Value Based Pricing

Traditional jewelers often employ “keystone” or “triple-keystone” pricing, which is to take the cost of a piece of jewelry obtained at a wholesale price and to either double (keystone) or triple (triple-keystone) the cost in order to obtain the retail selling cost to you, the consumer.

We started Apples of Gold Jewelry on the single premise that traditional jewelry companies’ prices were simply unfair to the average jewelry consumer. With wholesale jewelry marked up anywhere from between 100%-300%, we set out to do what any ethical company we hope would do—to undo what we believed to be an “unjust” mark-up in the jewelry industry as a whole.

Sure, we were perhaps being a little judgmental—after all, traditional jewelers have larger overhead, less exposure to the national and world markets, and sometimes hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars of inventory. Still, we did not feel that market prices were reasonable.

An Average of 50% Below Retail

We, too, learned that running our business model incurs heavy business expense and a different kind of overhead, such as daily marketing & branding, IT costs, professional photography, payroll, business insurance, and much more. Yet we firmly maintained our valued-based pricing methodology since our early inception in 1999, because we all agreed that that is what made our company a success. It was the premise by which we were founded.

Today, we maintain an average of 50% below retail markup on our jewelry. You can say our prices are “half-keystone”.

No Compromise

Despite all of this, it is our firm belief not to compromise the quality or the fine selection of the unique and fashionable jewelry that we carry. We offer the same quality jewelry—and in some cases, higher quality jewelry—than traditional jewelry stores.

The difference is the price …

Read more: Pricing Gold Jewelry, An Insider's POV