Please click here to view the latest news:  http://betterthandiamond.wordpress.com

Friday, August 17th:  New website for Jewelry classifieds and auctions:  Our message boards had a buy/sell/trade forum that ended up outgrowing their space, and so we've expanded it into a full blown jewelry classified and auction website.  If you are interested in selling jewelry you own, or in finding a bargain from someone else, this is the place to look. 

To kick off the website, we are currently running a 'giveaway' auction on a brand new strand of Amara 16" 10mm Tahitian shell pearls - the auction starts bidding at $1, and no reserve.  It ends however, this Sunday, Aug. 19th, 5:59PST.

You can view the site and register to bid, buy and sell here:  http://DiamondBistro.com

Sunday, August 12th:  Added 2 new P/T setters:  Our sales are up 30% vs a year ago, and it has created an unseasonable backlog...so we have brought in two new P/T setters to assist and have been working hard (6 days/week) to bring our backlog of orders down without sacrificing quality.  Both setters have previous Blue Nile experience, something that we now use basically as a hiring criterion.  Thus, our production capacity has increased and we are now rapidly bringing down the order backlog in order to revert to more normal turn-around time on most ring orders.

*Our message boards have been upgraded:  We've upgraded the software for our community message boards and the result is an improved browsing and viewing experience.  If you are interested in talking about various jewelry purchases with other customers from around the world (literally), please drop by and say hi:  http://betterthandiamond.com/discussion

*Large Asha restock:  To handle our continued sales growth, we recently completed the largest batch of Ashas we have ever done (3,000+ in one batch).  Thus, a number of previously sold out stones (including 2ct and 2.75ct H&A rounds, as well as cushions, asschers) are now in stock.  Unfortunately, just as we completed a large batch for the rounds, we have now sold out on several princess sizes.  Another batch is now in cutting for that.

Thursday, July 12th:  Pearls, Palladium, Rubies, Sapphires and Earrings -- Oh My! We had a lot of little things to update on the site so here is a quick run down on what happened. We temporarily removed the ordering of our Amara South Sea Pearls since the stringer we have been using has become unreliable. We will enable the ordering again when the situation is resolved. Due to the popularity and benefits of using Palladium over white gold, we have discontinued many of the white gold options in favor of Palladium for many of the rings we currently offer. The next batch of Cultured Rubies is now in stock and the ruby page has been updated to reflect the new availability. The Asha 4 Prong Stud Earrings page has now been moved to it's own page in the earring section and a new weekely special will be posted shortly. Finally, we have the last batch of Cultured Sapphires in 6.5mm and 7mm Asscher cuts for all colors added to the site.

Our Kashmir Blue Cultured Sapphire.

Our Tiffany reproduction with a 1.01ct, Ideal cut, Internally Flawless, D color natural diamond.

*Customer photo gallery now online:  We've had a large number of customers posting photos of their rings and Asha's on our message boards, and so we've gone through and put a number of these photos into an online customer photo gallery - you can these customer photos here!

*Phasing out white gold for rings in lieu of Palladium:  We've gotten excellent feedback on our rings being made in pure palladium, and as a result we are planning to discontinue white gold for our rings this summer.  If you are not familiar with palladium, here is a quick summary.  

Palladium is a platinum metal group, and thus shares in the most of the same benefits of platinum - a pure, steel-white color and hypoallergenic.  Palladium is approximately 10% stronger than platinum, and a few years ago (2000), cost nearly 2x as much as platinum.

By comparison, white gold is yellow gold mixed with an alloy to make it whitish color (usually nickel).  Since it still has a yellow tint, white gold is then coated in rhodium (another platinum metals group metal) to give it a platinum like look.  Unfortunately, the rhodium will wear off over time, resulting in two problems:  
a)allergies - the nickel in the white gold is now exposed to the skin where the rhodium has worn away, and 10-20% of the population is allergic to nickel and 
b)changing color - spots on the ring where the rhodium has worn will become yellow tinted, not the pure white it was when first purchased.  The fix is a steady supply of re-plating in rhodium, or better, choose palladium and avoid the issue entirely.

For these reasons, for all of the jewelry we make in house we are planning to discontinue white gold as the price of palladium is the same as 18k white, and with all of the additional benefits, the choice of which metal is better is very clear.  

Wednesday May 15th:  New CAD system now in-house for our upcoming jewelry designs:  Due to the large demand for new styles of jewelry, and our dis-satisfaction with the results of most external designers, we have purchased our own high-end CAD design system for jewelry and brought a designer in-house.  We'll be showing some of our new items next month at our upcoming jewelry website for high-end items at http://TimelessRings.com (note: site is very much under construction now...)

Etoile bands made using our new CAD system - natural diamond, sapphire and ruby

*Flanders 1ct now in stock: We've had a number of requests to offer the Flanders in a smaller size, and are pleased to announce that the 1ct size is now available.  We will further be using this stunning cut in some upcoming stud and dangle earrings (2.0ctw).  Our Flanders page is here.

Flanders in the Sun - details here.

Wednesday May 2nd:  Price increases of approx. 10% on most jewelry items:  Due to metal prices jumping nearly 5% the past 30 days alone, which we found out the hard way when our monthly metal bill arrived,  combined with diamond melee price increases, and UPS shipping rate increase of 5% in January...we have been forced to raise prices on our jewelry (metal) items by roughly 10%.  Many of the rings have been updated, the remainder should be done by the end of the week.  We have not raised prices from previous metal price jumps, hoping prices would subside, but at this point we either have to increase prices or start skimping on quality.  Decreasing our quality is not an option, so hence expect prices on our jewelry to be raised on average 10%.

*New website featuring our jewelry:  The quality of our jewelry is clearly being noticed by diamond purists, as we have been getting more and more orders from customers ordering without center stones to put their natural diamonds into.  Thus, this summer we intend to launch a separate site featuring a number of our upcoming micropave pieces, as well as our current reproduction rings, where the focus will be on our in-house manufactured jewelry rather than the Asha simulant.  We expect this will allow us to sell to customers who would assume our jewelry is otherwise lesser quality due to our primary center stones being the Asha diamond simulant instead of natural diamonds.  (Note -the new site will be located at http://TimelessRings.com) 

*Asha passes XPS testing at independent laboratory:  With the jewelry news aside, we are pleased to note that a sample Asha was sent off for independent XPS (Xray Photoelectron Spectroscopy) testing to independently show that the Asha does have a diamond coating.  The results were as expected:  "The principal element found at the surface is Carbon".  More details, as well as photos from the independently performed contacted angle testing, is shown on our independent testing page here.

*Asha subjected to independent contact angle testing to show proof of coating:  We recently sent a complete Asha (with amorphous diamond coating) and uncoated (polished core) to the premiere independent contact angle testing lab, Future Digital Scientific (www.fdsc.com) and asked them to perform contact angle testing on both samples.  

Contact angle testing is basically dropping a measured amount of water on a surface and recording the angle that the water droplet takes on it.  Because water contains billions of hydrogen atoms, they act like tiny feelers and react differently (the water beads at different angles) depending on what the material they are on consists of - it has been used for example to differentiate authentic antique coins from otherwise indistinguishable fakes, as well as used at other diamond coating labs to serve as proof of coating.  

The results were very dramatic - we'll have a full writeup shortly, but you can see the comparison photos for yourself on our boards at this thread.

Asha being loaded for the amorphous diamond infusion process

Wednesday, March 7th:  50% growth, new setter, lots of work to be done:  Our sales have increased 50% over a year ago, but its also brought some new challenges towards ensuring good turnaround on our more complicated rings.  

We switched in January to a much larger caster but the transition was very painful in terms of delays for getting orders out for our Cartier and Harry Winston reproductions.  The good news is that the quality of our new caster is outstanding, the short term bad news was that due to the transition, many of our rings took much longer than usual to complete. 

We've gotten through the bulk of the transition issues, and rings are flowing again much more smoothly.  We hope in fact that within another month to be under 3 weeks turnaround for all ring orders, and due to the size of the new casters, will are now much better positioned to keep up with order growth going forward.

*New diamond setter:  To help keep up with our growth, we've added another setter with some reasonable experience (36 years :)...meaning we now have nearly 60 years of setting experience between our two setters and that is further cementing our ability to offer only the best setting work.

*Website traffic growth:  Our site is also experiencing a large increase in visitors, topping over 15,000 visitors per day on two seperate days last week.  We are currently hiring for a full-time webmaster to assist us.

*Sold out of some Asha cuts:  We have sold out again for 2ct Princess and Flanders Asha.  As a result, we are currently cutting double the normal amount of inventory we usually stock and those will be ready in April.  

*Limited phone support:  We have installed a new PBX phone system and will be adding limited phone support expressly for customers with existing orders.  This is to counter the occassional problems where our emails (order confirmation, status and shipping) are being absorbed by spam filters or rejected outright by their email server resulting in lots of confusion (i.e. they email, we email back, they email again asking why we aren't responding...etc).  This will also serve as a secure line for customers to call who need to update their payment info for incorrectly entered cards.  We are working to expand that to a line for handling general sales questions, but for now it will only be expressly for customers with existing orders. 

*Diamond Nexus Labs product reviewed and exposed:  The International School of Gemology recently reviewed Diamond Nexus Labs, a simulant maker and competitor who advertises that their product is a "flawless synthetic diamond" and "perfect man-made diamond", as well as one that contains a diamond vapor deposition (implying they do a diamond coating like the Asha).  The reality is that their product, when subjected to gemological testing, is an ordinary CZ.  

You may read the full report for yourself here:
http://www.yourgemologist.com/DiamondNexusLabs.html

Saturday, February 18th:  New jewelry items on the way:  We have been having record sales, which is fantastic but also a bit stressful...we are currently in the process of trying to hire more shipping and setting staff to handle our growth, as well as an additional web programmer.  We are still working to continue flushing out our own jewelry lines at the same time, and hope to show off a new ring and two new earrings in the next two weeks (including princess dangles that will be offered via our weekly special). 

Pink Asha makes its debut:  After over one year of research, we are pleased to have perfected our new Pink Asha - we believe it is the most realistic 'pink diamond' simulant on the market.  Unlike many cz pinks, ours are a natural looking pink and not a 'bubble gum' pink.  We currently have rounds available and will shortly offer pink Asschers and princess cuts as well:

Our pink Asha (1ct round)

Saturday, January 27th:  Micropave items will be making their return:  We are working with a new casting house that has two micropave setters on staff, and so we are looking forward to bringing back our halo micropave designs by March.

*New software conversion:  We are about halfway done with moving our entire company over to a whole new order management system, that will include live inventory on the website.  We hope to have it fully completed by the end of February.

*Lets talk about Zolastar:  As mentioned in our earlier news, Zolastar (http://www.Zolastar.com) was one of three diamond simulants that was purchased by the International School of Gemology (posing as a consumer) to independently test various diamond simulants and see how their advertising claims stood up to gemological testing (aka reality).

The results for Zolastar were...not good.  Despite their claims to be a lab-grown sapphire coated with "diamond glazing" and a hardness of 9.3Mohs, the reality is that Zolastar was shown to be regular CZ with a lot of deceptive claims being made. 

Excerpt: 
"We severely scratched the Zolastar, and quite easily I might add, with.....a cubic zirconia. Meaning that the Zolastar cannot have a hardness above the 8.5 average of a cubic zirconia, and no where near their claim of 9.3 or harder than sapphire.

...We proved that neither of the Zolastar gemstones sent to us was synthetic corundum. In fact, we proved that each was a cubic zirconia.

...The bottom line is that the Zolastar stone we received did not fulfill their claims in virtually every category that we tested. "

The full report on Zolastar has now been posted on their website here:
http://www.yourgemologist.com/Zolastar.html

Diamond Nexus was similarly revealed to be....ordinary CZ.  

Only the Asha was shown to in fact have a hybrid diamond coating - we will shortly have additional testing results posted including contact angle goniometry and XPS analysis of the Asha.

Tuesday, December 19th:  Thanks for a great year:  We have been too busy to post much under the news section, but we are rapidly winding down and just have a few rings to complete and ship before we close tomorrow.

We had record sales again this year, and we are working hard to respond to a number of improvements you have requested to our site.  We're planning to move to a much more sophisticated order management software system which will allow real-time, automatically updated inventory in January for example.

*More earrings:  Our earring sales have exploded this year, and we were hard pressed to keep up with orders this holiday season.  As a result, we will be stocking our earrings 20 deep for each design and size, as well as adding a number of new styles including lever backs and dangles starting in January.  

Friday, September 8th:  Tiffany reproduction now available in pure palladium:  We're pleased to announce that our popular Tiffany reproduction engagement ring and matching wedding band are now available in palladium.  We are continuing to expand our palladium offerings, as palladium has really become our preferred metal - almost all the benefits of platinum (no allergy issues, no plating required, 10% stronger than platinum and a beautiful pure white color) but at 18k white gold pricing.
Details and pricing are available at our Tiffany reproduction page here. 

Our Tiffany reproduction wedding set, now available in palladium

*New Knowledgebase system to replace our old 'FAQ' section:  We've upgraded our common questions section from a standard list of common questions to a dynamically searchable 'answerbase'.  We're continuing to add info into it, but it should make finding answers to common questions vastly easier.  Take it for a spin here, or just click on the FAQ menu item above.

Thursday, September 7th:  Server software upgrades complete - sorry for the downtime!  If you visited between Tuesday or Wednesday you may have noticed we weren't online...we had a scheduled '3 hour' upgrade for our server software that turned into a complicated 50 hour upgrade.  With a new hard drive and upgraded PHP, we are now back online again and with some better performance to boot.   

The reason for the upgrade was to better handle our increasing web traffic - we've gone from 5,000 visitors per day in May to nearly 10,000 per day now and thus needed to upgrade some infrastructure to keep up.  We certainly hope any future upgrades won't be needed for a while, and when they do, we'll look at setting up a backup server first next time after this experience!  

*Two new pendants coming:  We'll have a new diamond pendant for our cultured Colombian emeralds, as well as the new "Dew Drop" pendant for the Asha rounds (palladium) available next week!

Thursday, August 10th:  Princess 2ct and Asscher 1.5ct and 2ct restocked!  Based on your email requests, we are pleased to have restocked the Princess 2cts and Asscher 1.5 and 2ct sizes!

Asha Asscher showing its sparkle

 Our Asscher page is here, and the Princess page is here!

Monday, July 31st:  Palladium will be offered as a metal choice for some of our new upcoming jewelry!  Due to the continuing rise in platinum prices, we are going to start offering a new platinum group metal for some of our new jewelry, palladium.  Palladium, like platinum, is cast at 95% purity, and thus offers the same hypoallergenic benefits as platinum (vs. white gold, which about 20% of customers are allergic to due to the nickel alloy).  Further, being a platinum group metal, it has a pure 'white' look like platinum, but is actually 10% harder than platinum.  

Finally, the most important aspect is thats its pricing is very similar to that of 18k white gold, which means the ability for us to offer customers the many benefits of platinum but at pricing similar to white gold.  We've written a more detailed article about palladium here.  

We will have two new pendants and a new three stone ring available next week as the first jewelry items available in palladium. 

Monday, March 6th:  Restocking for some fancy cuts by first week in April!  Due to a large reseller order for fancy cuts, we will have roughly 25-50 new Asha's available as a limited offering for Flanders, Asscher and Emerald.  These should be ready by the first week in April.  If you would like to be notified of when they are available, please visit the respective cuts webpage and sign up for the Asha inventory email notification. 
(Flanders page is here / Asscher page is here / Emerald page is here)

Princess cuts largely sold out, will be restocked by first week in April!  We are also completing a large amount (several hundred) princess cuts to restock our sold out Princess cut inventory.  These will also be ready about the first week in April.

Continued growth in our website traffic!  We are happy to report that our website is continuing to grow, with an average of over 5,000 visitors per day and an all-time high of nearly 9,000 visitors last week (Wednesday).  We will be adding two new ring vendors to offer you additional choices of jewelry to set your Asha center stone into shortly to help keep the website growing!

Platinum prices up nearly 20% from last year, gold up nearly 30%:  Metal prices are continuing to climb, and we will have to go through this week and raise prices on a number of our rings to account for this continued increase.  The principal cause for this rise seems to be the growth of China's middle class, which is now bidding for the same annual platinum and gold supplies.  It was announced today that China is now the largest consumer of platinum for ornamental (jewelry) purposes.  Article link, click here.

Friday, January 20th:  Earring sales are exploding!  Over the past year, our earring business has truly exploded, and we are currently working on stocking all of our earrings pre-stocked at least 60 pair deep to keep up with demand.  As a result, we will be focusing even more on earrings, and less on rings this year.  

Related to the huge increase in earring sales, we have had an even more elegant earring box made for our earrings.  We made the switch to the new boxes the first week of January, so it is now the default box for all earring orders.  Photos coming shortly, but it is an brown lacquer, all-wood box with a very sophisticated look.  Because we were able to order it in very large volume, we were able to purchase these at the same price point per box as our previous black-lacquer wood boxes.  Thus, an even nicer look for gifting and at the same price due to the volume growth!

Dangle earrings:  We've also received a number of requests to add some form of dangle (leverback, lever-wire) earrings to our selection.  We have been reviewing a number of new styles, testing proto-types, and hope to select a winner and add these to the site within the next month!

Monday, October 17th:  Monthly special on Asha Princess Scroll earrings!  We're offering the best pricing we've ever been able to offer on our princess scroll studs - $199 for 1.5ctw,and $299 for 2ctw.  Special pricing ends October 31st though - our princess earrings are here!

 
Our Asha Princess earrings showing off their sparkle!

Monday, April 25th:  Clearance sale on our Platinum Cove Saltwater stud pearl earrings (AAA grade)!  We have put the last of our AAA grade, saltwater pearl stud earrings on clearance.  We have approximately 20 pairs left, and these will not be restocked after these are sold.   Most of these are now selling at 1/4 their appraised value, and all earrings ship with an independent appraisal card (independently showing that these are excellent lustre, thick nacre, top of the line saltwater pearls).    Details are here at our pearl earring page - these make for a perfect Mothers Day gift!

Asha round updates:  We have completed cutting the next batch of Asha H&A rounds, and are now starting the amorphous coating process.  We are still on track to have these ready for sale in May.  We will have .25ct, 1.5ct, 2.0ct and 2.75ct available with the next batch.  

New regional retailer of Asha!:  We are pleased to announce a major regional jewelry chain (Corey's Jewel Box) is now carrying Asha earrings in half of their retail locations.  Centered around the Michigan area, this will allow those in this area to easily see and purchase Asha earrings in person.  Based on the feedback from the first weeks sales, many of the stores have already sold out of the initial allotment, so please call ahead to make sure they have stock!

The list of their store locations is here!

Sunday, March 13th:  v5 Princess scroll earrings now pre-stocked!  We completed setting a number of our remaining v5 Princess Asha's into our top-selling Princess scroll earrings.  We thus have 8 pairs of 2.00ctw, set in 14k white gold, available for shipment within 48 hours of your order!  More info and online shopping here! 

*Cheap jewelry kills (literally!) - lead tainted jewelry recall:  A 6 year old girl recently died of lead poisoning after putting her necklace charm in her mouth. If you or your kids have any 'charm' type jewelry that meets the following criterion, snatch it away asap and return it.

"The mostly silver-color charms, made in China, were sold in packages of two to 12 pieces for $3 to $4 at Michaels Stores from July 2002 to February 2005; at ReCollections from October 2004 to February 2005; and at Hancock Fabrics from January 2004 to January 2005."

"Consumers are urged to take the charms from children and contact the company at 800-873-5506 or e-mail [email protected] to receive a refund."

More info here at msnbc news:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7076915/