We love custom and bespoke work at Hera, and we do a ton of it! About 50% of our revenue comes from custom rings. It makes us so happy to bring a client's exact vision to life and make sure that they truly get their dream ring. Sometimes we get questions about why our custom and bespoke work is priced higher than our collection rings. We're big on transparency here, so let's get into it.
Staying Organized
When a client checks out with a collection ring online, the process on our end is very standardized. Our team sends these orders to the production facility using the specifications (ring model, stone size, metal purity, etc) selected by the client, and from there everything is pretty routinized. We make standard changes to custom fit the basket to the stone, adjust the ring size, and adjust gold weight if necessary based on the stone size. Then the ring goes into production, and after that, through QC and onto fulfillment.
Custom and bespoke orders require more administrative work to stay organized, since we're taking the ring outside of this standard process. After finalizing all the design details with the client and providing an itemized quote, our client services team creates a detailed custom order description for our CAD team, and sends out a custom invoice to the client.
Our team stays on top of each ring sure the correct changes were made and no details were missed, and then works with the client on edits. Once these pieces are finished, they require photography and videography to send to the client, as well as a final invoice. This is a more complex administrative process that requires more organization and oversight - just like any time you take a project out of the standard operating procedure.
Structural Changes are Never Small
We offer fully bespoke rings as well as customizations to our existing collection. A tweak to an existing ring may seem pretty quick and easy to do, but there's more to it than you might think.
Changing one element of a ring often means that we need to make other structural changes - for instance, changing a ring from a prong to a bezel setting means we're adding a bezel, eliminating the gallery rail, and adjusting the contour of the shoulders to connect to the basket in a different place. These changes add up to a lot of time spent adjusting the model for the client's approval. This design process is collaborative between the client, our CAD designer and our client services team.
A Collaborative Editing Process
Our custom and bespoke pricing includes three full rounds of revisions. In keeping with our prong-to-bezel example, once we have a draft ready for our client to view, they may have additional changes they want to make. Maybe those adjustments to the shoulder contour isn't quite the angle they'd like, or maybe the bezel itself should be a little softer, a little wider, a little more angular. Our client services team will go back and forth working with the client and our CAD team to refine these elements until the ring is perfect.
Expert Staff Time
Our CAD and client services team members receive hundreds of hours of training to become true experts in what they do. Their time is valuable, and their labor counts as much toward the price of the ring as the labor of our bench team or the cost of materials like gold.
From our initial complimentary consultation, often lengthy email exchanges to go through options and finalize details, stone layouts, internal design review and editing, client CAD revision process, and administrative work, this often adds up to 15+ hours of staff time on a single custom piece. This is especially true for Hera because of our emphasis on durability and education; we work very closely with each client to help them understand the pros and cons of their options, raise any issues we foresee down the line with their preferred design, and help find creative solutions to make their vision come to life.
That's not to say we don't want to spend this time with our clients - we really do! - but to keep the lights on, we need to make sure that we're balancing our pricing with the amount of staff time we're spending on the piece.
