Q for Paul from Antwerp

[Phoenix]

Paul,

First, let me say my DH and I LOVEEEE Antwerp and generally everything Belgian. I've personally been to Belgium four times now, once to Brussels, twice to Bruges and one to Antwerp. This last trip to Antwerp was with DH last year and we LOVEEEDDD it, everything!! Really, I mean everything, from the diamonds (even if some are not well cut, I still enjoy looking at them...i am just diamond-mad!

), to the yummy food, to the beatiful cathedrals, to the cleanliness of the place, to the friendly courteous people.

Well, now onto the Q: I just looked at your website (at least I think it's yrs) http://www.craftedbyinfinity.com and noticed 2 things: 1) you don't carry larger stones, say over 3 carat and 2) you don't list yr prices. Why?

I'd love to be able to enquire abt a 3.5 carat, E or F, VS1 or VS2. If you have one, I wouldn't mind travelling to Antwerp to buy it. Good excuse!!

. Plus, my parents live in London, so I can kill 2 birds with the same stone. The trip may not happen until next July or August so this might be a bit premature.

(I realise that maybe I should send you an email, but thought some others here on PS might benefit from some infor from you abt your diamonds).

 

[Paul-Antwerp]

Wow. I think that I never had the honour of such a direct question. Thank you for that.

As for your first question, you are right, the biggest stone that we are carrying right now is just over 2 Carats. Different reasons:

1. We are a relatively small company with limited capital, unlike many of our competitors, who often are in essence a division of huge cutting houses. As such, we have to wisely allocate our capital to the kind of stones that benefit us most.
2. Extreme cut-quality is apparently less in demand in bigger sizes.
3. On the other hand, there is very high demand for average cut-quality in these sizes, thus there is only a small price premium for the premium cut-quality, which leaves us little room to loose the extra weight necessary for our cut-quality.
4. Rough is sold in parcels of a number of stones, and if we would want to cut bigger sizes, we immediately would have to invest in a complete parcel of rough of these sizes. Here also, working independently is a disadvantage for us, since if we were a division of a bigger house, we could probably arrange sourcing of a few rough stones for our cut-quality, while the rest of the rough-parcel could be cut in the average cut.
5. Finally, we could probably do such a size upon request by re-cutting a single stone, which we buy in the open market, but with current high demand for these sizes overall, it is highly unlikely that we find a stone, with which we can do this in a profitable way.

As for your second question on why we do not put pricing on our website. Again, there are several reasons:

1. We are cutters, and as a rule, we do not sell directly to the public. Instead, we work with dealers, and we are happy that our network is slowly growing. We do make an exception of selling directly, if we are faced with a customer in a country, where we have no dealers, but this is an exception. Pricing however in the latter case, will be based upon the normal retail-price, in order to avoid direct competition with our dealers, whom we cherish.
2. Belgian legislation of consumer-protection does not allow companies to communicate net prices, which do not include VAT. As such, if we would put prices, we would have to add the Belgian VAT of 21% to that. Considering that we basically work on similar price-level as that of our competitors, it would look odd if we would put up prices 21% higher than theirs, just because they are in a different legislation. To avoid confusion, it is better for us to not put prices on the site.

I hope that I answered this clearly. Unfortunately, some of my sentences become rather long while explaining, and I hope that it is still clear.

Live long,

 

[Phoenix]

Thanks, Paul. That is very informative. I hope you''ll forgive the directness of my question. I guess that is just how I am as a person but I was hoping that other PS''ers would benefit from the infor too.

Hopefully, by the time I am in Europe next year, you''ll have a bigger stone.

.

Kind regds.

 

[:)]

Yes, that was very informative - Thanks!

 

[Paul-Antwerp]

Date: 11/1/2006 10:39:45 PM
Author: lienTN
Thanks, Paul. That is very informative. I hope you''ll forgive the directness of my question. I guess that is just how I am as a person but I was hoping that other PS''ers would benefit from the infor too.

Hopefully, by the time I am in Europe next year, you''ll have a bigger stone.

.

Kind regds.

I would like to thank you for the directness of your question.

Reading back, I think that I need to clarify one more point. In the past, when faced with requests for sizes, which we did not have available, we would try to locate a stone to re-cut to our specs. Sometimes, this worked out perfectly for the consumer.

However, it is a very difficult path to take.

First, in that case, we would try to buy the starting-stone on the Antwerp market. There is a huge availability here, so we should have the best choice, one would think.

However, AGS-reports are hardly sold here, since the houses cutting these generally have established customer-relationships, mostly in the U.S., and the stones immediately go that way.

The same is basically true for GIA-reports, although there are a lot of stones with GIA available in Antwerp. We found however that, generally, these are stones that are hard to sell to an established professional customer, say a retailer. These are generally ''lucky certs'' with either colour or clarity a grade higher than mostly accepted, or non eye-clean SI''s, or, in the case of reports before 2006, stones with a horrible cut, but with VG or EX polish and symmetry.

Because of this situation, we often have to start working with HRD-graded stones, or IGI, and we have to take into account what would be the final AGS-grade on the stone. Knowing that AGS is particularly strict, especially in clarity, it is extremely difficult to find a starting stone with the following criteria:
- sufficient excess weight above a magic weight, so that recutting does not bring it below that weight
- sufficiently decent cut, so that extra weight loss is minimized
- graded colour and clarity that is most probably the same as the final colour and clarity that AGS will grade

Nowadays, with pricing of average cut big sizes being very high, the exercise is near to impossible.

You could say that we should not care, and just charge, based upon our costs. However, we feel that price should be related to some sentiment of value, and we do not want to sell stones above what we consider true value. Also, since we are guaranteeing a buy-back to our dealers, so that they have the possibility of setting up full-upgrade programs, it is not in our interest to sell stones at a higher price than what we consider reasonable.

I hope that this little extra was informational too.

Live long,

 

[strmrdr]

Just wanted to pop in here and say thanks for the honest and upfront answer Paul.
Its what sets you and your dealers above the pack.
Keep up the good work.

 

[Paul-Antwerp]

Date: 11/2/2006 2:19:42 PM
Author: strmrdr
Just wanted to pop in here and say thanks for the honest and upfront answer Paul.
Its what sets you and your dealers above the pack.
Keep up the good work.

Thank you, Storm. You have just made my day.

This night, I was thinking about something that I should add too.

When we started up Infinity in 2001, and we would be searching on the Antwerp market for stones that were worth to re-cut, dealers tended to give us a break, and sold to us at normal prices.

Nowadays, when they notice that we want to buy a particular stone, they tend to want to hang on to that particular stone, because they know that we see value in it, which they apparently missed. On the Antwerp market, between dealers, one must always negociate on the price, but hardly anyone still wants to move on his asking price, when we start to offer. It is another reason why we did not do any re-cuts in the past years.

Live long,

 

[Phoenix]

Thank you very much, too, Paul, for your honesty and information.