Think about a $5 fast-food burger.
You order it, and five minutes later it's in your hands.
It seems like an incredibly simple product: a bun, a piece of meat, cheese, sauce and a few toppings.
But that burger didn't take five minutes to create.
Before it ever appeared on a menu, a company may have spent months—or even years—developing it. Chefs and food scientists develop recipes. Suppliers have to be found. Ingredients are tested. Consumers taste different versions. Packaging is designed. Equipment and preparation methods are worked out. Costs are analyzed. The product is tested, changed and tested again.
For a major restaurant chain, developing and launching even a seemingly simple menu item can involve large teams of people and substantial amounts of money.
And after all of that, they can sell you the burger for five bucks.
How?
Because they're not doing all of that work for your burger.
They're doing it once and then making the burger millions of times.
The cost of developing that product gets spread across an enormous number of customers.
Now imagine something completely different.
Imagine going to that same company and saying:
“I want you to develop a completely new burger. Just for me. And you're only going to make one.”
The chefs still have to develop it. Ingredients still have to be selected. Recipes still have to be tested. Problems still have to be solved. The entire process still has to happen.
Except now there aren't millions of burgers over which to spread that expense.
There's one. Yours.
That's essentially what happens when you order custom jewelry.
When you buy a piece of jewelry that's already been developed, you're buying the finished result of work that may be reproduced hundreds or thousands of times.
With custom jewelry, you're asking us to create something that has never existed before.
It has to be designed. Proportions have to be worked out. A model has to be created. Stones have to fit. Manufacturing problems have to be solved. Then the piece has to be printed or fabricated, cast, assembled, set, polished and finished.
And all of that is being done to produce one piece for one person.
That's the difference.
You're not simply buying more expensive gold, diamonds or labor.
You're buying the first and sometimes the only one.
And the first one is always the most expensive one to make.