What is the typical markup on custom rings?

About 100 to 150 percent over raw costs, depending on your jeweler and where they're working. That sounds high. It is high, until you see where the money actually goes.

I'll give you a real breakdown from a job I finished last month. Client named Nicole brought in a 1.02 carat old European cut, H/VS2, that had been her grandmother's. She wanted it set in a plain 18k yellow gold solitaire, 2.3mm band, hand-finished. No halo. No pave. Just the stone and the band.

Where the money went

Metal. The 18k gold for that band, at current market, cost me about $140 in raw metal. That's not marked up. That's what I paid Hoover & Strong. Casting added another $45 - the resin print, the investment, the pour, the cleanup.

Labor. Here's where it gets real. I spent roughly four hours on that ring between casting cleanup, sizing the seat for the stone, setting it, and finishing. At $85 an hour for bench time - which is modest for a GIA-trained jeweler in a small studio - that's $340.

Stone setting alone is often a separate line item. I charged $75 for the setting on that ring because the old European cut has a slightly off-round girdle and needed a custom seat. A standard round brilliant in a pre-made head would be less. Anything with melee goes way up - micro-pave setting runs $25 to $50 per stone, minimum.

Finishing. Hand sanding, polishing, ultrasonic clean, final inspection. Another hour, another $85.

So my raw input cost on that ring - metal, casting, labor, setting, finishing - was roughly $685. Nicole paid $1,450. That's a markup of about 110 percent over my cost.

What the markup covers

• Consultation time. Two hours with Nicole - one with her and her partner, one without - talking about what she wanted, what the stone could handle, what the band should look like. I don't bill for that. The markup absorbs it.
• Risk. If I break the stone during setting, I eat it. If I cast a ring with a defect, I redo it. If the client hates the wax model and wants a completely different design, the first set of CAD files is wasted. That all comes out of the markup.
• Tools and overhead. My Foredom flex shaft doesn't care about your budget. Neither does my rent, my insurance, my GIA recert fees, or the argon tank for my laser welder.
• Expertise. You're paying for twenty-two years of knowing exactly how far to push a prong without cracking the stone, and for having ruined enough rings to know what not to do. That's not arrogance. That's the truth.

What markups look like at different price points

A $1,500 ring from a custom jeweler probably has about $700 in hard costs. A $15,000 ring with a nice diamond might have $9,000 in the stone alone, and the jeweler's cost on that stone may only be a few hundred over wholesale if they sourced it smartly. The multiplier shrinks as the stone value goes up. The jeweler's margin in dollars grows, but as a percentage, it drops - maybe 30 to 40 percent on a high-value piece.

Mass-market retailers - chain stores, mall jewelers - often work on keystone (100 percent markup) too, but their costs are lower. They buy castings in bulk from Stuller, use standardized heads, and pay setters by the piece. A $2,000 ring at a chain might have $400 in actual cost. The other $1,600 is markup, overhead, and the cost of the salesperson on commission.

The hard question you should ask

Don't ask "What's your markup?" That question makes everyone defensive and doesn't tell you anything useful. Ask instead: "Can you itemize the material and labor costs for this ring?"

A jeweler who can - who will tell you the gold weight, the casting fee, the setting charge, the hours at the bench - is a jeweler who is confident in their pricing. A jeweler who waves their hand and says "it's complicated" is probably padding the markup to cover inefficiency.

I'll tell clients what things cost because I want them to understand that a $1,500 ring isn't a rip-off. It's just not a $500 ring, either. And the $500 ring will need replacing. I've re-set too many stones that fell out of cheap castings to pretend otherwise.

Markup is not a dirty word. Obscuring it is.