A Private Jeweler for Artists, Musicians and Collectors

If your work is public and your purchases are not, the ordinary way of buying jewelry is a poor fit. There is a counter, a camera phone, a member of staff who recognizes you, and a record of the visit. We do none of that. Dave works privately, sources against your brief, and hands the finished piece to you wherever you are.

This page is about how commissioning works for artists, musicians, producers and collectors specifically — the schedules, the discretion, the pieces that come up most, and what they actually cost. If you are an athlete, we keep a separate page for that work, because the pieces and the timelines are different.

Why the Model Suits This Work

Four things, and none of them are about jewelry.

There is no public location. Nowhere to be photographed walking into, nowhere for anyone to wait outside, and no address that ties you to a purchase. This is not a service we added; it is simply how the business is built.

There is no staff. Dave takes the first conversation, sources the stones, manages the bench work and delivers the piece. Nobody else handles the file. The number of people who know what you commissioned is the number of people involved, and that number is one.

The schedule bends to yours. Studio time, tour legs, shoots and press runs do not fit anyone's opening hours. A commission can be discussed at midnight from another time zone, progressed while you are unreachable, and handed over in whatever window exists when you land.

Delivery is a person, not a courier. Dave brings the piece — to a house, a studio, a hotel, a venue. Nothing significant arrives in a box on a doorstep, and there is no signature sitting in a carrier's system with your name on it.

What Gets Commissioned

Chains and pendants

The largest category, and the one where the money is most often spent badly. A chain is not one decision, it is several hundred: the total carat weight, how consistently the stones are cut, how well their color is matched, the link profile, and the quality of the setting work that holds it all. Any of those can be quietly compromised while the specification sheet still reads well.

We go through this properly in the VVS guide, including the part most makers leave out: at chain stone sizes, clarity is the specification that matters least, while color matching and setting precision — which are rarely quoted — are what decide whether the piece reads alive or flat.

Tennis pieces

Necklaces and bracelets in a continuous line of stones. The craft question here is uniformity: every stone matched to its neighbors in size, color and cut so the line reads as one object rather than as a row of individual diamonds. Our current tennis and rivière pieces run from roughly $4,400 to $17,600, and you can see them in the bracelet collection.

Single-stone pieces

A bezel pendant, a solitaire, a signature stone that becomes yours. Here the whole decision is the stone, and it is worth taking time over. Dave brings candidates with full grading reports and looks at them with you in ordinary light rather than under a lamp chosen to flatter them.

Fancy colors

Yellow, pink, blue and green stones, natural or lab-grown. This is where the most distinctive pieces come from and where the most money gets lost, because the certificate tells you less than usual. We keep a full fancy colored diamond guide covering how the grading works and what actually drives the price.

What It Costs, Honestly

Our finished necklaces and pendants currently run from about $4,600 to $17,450, and bracelets from about $4,400 to $17,600, with each price stated on the piece. Commissions are quoted rather than estimated, because the stones are the largest variable and get chosen last.

The more useful thing we can tell you is how the price is built. Every piece decomposes into stones, metal, bench hours and margin — and the fourth one is where two identical chains become two different numbers. A price that has to fund a street-level lease, floor staff on commission and pieces sitting in a case is necessarily larger than one that does not. We publish the full breakdown, with live stone prices from our own catalog, in what an engagement ring actually costs. The arithmetic is the same for a chain.

We will also tell you when a specification you have been quoted is doing nothing for you. That conversation costs us margin and we have it anyway, because the alternative is a client who finds out later.

On Discretion

We would rather describe what we actually do than make claims that sound impressive.

There is no public location and no staff, so there is nothing to see and nobody to tell. Dave does not publish client names, does not post finished pieces with a face attached, and does not use commissions as marketing unless you have specifically said he may. If confidentiality needs to be formalized in writing for a particular commission, ask and it will be.

What we will not do is imply a client list we have not been given permission to describe. A jeweler who will name their clients to you is a jeweler who will name you to somebody else.

Timelines That Have to Be Met

A date attached to a piece — a video, a show, an award night, a birthday — changes how the commission is run, and it needs to be said at the start rather than discovered in week three.

Given the date up front, Dave works backward from it: sourcing gets a hard deadline, the bench work is scheduled against it, and if the date is not achievable for the piece you have described, you are told that in the first conversation rather than the last one. Where a timeline is genuinely tight, there are usually options — a simpler setting, a stone already in hand rather than sourced — and those are laid out as real trade-offs rather than quietly taken.

Where We Work

We are based in Winter Park, just outside Orlando, and Dave travels for delivery. Clients across the country commission pieces here, and he brings them in person — New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami, wherever the work is. There is more on how the local side runs on the Central Florida page.

How to Start

1. Describe the piece. A reference photo, a rough idea, or a single sentence. All of them are workable starting points.
2. Get a real number. Not a range designed to get you into a conversation — an honest read on what your brief costs, including if the answer is that the brief and the budget do not meet.
3. See the stones. With reports, and with a plain account of what each is doing well and where it compromises.
4. Take delivery in person. Wherever you are.

Common Questions