What is a Custom Project at OURI?
OURI specializes in custom projects that celebrate the biggest events of your life to the small celebrations of your everyday.
There is so much more than what you see from the front that goes behind making the perfect jewelry. We create your pieces from ground up, including the mix of metals to type of final polish you want. We guide you through the entire process by answering all of your curiosities and necessary information for your benefit. The more you ask, the more we can land the exact piece you want. We foster educational experience for our clients to know exactly what they are buying and creating with us.
Custom projects include:
Engagement Ring/Jewelry
Wedding Ring/Jewelry
Custom Gift Jewelry
Heirloom Remakes
Remake of Jewelries
Learn about our processes in custom creations and why you would choose to work with us:
Fine jewelry at OURI
Make your own meaningful jewelry
OURI Processes:
Private Consultation
Custom Design Drafting
Custom Gemstone Sourcing/Cutting
Careful Production
Appraisal
Follow-up / After-service
Private Consultation
In starting a custom project, we begin by gathering all of the detailed information on your needs and desires for your own custom fine jewelry. Whether it is for a milestone celebration or a custom gift to yourself, we take our time learning about what would make you the perfect piece.
One of the most important step in this process is communicating exactly what you are looking for in terms of design, size, quality/grading, and budget. We will make sure every aspect of the piece is communicated between us to set us for success together. This allows us to have a frame to work within, making sure we are spending our time and efforts in the right place and guide you through the confusing and complicated process of jewelry production.
This step is where we determine if we are a right fit for each other and make sure OURI can provide exactly what you are looking for. If this process goes well and you are ready to commit to starting a project with us, we will guide you to place an order of Custom Project to get started.
Custom Design Drafting
Design work usually takes clients about two to four drafts to figure out exactly what they want. The process begins on the basis of the details we communicate during the consultation step, where we start with a number of broad design options to then narrowing down to the exact design you want. Details in this process can include the style of the setting, the thickness and width of the band, to even the style of prongs they want. The entire ring is customizable.
Custom gallery design: Heart detail on the left and right of the gallery & Alpha sign on the top and bottom of the gallery.
Because every aspect of the ring can be customized, clients are able to add hidden or prominent features to the ring that is meaningful and intimate to the wearer.
Design process can continue to be edited up until the point we cast the piece into metal. Because design ideas can sometimes not be as wearable or functionable as a daily-wear fine jewelry, so we may advise you throughout the process to make sure we create a piece that is not only beautiful and meaningful, but also wearable and long lasting.
3. Custom Gemstone Sourcing/Cutting
After we land the exact design you love, we start the process of gemstone sourcing. Sometimes the design may be so unique that we have to custom cut diamonds or gemstones to fit the design. We inform you of this before we proceed and we move according to your budget. No surprises anywhere. Everything is communicated every step of the way. We prefer to over-communicate to keep you fully aware of what is being created and where your money is going, rather than showing up with surprises of extra costs or the pieces appearing to you as something completely different than what you thought it’d look like.
This process includes us showing you different options of sizes, quality, gems’ origin, colour, shapes, and prices. We show you what is within your boundaries, and allow you to make the decision with our professional guidance to land the perfect stone for you and your needs.
4. Careful Production
At OURI, we work with highly skilled goldsmiths who specialize in high-end jewelry production. We also have in-house goldsmith to further inspect every jewelry that we create to make sure we see everything at 10x magnification to ensure perfection. Every piece at OURI fine is hand-made, so we take our time in making sure we find and fix every small human errors before they land in your hands.
Because we work with very small batches of projects and ensure thorough inspection every step of the way, custom production can take anywhere between 2 to 8 weeks. The production time depends heavily on the complication of the design and whether we need to custom cut and fit the stones.
We consider not only the physical look and aesthetic of the jewelry, but how they are worn by the wearer, so we inspect the wearability during our production. This can include looking into how you tend to wear your jewelry, your habits and needs. As an example, we create stronger basket for those of who tend to knock their hands on surfaces to ensure the durability of the basket holding the stones. Sometimes you may like to never take them off of you, so we make the jewelry as comfortable as possible to live with day to day.
5. Appraisal
Every custom jewelry is offered an appraisal. This is done at our office in Vancouver, BC, and it is a complimentary offer. If the item is over $2500 CAD, we give you the appraisal without asking for record keeping purposes.
Appraisal is useful for you to keep a record of your fine jewelry, because it includes every detail of the jewelry and the current market price of the piece. This appraisal can be then taken to your insurance company to protect it in case lose the item. Depending on your insurance company, this allows you to be fully compensated and create the exact piece again according to the appraisal, if you lose your piece.
6. Follow-up / After-service
At OURI, we believe that the pieces we create are forever our duty to ensure it is loved and long lasting as a fine jewelry should be. Once the jewelry leaves our hands to meet its forever home, we follow up with the client to confirm their satisfaction. Although we cannot follow up with every client to come in for cleaning or retouching every year, we welcome all of our clients to reach out to us to have their pieces looked into for deep cleaning, repolishing, retipping, resetting, resizing, etc anytime they need it. The habit of getting good maintenance services for your fine jewelry allows you to enjoy your pieces for a long time.
We recommend getting your jewelry regularly cleaned and checked by us to make sure there are no build ups of dirt and oil covering your beautiful jewelry, but also to prevent further damages that can be hidden by surface dirt.
You can email us anytime to see if you would like to bring them in for yearly cleaning or fixing at a small cost. Cleaning is done in house and is complimentary for all of OURI fine jewelries.
