We offer discounts of approximately 15% on our kits and kit packs and a range from 9-25% on our loose rings when buying 5 or more of any one item. We don't offer discounts on tools or components because we carry them as a service to our customers and mark them up only enough to cover the costs of making them available. Quantity prices are marked in the detailed description of each item and our shopping cart will calculate your discount automatically.

We're often asked for wholesale pricing or special discounts for a variety of reasons including mixing ring sizes to total 5ozt, mixing kits for a total of 5, buying multiple tools at the same time, purchasing additional tools of the same brand purchased in the past, etc. and so on. We've spent so much time addressing these special requests that it made sense to take the time to explain our discounts and how they came to be.

Why Wholesale Sometimes Isn't

When we went into business, we planned to begin our discount schedule at 10 troy ounces, with larger discounts at 25, 50 and 100 troy ounces, offering deeper discounts for greater quantities ordered as most of the wholesale suppliers do. We wanted to express our gratitude to people who place large orders with us, so this plan held great appeal.

We soon discovered the problem with that idea. At the deepest level of discount, the prices we charged still had to cover our costs and include some profit or there would be no point in accepting the order, so we would have to work backward from the deepest discount level to determine what the prices would be. So first, we worked out the lowest prices we could afford to sell our rings for while still making enough to cover the best materials, the hours it takes to make them so well and a bit of profit so we could afford to keep the lights on and hire help when needed to grow with demand. That was to be our 100 troy ounce discount price; the minimum we could afford to sell the rings for and stay in business.

The 50 troy ounce level needed to be a nice discount but not as nice as the 100 troy ounce level, so we raised the projected prices a bit for that level. For the 25 troy ounce level, we raised the prices a bit more. For 10 troy ounces, we raised the prices still more. By the time we had a full discount structure worked out the price for a single troy ounce was shocking. We flattened the discount structure, making the increments smaller but the price for a single troy ounce of anything was still much too high. We could never charge those prices and sleep at night.

We went over the numbers at least a hundred times, looking for a way to cut costs. We were already buying wire at the highest discount level so there was no money to be saved on materials. The rings are made by hand and there's no way to save money on the process except by cutting corners that would compromise the quality and that's something we're never going to be willing to do.

We wondered how suppliers of other jewelry components could afford to structure discounts that way... and that's when we realized something significant. If our rings and kits were made by machines, we could run the machines 24 hours a day to make more, thereby cutting our unit costs for each ring and kit, and pass that savings on. If we bought our rings and kits in quantity from a country where people work for $1 a day, we could pass that savings on. But we don't do any of those things. Our rings and kits are made by hand, of the best materials, by skilled people who require a lot of training and practice to get as good at it as our quality standards demand. Cheap things can be made cheaply but doing it right isn't cheap.

So we threw out the plan for tiered discounts and set one discount level at the price we'd calculated for the 100 troy ounce level. Then we did some math and figured out that we saved a little money, between 9 and 25%, on production and packaging with orders for 5-10 troy ounces at a time, as opposed to single troy ounces, and that we save about 15% when we can make and ship five or more of a single kit at a time, as opposed to making and shipping them one at a time. So we added those amounts to our discount prices, made those are single unit prices and set our one discount level at 5 or more of any one item.

That's been our pricing structure ever since. It's fair, it keeps the lights on and we sleep well at night. *s*