A bespoke price is never one number pulled from the air. It is the stone, the metal, the hours of bench work, the setting of that stone, and the hallmarking, added together. We would rather walk you through each of those parts at the very start than hand you a total and hope it lands well.
What actually makes up a price
Most of a commission's cost sits in the stone and the metal. Its carat weight, colour, clarity and origin, tend to matter more than any other single decision, because diamond pricing does not move in a straight line with size: cost accelerates past thresholds like 0.5, 1 and 2 carats. After the stone comes the metal itself, platinum costing meaningfully more than 18ct gold both in raw material and in the bench time it demands, since it is denser and slower to work. The time our designers spend with you before a single tool touches metal: the consultation, the sketching or CAD rendering, the rounds of revision until a design is right, at Lark & Berry this is complimentary, as you will want to gauge the design and cost before you commit. Bench labour, the actual making of the piece, sits alongside stone-setting, which is its own distinct skill, and finally hallmarking, a small but legally required cost on any UK gold or silver piece over the qualifying weight. Add it all together and a bespoke commission starts from as little as £500, though that figure marks the beginning of the range rather than a typical total, since the stone, the metal and the amount of work involved can take a piece well beyond it.
Our design and consultation time is free, we like to educate.
We don't put a separate line on your quote for design consultations, because there isn't a separate design fee to itemise. That doesn't mean the time is free to produce, only that we've chosen to see this as an exercise in education, after all a bespoke piece is usually of high value or importance, therefore we want you to be 100% comfortable with what we are offering. We think that's the more honest way to price a relationship that often runs across several conversations, and it's also why we don't cap revisions at a set number: we keep refining the design, CAD included, until you're happy with it, even if you want to start over on something different. A client who arrives with a reasonably clear sense of what they want, a saved image, a family piece they admire, a word or two for the feeling they're after, gets to a finished design faster, and that efficiency benefits everyone.
Why the stone usually decides more than the setting does
If you've read anything about bespoke pricing before, you'll have seen figures suggesting the stone can account for anywhere from a third to well over half of a total commission cost, more as the budget rises. That matches what we see on the bench. A bigger or higher-grade stone doesn't need a proportionally bigger setting; the claws, the bench hours, the polishing are broadly similar whether the centre stone is modest or substantial. So when a client wants to stretch a budget further, we often talk first about the stone, because that's where the largest single lever sits, before we talk about setting complexity or metal. Our reference site Commissioned has a fuller breakdown of what a bespoke ring costs in the UK, if you want the detail behind the proportions.
Why we'd rather discuss budget first, not last
The single most useful thing a client can do at a first consultation is name a number. Not because we're precious about it, but because a budget discussed openly at the start lets us design toward something achievable, rather than designing something beautiful and then discovering, at the quote stage, that it needs to be quietly scaled back. We would always rather have that conversation early, plainly, and without embarrassment on either side. A budget is not a constraint we resent; it's the frame that makes a design decision meaningful, because every choice, stone size, metal, setting complexity, is a trade-off against every other, and you're the only person who can say which of those trade-offs matters most to you.
Talk to us before you commit to a figure
If you're weighing up what a commission might cost before you've settled on a design, that's exactly the right moment to come and talk to us. We'd rather help you think through the trade-offs at a consultation than have you guess at a number alone.
