Mardon Jewelers at the Mission Inn

Recently, I asked the staff at Mardon for ideas and suggestions for this Blog.  My beautiful wife Kaye told me about a dream she had about her grandfather, who was a businessman during the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  She remembers him always saying, “I’m too poor to buy cheap”.  Lately, I’ve been pondering the dilemma posed by the difficult economy we all face today, so this simple phrase really struck home.

Almost on a daily basis, we at Mardon see plenty of “cheap” jewelry that folks bring us to either fix a problem, or to verify the claims made by the seller.  Almost always, the seller gave them a “Feel Good” appraisal with their purchase, a piece of paper which states the value of the item to be substantially more than the purchase price.

In one case we looked at several days ago, a ring was purchased via the Internet for about $7,000, but came with a price tag of over $56,000.  It was a white gold ring set with a fairly large (1 1/2 ct +) radiant cut pink diamond and lots of small white accent diamonds.  The overall style was generic and the workmanship and quality of diamonds was mediocre, not what you would expect on a $50,000 item.

Of course, we knew the color of the diamond to be treated.  Besides the fact that the seller had disclosed that the diamond was treated color, natural color pink or pink diamonds of that size and clarity are quite rare and would normally sell at wholesale for around $30,000/ct.  It would be unlikely that a consumer retail site would sell a natural color pink diamond (which are extremely rare), for $7000 when diamond professionals or collectors would be glad to pay well into five figures.

On close inspection, I noticed the center diamond had a large fracture across the center, bisecting the stone almost into two pieces, which had been filled with “clarity enhancing” material, which is usually some form of high lead content glass. The real issue here is that a glass filled diamond can be problematical over its lifetime. The main issues are durability, mainly the durability and stability of the filler material, not to mention the size of the fracture. Regardless of the claims of the sellers of these glass filled diamonds, the technology has only been around for about 20 years.

When I added up the cost of gold and the small diamonds + local labor costs commensurate with overall quality of the piece + the cost of the treated color glass filled center diamond, I came up with a ball park estimate to manufacture the ring here in the US of $4 to $5 thousand dollars, so the price paid was not out of line with normal retail markups. Of course, the piece was almost certainly made overseas with ultra cheap labor), and of course, I had a big “haw haw” over the $56K price tag.

The real kicker is that some of the “auction” .com sites that specialize in close out merchandise (you don’t just buy, you “win!” the right to buy the item), often charge a substantial restocking fee, in the order of 15%.  That would be about $1000 on this item.

Sometimes, you just have to scratch your head.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 10:29 am and is filed under Gem Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.