge for it, how much do you think would be reasonable? I'm also taking suggestions for topics you'd like to hear me address.  As always thanks for reading and please feel free to share my blog articles on social media.

P.S.  You can now find me on Instagram too so become a follower!