Why this is so hard to find out
Search for a bespoke engagement ring in Singapore, cost included, and you will get a great deal of prose containing no number at all. Enquire, and you will usually be invited in for a chat.
There is a defensible reason for that and a less defensible one. The defensible reason is that bespoke genuinely varies — the same brief in two different stones and two different metals is two different figures, and quoting before anyone has said what they want is guessing. The less defensible reason is that a number on a web page lets you compare, and comparison is inconvenient for a trade that prefers to hold the conversation on its own floor, in its own lighting.
We would rather be plain. Commissions here start at US$3,000, and the final figure is confirmed at consultation rather than assembled while you sit there.
Where the money actually goes
Four things move the number, and they move it by very different amounts.
The stone. This is most of it, and the range is enormous. Carat weight drives price steeply rather than proportionally — the jump from one carat to two is not double — and colour and clarity move it again. Two stones at the same weight can sit a long way apart on the same invoice.
The metal. Real money, but nothing like the stone. Platinum costs more than gold to buy and more to work. Eighteen carat costs more than nine and behaves better over a lifetime of being worn every day. A heavier band uses more of it.
The making. Design, modelling, setting, finishing. Someone spends hours on this and those hours are not the free part, though a great many people assume they are. Intricate settings cost more because they take longer and because there is more to go wrong.
The certification and everything after. Independent grading, insured delivery, sizing. Individually small, collectively not nothing.
What is worth noticing in that list is how little of a bespoke engagement ring's cost, in Singapore or anywhere, is brand. In a case at a mall you are also paying for the case, the mall, and the advertising that brought you to both.
Why the prices are in US dollars
Everything underneath a diamond is priced internationally in USD. Growth capacity, rough, gold. Holding retail prices in Singapore dollars would mean quoting in one currency while paying in another and absorbing the gap, which is a good way to be quietly wrong for a year.
So the figures are in USD and convert on the day. For an American reader that means the number on this page is simply the number. For a Singapore one it means a conversion at whatever the rate is when you commit, rather than a padded local price with the currency risk already baked into it and no way to see how much.
It is not an affectation and it is not there to make the figure look smaller.
What a biological commission adds
A commission using your own carbon costs more than a conventionally sourced stone of the same specification, and it is worth being direct about why.
Part of it is process. The sample is collected and sealed under a documented chain of custody, and every stage is recorded, and the paperwork at the end — a physical Certificate of Biological Origin — exists because provenance you cannot see has to be provenance you can prove.
The other part is not a cost at all, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. A one-of-a-kind stone grown from carbon that was part of the two people getting married is not the same object as a stone bought from a tray, and it is not priced as though it were. You are welcome to decide that is not worth it to you. Some people do, and they are not wrong.
Which is exactly why Custom exists: a conventionally sourced lab-grown stone, chosen and set by us, with no biological contribution at all. It costs less because it is a different thing. We keep the two apart on purpose and we will never let one be sold as the other.
If you are not in Singapore
Most of the arithmetic above is not local. A stone costs what a stone costs, gold trades globally, and the hours it takes to set a ring properly do not vary much by postcode. Someone commissioning from New York and someone commissioning from Bukit Timah are looking at the same drivers in the same order.
What does differ is everything around the object. Retail mark-ups vary enormously between markets, and the gap between what a bespoke maker charges and what a mall case charges is much wider in some cities than others. Any duties or local taxes on arrival are a matter for your own jurisdiction and are worth checking before you commit, from us or from anyone.
The commission itself does not require you to be here. Consultation happens wherever you are, delivery is insured and signed for worldwide, and the sample is collected at your own barber, stylist or groomer — an appointment you were having anyway, in whatever city you have it in.
What US$3,000 does not buy
It does not buy a three carat stone, and anyone implying otherwise is either about to substitute the specification or about to substitute the material.
The entry point buys a real diamond, independently graded, set in a piece designed for the person wearing it and made properly. What moves you above it is almost always stone size, then metal, then how intricate the setting is. If your budget is fixed — and most people's are, and there is nothing embarrassing about saying so out loud — the sensible order is to fix it first and let the stone be chosen to fit, rather than fall in love with a stone and then find out.
How to have this conversation without being handled
Say your budget early. The fear is that naming it means being sold exactly up to it, and with some jewellers that fear is well founded. But withholding it means every option you are shown is a guess, and the guesses tend to point upward.
Then ask what changes if the stone is a quarter carat smaller. If the answer is a meaningful saving and a difference nobody will ever notice on a hand, that tells you something useful about the pricing. Ask what the grading report says before you become attached to anything. And ask what is not included, because delivery, sizing and certification are the usual places a quoted figure turns out to have been the beginning of a sentence.
A jeweller who answers those four questions plainly is one you can work with, whether or not it is us.
Where to start
Commissions start at US$3,000, quoted in USD wherever you are, delivered insured and signed for worldwide. The collection shows the forms this tends to take, and an enquiry costs nothing — tell us the figure you have in mind and we will tell you honestly what it reaches, including when the answer is that you would do better elsewhere.