In short, if you're in the market for jewelry and are shopping around, especially diamond jewelry, Moshe will likely be your last stop...for life!
Price, service, knowledge, convenience all far exceeded our expectations. Since this seems to be his first review, let me go into some detail about how he worked out for us...
Meeting him - Most likely, you will meet in a very casual setting. He does not have a storefront so often times met up with us in fairly public places such as cafes. While there was a lot of "shop" talk, there was also a lot of conversation and "talk story". The entire experience was closer to making a new friend than shopping for a diamond engagement ring. We felt no pressure or obligation or even time constraints when chatting. We especially appreciated his surprisingly honest answers to some of our questions about diamond pricing and the jewelry market in general here. Because there are no store hours, per se, I'm sure he can accommodate any schedule and he did mention he does house calls too. He is highly knowledgeable about his trade and, besides diamonds, deals in high-end watches as well, if that is something you are interested in.
Custom Jewelry - Moshe has a nice resale business and there is a lot of jewelry you could buy but we mainly came to him to custom make a diamond engagement ring. It is VERY straightforward with him. You can pretty much dictate everything about the ring. You can either give him a ballpark amount you want to spend or the size of the diamond(s) in the ring and he'll go from there. Solitaire, multiple stones, platinum, white gold, etc., etc. He also mentioned pictures work too, if there's a particular design/setting you want made or incorporated. In our case we gave him a budget and, lucky for us, he had a cut diamond on hand that was absolutely perfect for our budget. We agreed on a solitaire "Tiffany & Co.-inspired" white gold ring and he priced it out on the spot.
Price - What shocked me the most was that he broke down the pricing like this:
"$XXX for the stone, $XXX for the setting and gold (by weight only!) and $XXX for my markup"! SO transparent. For those of you thinking, well maybe he shifted the numbers around...WRONG! GIA-Certified diamonds (the only ones he sells) are priced on the international market. What this means is the value is pretty much the same everywhere in the world. It's almost like a heavily traded commodity and if you plug in the values you get off a GIA Diamond Grading report into one of the many diamond calculators on the Internet, you'll get an idea of how much a stone is worth. You can also look at high-volume e-stores like diamondsafe.com for comparison as well, like we did. That said, before you even attempt to bargain with his prices...do some research on your own and you'll find out like we did that it was about as low as it could be and bargaining further would just be...petty...crass...cheap...to give you a ballpark of how far your money goes with Moshe...look at something from somewhere mega retail like the The Wedding Ring Shop...Moshe will make you the EXACT piece for about HALF! We're not talking about saving a couple hundred bucks...depending on the size of the rock...you will save THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS.
Long story short, the finished ring's retail replacement cost was appraised by a third-party GIA-certified Gemologist at 88% more than what we paid for it. The ring was amazing and, while the GIA-report (which Moshe provides with all his gems) did not rate it an Excellent Cut...the gemologist said that the reason this was so for our gem was a design matter not about the physics of the gem and that in Europe we had an Ideal Cut Diamond! The stone was gorgeous and was cut in such a way as to make it look bigger than it really was! When we told her what we paid for it, she told us that was the price she was calculating out AT COST! Awesome!!! (We also learned the standard jewelry markup from wholesale to retail was 85% which is ridiculous but, I digress...)
Other awesome things, in our book - Moshe is fairly young and can use more modern methods of communication and payment. There is no sketchy "cash-discounts". He writes out proper receipts. Text messages, e-mail and payment through Paypal were all no problem at all and for someone like us in our early 30's, preferable. He also uses Instagram fairly heavily so check him out there too!
After all is said and done...we met an amazing person, made a new friend and got ourselves a jeweler for life! Whether it's shooting a quick text asking whether a certain pendant is worth buying or selling him old unused jewelry or ordering a custom piece from him, he is now our go to guy for all things shiny! This is not a relationship that could have been born from a normal retail storefront and its Moshe's personalized service and attention that, more than anything, won us over through this process. Yes Moshe, WE LOVE YOU! read more