Join us for our custom design event April 25-26, 2024! Click here for more info.
Custom design jewelry is one of our services that will always be near and dear to our hearts. In case you aren’t familiar, custom design jewelry basically means that we are creating a one-of-a-kind piece of jewelry for a customer. This may require us to use some of the customer’s existing jewelry or we may be making something from scratch. Of course we love selling the jewelry out of our showcases but our custom jewelry design services allows us to use our creativity. We also find that the sweetest stories are shared with us when we are assisting someone with a custom project.
First we would like to explain the process of creating a custom piece of jewelry. Our custom jewelry design process has come a long way since we first started offering it decades ago! The process starts with a free consultation where you can come into our store in person or meet virtually through video, text or e-mail to discuss your design idea. We can incorporate your jewelry and loose stones or start from scratch. Don’t have any ideas of what you want? No worries, we can help you come up with design ideas as well! We usually like to give you a tour of our store or look at Pinterest to get ideas of your style preferences. Then we create a CAD image for you that is a 3-D rendering of your design. From this rendering, we can make any changes that you would like. If you love the design, then we make it in a wax mold so you can try on the piece and get a feel for the overall sizing.
We can continue to make changes or if you are happy with the design, we will go ahead and start making your piece! We don’t require any money down until we have perfected the design and you are ready to move forward. It usually takes 2-3 weeks from the approval date to get your custom jewelry piece but we can sometimes expedite the process if needed to meet a special occasion. We try our best to make it fun and easy to create your own one-of-a-kind piece of jewelry.
We thought it would be fun to take a trip down memory lane and talk about some of our favorite custom jewelry design projects and the stories behind them.
Interlocking Hearts
One day we had a woman that came into our store with a gorgeous classic wedding set. She informed us that her hudband had recently passed away from cancer and they were married for over 40 years. This was the first time that she could bring herself to remove her wedding rings since he passed. She wanted to continue to wear the rings but she wanted to repurpose them into something new. There was also a very special engraving inside the rings that she wanted to preserve. The engraving was their wedding date and their initials!
So our jewelers got to work to see what they could do with her rings. They started by cutting the rings and playing around with the design. They decided to use each of the wedding bands to form one side of a heart that would interlock.
Where the two sides interlocked, they set the diamond from her solitaire in the center. They cut and formed the rings in such a way so that the engraving was still perfectly visible! Now she could wear all three rings around her neck and close to her heart. We all cried when she saw the final piece! This is such a great example of how jewelry can help us hold onto the memories of our loved ones.
From Rags to Riches
We usually help people celebrate happy memories at Kiefers but this was another sad story so get your tissues ready! A very good customer of ours came in one day and shared with us that her mom had just passed away. Her mom didn’t own much jewelry but there was this sterling silver ring that her mom wore all the time. The ring had actually lost the center stone many years prior and she just never got around to getting it fixed.
Our customer now wanted to be able to wear her mom’s ring but she didn’t like sterling silver jewelry. This customer mostly wore yellow gold jewelry so she asked if it were possible to re-make the ring in yellow gold. As you can see this ring had a very intricate and detailed design. But our amazing custom team was able to take the sterling silver ring and make a mold of it so they could re-cast the ring in gold!
This ring also was made to fit a very large center stone! This customer didn’t want to invest in a large diamond for the center so we decided to set it with a cubic zirconia to keep the cost down. That is the great thing about custom design, we are able to cater the project to fit any budget because the options are endless! Here’s the final product and she loved it so much when we presented it to her! She told us how she smiles everytime she looks down at the ring and thinks of her mom.
Luck of the Irish
We promise this one won’t want to make you cry! We had a customer that inherited some jewelry from family members that she wasn’t necessarily close with because they lived in Ireland. Even though she didn’t have a relationship with this side of the family, she still wanted to honor them and their Irish roots. She had an idea to create a celtic knot design that would have a circle of diamonds connecting each arm of the knot.
Although the diamonds that she had were different sizes, we were able to alternate the diamonds so that the size difference was not apparent.
She loved how this turned out so much that we ended up designing matching earrings for her with the leftover diamonds that she had!
Beauty & The Beast
Living so close to Disney means that we have LOTS of Disney fans! We had one customer in particular that loved Beauty and the Beast. She saw this ring on Pinterest that she wanted to copy and make her own. This was a particularly difficult design because the head/crown of the ring actually twists and has gemstones set into the side of the head. When designing a ring from scratch, we must also consider the structural integrity of the piece so that the customer can enjoy it without worry.
We finally nailed the design and created the ring using a ruby center stone, emeralds and black diamond side stones set in yellow gold. It’s almost like you could hear “Tale as old as time” playing in the background while we presented this ring to her! This design was so gorgeous we almost wanted to create one for our inventory as well!
Something New
We had a customer who actually drove all the way from the Orlando area to let us redesign some jewelry for her. She had a random assortment of jewelry that she was no longer wearing. She wanted to find a way to incorporate it all together into one piece.
We started by giving her a tour of our store to get an idea of her style. We found that she gravitated towards modern styles. So we got to designing her new ring and we came up with this design.
She was floored when we showed her the new design and she couldn’t even believe that we created this out of her old jewelry! We didn’t end up using all of the gold that she had so we credited her back for some of the gold that she traded in towards the new design. The final product came out so nicely and she says that she gets compliments on her ring everywhere she goes!
Salt N’ Peppa
Nowadays almost 60% of the engagement rings that we create are custom made. Even if it’s just a little tweak here or there, we find that young couples love knowing that they have a unique engagement ring that is different than their friends. This couple wanted to create a Salt & Pepper engagement ring. We know you are probably wondering what that is. Well a Salt & Pepper diamond is basically a heavily included diamond where the inclusions actually make a design inside the diamond.
These diamonds can vary quite a bit in appearance, some are mostly white with black inclusions and some have so many inclusions that they look dark grey or black in color. This customer also wanted the diamond to be cut in a hexagon shape which was going to be tricky to find! We ended up bringing in an assortment of salt & pepper diamonds for them to choose from before we created their ring. 
We then created a custom halo to fit the stone that they chose and we set the diamonds in yellow gold. This was truly a one-of-a-kind engagement ring that we will never forget!
We hope you enjoyed these custom design stories and we look forward to helping you bring your custom jewelry dreams to life! Join us for our Custom Design Event April 25-26, 2024! Click here for more info on the event. Click to learn more about our custom jewelry design services.