Nothing here exists yet

Every ring on this site is, at the moment you are looking at it, a photograph of one that has already gone.

Nothing is held in stock. There is no case out the back with a Georgian in three sizes. When you choose a setting, that setting does not yet exist — it is made afterwards, around a particular diamond, for a particular finger. Which is why it takes about ten weeks rather than about ten days.

That is a real cost and it is worth being plain about it.

Why we cannot hold stock

Not principle. Arithmetic.

The settings here are built around old cuts, and no two old cuts are the same. Two stones of identical weight and identical grade will differ in spread, in depth, in outline, in where the girdle sits. A seat cut for one will not hold the other. On the Cutaway settings this is even more absolute: the gallery is sculpted to a specific pavilion, so the same design made twice is not the same piece of metal.

So a finished ring is not a product with variants. It is one object, married to one stone. To hold stock we would have to hold the stones too, decide in advance which diamond each of you should have, and then persuade whoever turned up that the one already bought was the one they wanted.

Houses do this. It is why so much fine jewellery is discounted — something made before anyone asked for it eventually has to be cleared.

What the ten weeks actually is

It is not a queue. Nothing sits waiting for its turn.

The stone is sourced and confirmed. The setting is drawn to that stone's measurements. Wax or metal is worked, the seat is cut, the gallery is opened where the design calls for it. It is set, finished, sized to you, engraved if you have asked, photographed and documented.

Most of that is a person at a bench, and the parts that are not — waiting for a stone to arrive, waiting for a casting — cannot be shortened by paying more attention to them.

Where a piece can be made faster we say so. Where it cannot, we say that instead, before you order rather than at week eight.

What it costs you

Three things, honestly.

You cannot try it on first. You are choosing from photographs and from a conversation, which is why we would rather show you stones on camera or across a table before you commit to anything.

You wait. If you are proposing in a fortnight, we are the wrong house for that ring, and we will tell you so rather than take the order and hope.

And you cannot have exactly what you saw. The ring in the photograph was built around a stone that has gone. Yours will be the same structure around a different diamond, and it will not be identical. We think that is the point. It is reasonable to think it is a nuisance.

The exception

There is one, and it exists precisely for the case where waiting will not work.

Occasionally a diamond turns up that is worth having before anyone has asked for it — unusual spread, an outline no existing setting fits, a colour that will not repeat. Rather than hold it in a safe until somebody requests that shape, we build the ring it asks for. Those pieces sit under Available Now. Each exists once, in one size, and needs about ten working days to be sized and refinished before it is sent.

That is the whole of our ready-to-wear, and it is accidental rather than planned.

What you get for the wait

A ring whose seat was cut for your stone rather than adapted to it, made to your finger rather than resized down from a stock band, by the same small workshop that has built every piece here from the beginning.

Ten weeks is a long time to wait for a ring and no time at all in the life of one. We would rather state that plainly than have you discover it at checkout.