The Eternity Band

From a jeweler's point of view, the drive to New Jersey's northern Bergen County is a typical snapshot of American prosperity: a well-spaced string of small, pretty towns with one or two mom-and-pops offering fairly consistent mixes of jewelry, loose stones, and gifts.

Then, for no discernible reason, in a town not appreciably different than the ones preceding, comes a store like Hartgers Jewelers in Wyckoff, with 3,000-plus feet of vaulted neo-French countryside architecture. The interior drips of that strangely attainable wealth that defines early 21st century America: chandeliers, lush carpet, case after case of designer jewelry, 50 feet of Breitling, Patek, Rolex, and other brands. Hartgers boasts the northeast lead in single door luxury watch sales, accounting for roughly half their business.

As with the other half dozen similar success stories I've seen, the answer isn't in timepieces. In Hartgers, that's in a smaller area, given pride of place up a few stairs at the north end. "Last year was big for diamonds," says Jack Hartger, one of four brothers running the fourth generation business. Former 47th Street dealers, the family knows diamonds. And they know their part in the equation. "Watches pay the bills," says Hartger, "but it's a ring here and there, a diamond bracelet, a pendant, that makes the real difference."

A very unusual difference—over two dozen diamond eternity bands—sits in two trays in the center diamond case. It's the full catalog: bridal, fashion, stackables, sets; total diamond weights of under 2 carats to upward of 5; platinum and gold; shared prong, bar, and channel settings; rounds, fancy shapes, and colors, bands pairing diamonds with rubies, sapphires, or emeralds. Northern Bergen County is affluent but not showy, and while sticker prices are healthy, Hartgers keeps styling to a minimum. Half these bands retail in the $3,000 to $6,000 range, the others at $7,000 and up, but almost all are diamond intensive, SKU items, with multiple yearly turns.

The bulk of the truly bread-and-butter bands—topping out at 3 carats total weight—are from Dev Valencia, a New York eternity specialist known as much for well cut, well matched diamonds as their finely-wrought jewelry. "Shared prong is a best seller," says Hartger, showing 1.90 and 2.75 carat total weight pieces. "It's as safe as bar-set or channel, but shows more diamond and less metal." The stones are ideals, or close. The 1.90, all F/VS, is priced at $4,995. The 2.75, G/VS2-SI1, stickers at $6,500. "I have to list a price by law," Hartger says, knowingly, "and Dev Valencia prices for us at triple-key. But as our father taught us, over and over, when there's a profit to be made, make it."

Strictly speaking, however, these aren't for sale. Unless the final stone is left out, leaving a width of metal (or sizing bar) at the back, you can't size an eternity band. Any jeweler solvent enough to own his merchandise, like Hartgers, will see why this wealth of eternity bands is rare. Sizing is crucial to any ring, but more so with an eternity band, an everyday item where a slack fit will cause diamonds and prongs to rub against the middle finger and pinky. "Once in a blue moon," says Greg Hartger, "a client with a size six finger will fall in love with a size six ring, and by that I mean an exact size six, but this is a special order business with five to ten day typical delivery."

Very few eternities have sizing bars. It's a purchase, seemingly, that consumers either commit to or not. For those who like the look but want to save, there's always the partial eternities (half-around and three-quarters), and of course, three, five, seven-stone, and "Journey" rings. None of Hartgers' eternities have the bars, making these two dozen-plus rings, in essence, models.

Very expensive ones. Hartger's bigger eternities, which tend toward fancy shapes, retail north of $10,000, and are not priced at triple-key. Typical mark-up for eternities is key to 2.25. So, even subtracting from Dev Valencia's triple-key structure, I'm looking at tens of thousands outlayed for bread-and-butter "museum pieces." Why would any jeweler willingly increase overhead by such a margin?

ETERNITY'S PERCEIVED VALUE

I get my first clue on the way out of Hartgers, an eternity band Jack shows me almost as an afterthought. The store's most elaborate piece, it's one of those timelessly elegant, one-of-a-kind rings for the suburban society swan, a Gregg Ruth band that lays 2.49 carats of prong-set round yellows between two rows of white baguettes, each row approximately 1.25 carats. That's five carats of diamond, retailing for under $8,000. No one does affordable elegance like Ruth, but it takes a long louping to see how this price is possible. The yellows are very faint and the gold prongs very big and yellow. I've looked at a lot of eternities (and prices) for this story. This one I was off by a good 50 percent. That huge fancy yellow look owes as much to $675 per ounce gold as to diamonds.

A separate SKU number catches my eye. This "one-off" is stock. Gregg Ruth knows the fancy diamond market. I'm guessing he got a price and found the right use for a parcel of faint yellows. Smart business. Nonetheless, it's the initial face-up punch of the piece—not its business end—that keeps speaking to me, telling me volumes about the eternity band. Visually, as a category, and as a business.

"If jewelers share a fault," says Hearts On Fire's Maarten de Witte, "it's in taking their merchandise for granted. Seeing so much of it, particularly bread-and-butter goods, they forget how beautiful a piece can be to a client. The moment you lose track of that, you're back in the price game."

That conundrum defines the eternity band, a bread-and-butter item that walks the line between commoditization and differentiation better than any other category. "From a consumer's point of view," says Torry Hoover, president of Hoover & Strong, the Richmond, Virginia, manufacturer currently adding eternity bands to its patented "Tru-Seat" system, which allows jewelers to set diamonds quickly, "when you buy a $2,000 eternity band, 90 percent of the cost is in the diamonds. So you don't want to chintz out on the band."

Differentiation owes largely to the sizing issue, making the eternity chiefly an independent item. For eternity bands, you need the right size so it's almost always a custom order. Explains David Skuza of Virginia's Guertin Brothers, "It's an equation of thickness, finger size, number of stones. It's engineering to make sure if it's a five, six, seven, or eight, it still looks right. This means it is harder to sell total weight. If you make a five and a seven and a half with the same carat weight, it's a different style, really. Either the stone size changes or the total weight changes."

"The majors," says a large Indian sightholder selling chiefly to the big-box doors, "are publicly owned companies. They have to show quarterly results, and are loathe to carry eternity bands because of the overhang and returns on the books." Many Internet sites "carry" eternity bands, but most are showing catalog boiler-plate. Fulfillment varies from two to five weeks—if the ring fits. That's an eternity. In a nutshell: This category is all about perceived value.

STRIKE UP THE BANDS

A De Beers and N.W. Ayer campaign born, likely, to accommodate the surplus of 1/4 to 1/2 carat polished diamonds emerging from Russia in the late '50s, the eternity was the original multi-stone category. It was hardly the first time someone thought of circling a ring with diamonds. That distinction, like so many innovations, appears to date to Tiffany, in the late 19th century. Auction houses sell scads of early 20th century "eternity bands," but they're mislabeled. The 360-degree bands of that period were "jeweled hoops" or, more commonly, "guard rings," worn as they were between engagement and wedding rings. Cartier designed a set of three for the Duchess of Kent's 1934 betrothal—diamond, blue sapphire, and ruby. (They remain the three principal stackables, though emerald eternities still outperform the other categories of that stone.)

Ayer launched the eternity as a first anniversary gift. Replacing paper, it cut 59 years' wait for the diamond anniversary, and marked, as the joke ran, "the last one when either party would think of love as eternal." But other applications came quickly: Fashion (until the right-hand ring, all 360-degree rings were "eternity bands"). The birth of a child (Pregnancy Today lists the eternity, worn as a solitaire stackable, as the push present for new moms). And April, with its "cyclical" rebirth, coincides as the diamond birthstone month, and, of course, sits in the middle of the all-important bridal season, without which, to wax momentarily poetic, there would be no eternity.

The three-stone has eaten into the eternity's applications as the wedding ring, engagement ring, or anniversary gift, but jewelers sit eternities, correctly, in bridal cases. Manufacturers say that 50 to 90 percent of their business is in the first six months of the year. Jewelers interviewed differ in their breakdown guesses of bridal sales, but most see the eternity less as the wedding band or engagement ring than as an anniversary gift. Ruby is the 40th anniversary, a likely explanation for the huge amount of ruby and diamond eternity bands.

These are all significant business and symbolic applications. All smoke and mirrors, however, in the face of a poorly assembled eternity band. "There's tremendous labor in a well-made eternity," says Ravi Wadehra, president of Dev Valencia, which casts over 20 ounces of platinum a month for eternities. "It's 40 to 45 percent of our business, but a far greater percentage of labor. That begins with the diamonds. For shared prong, table matches and caratages have to be so close. If I'm matching .38s, I can allow .375 or .385 but not .37. And if tables don't match, the eternity look, which is a very special and really, the whole secret to this category, is lost."

"So forget about waving a wand over a parcel of rounds. For princess or baguette, tables have to be, if anything, closer, for optical reasons, but also structurally. If you're doing four-prong, you can space rounds evenly, but for the square and flat shapes, the customer will not want to see space between the diamonds. It compromises the 360-degree look, and it just looks wrong to them."

"There are so many things that can go wrong," says Osnat Gad, president of OGI, the New York house that has become a byword for die-struck platinum and 18k white gold eternity bands. Like Hoover, who creates azured die-struck bands (a process requiring 19th century German tools), Gad feels that the advantages of die-struck goods (consistency, cleaner look, and greater malleability) more often than not outweigh its cost—roughly twice that of cast product.

"With die-struck, you have to plan carefully, because of the different heights involved," she says. "Even more so if you're working with colored stones, and for diamonds and colored stones in a pattern of, say, three and three. That's a headache. There's also considerable art, by which I really mean planning, in getting width correct. This is an eternity band, after all—and prices can be two, three times, higher than half-around or a three-stone. If you're bezel setting, you cannot botch it around any stone, or the look is lost. And if a single stone sits ever so slightly higher, again, lost."

Gad is the consummate eternity artist—her bands are hers alone, and therefore the ones most frequently knocked off. And the ones that spur the creative impulse in consumers. "Particularly with diamond and precious stone combinations," says sales director Lisa Leyman, "I'd say that 20 percent of the time, someone wants to change something." Gad not only minimizes her creative input, but stresses, if anything, the jeweler's technical savvy. "A little small in the fit is time consuming, but okay. We can always shave the inside of the ring. A quarter-size too big, and you have to start from scratch. So it's a question of how you take the measurement, what part of the number on the mandrel [ring gauge] you use, and then conveying that to us." Gad asks clients to measure toward the top (thinner part) of the mandrel, erring, if at all, on the side of caution.

For Steve Copering of Rhode Island's Armadani, a wedding band specialist, the eternity band is a natural expansion not only of product line, but of domestic production, so crucial to turnaround times for a special order business. "I think of it more as a restocking business," he says. Custom work comes as quickly as one to three days—this for hand-carved, hand-stamped goods with fully azured settings—and Armadani's eternity inventory, the full catalog of sets, stackables, fancy colors and shapes, and precious stones, is over two dozen. "For a category that depends so much on the look, and that comes as much from the solidity as the stones or design, you're lost without technical know-how."

Guertin, with a full complement of engineers, creates its eternity bands using fusion-forged extruded tubes in each size, which are then cold-drawn for grain uniformity and then shaped by computerized machine tools. The company works with tolerances of 1/2000th of an inch. In fact Guertin not only creates 1/4 sizes, it makes 1/8 sizes. That drive for precision comes from the high-end consumer, who wants precisely what she wants. "It has to be perfect, it's an eternity band," says Skuza.

It was engineering savvy, and the eternity band, that launched Precision Set, the Dallas manufacturer of machine-set jewelry, two decades ago. Their entire inventory, be it 30 points to upward of five, is marked by an uncommonly solid, streamlined look, regardless of diamond content. All platinum, the stones vary from round to baguette, princess to modified emeralds, asschers, or combinations thereof; settings may be channel, shared prong, and bead. But a Precision Set ring will never be mistaken for another's. The firm trains its staff of 40 exclusively in-house, adapts multi-use operation lathes to their specs, and, like any card carrying Texan, keeps its cards close to the chest.

"The secret's simple enough though," says Precision's Don Jopling. "We machine the product to the stone, not the other way around." Fulfillment, as one might expect, is fast—five days on average—and guild store clients stock, and own, multiple rings, as many as 50. Now roughly half of Precision's business, the firm does the full bridal range, as well as eternity band variants—half-around, three-quarters, spacing bars, and semi-mounts for "solitaire" wedding rings, etc. The half-around and three-quarter eternity with raised main-event diamond has become almost a category of its own.

"But face it," says Jopling, "rings do flop around on your finger. Suddenly, your eternity is a piece of platinum. It is a category people just get, but it's also a category jewelers learn to commit to. Why sell a half-around when you can sell the whole thing at basically twice the price?" That's a rule of thumb, and a head-start for a jeweler faced with the difficult problem of pricing an eternity band for interested clients, particularly if the design mixes fancies and rounds or larger diamonds set between rows of smaller goods. "It does vary with each piece, and can be difficult," says Jopling, "but at the end of the day, the cost of the diamonds is what it is."

THE BUSINESS OF ETERNITY

A funny thing happened to the eternity band in the 21st century as sightholders, affiliates, cutters, and manufacturers headed downstream to find the riches in the niches. For a sightholder-cutter, a single, repeatable piece using upward of 20 stones was worth its weight in platinum. For Pady Shah of K. Girdharlal, a specialist in fine makes of smaller stones, the niche thus far has been in smaller carat weight pieces. Their popularity, he says, "has grown significantly with Journey's introduction. For top customers, we do make eternities with 10 point hearts and arrows, and we've looked into ideals. It's a trial and error area, but I'm optimistic."

For the typical U.S. jewelry manufacturer, a shop with at most, a single diamond buyer, the chance to source parcels of perfectly notched .40 princesses from a sightholder was a godsend. For manufacturers like Dev Valencia, the perfect match is a small to midsize sightholder. "Big enough so I can count on 800 carats of VS goods," says Wadehra, "but small enough so I know that cut will be consistent."

"There's room in the industry for the inflexible commodity, or items that sell strictly on total carat weight," says Bruce Pucciarello of New Jersey's Novell Design Studios, a platinum wedding band maker whose increasing specialty in eternities was a leading motivator for a partnership with a sightholder, currently in the closing stages. "And also room for branded, highly individuated product. The eternity band is the most flexible of commodity products. You are talking as much as 90 percent of the consumer's cost in diamond weight. But also think about how much of it is special order." Special orders have made the eternity the made in America bread-and-butter item.

It's that cost, paradoxically, that has helped Novell expand, with the eternity "right up there on the front burner." They are soon moving to a 25,000 square-foot plant, with an expansion of eternity lines from .75 to 2 carats to now 5 carats and up. "For a metals specialist, and my heart and soul belong to platinum, and always will, the price of the diamonds justifies the cost of the platinum [though Novell is expanding to palladium for less costly goods]. As recently as 1987, the eternity was largely a later-in-life sale, for higher disposable incomes, anniversaries to be marked. But I'm showing 50 percent of the time now as engagement rings, wedding bands, earlier anniversaries."

Part of that rejuvenation is coming from a source that sightholders with extended marketing reach have tapped into very well: mid-America. "We're big on remounts," says Jessica Ben-Ari, independent account executive for high-end jeweler and sightholder affiliate Chad Allison, New York. "And it's not at all uncommon to see the eternity band as the setting for 5 carats of ovals for jewelers in Wichita." A big part of that look comes small so the bulk of Allison's eternities are micro-pavé and two-pointers that walk the line between pavé and diamond as the hero as well as can be done. A typical piece, 1.25 carats total weight with 23 rounds, retails for $3,725.

"We began with eternities about seven years ago, largely as a carry-through item," says Joel Namdar, of New York sightholder affiliate H.J. Namdar, "but the category proved to have a life of its own." They're now unique for carrying eternity programs for middle to high-end independents—from countertop displays and Christmas mailers to next-day restocking for sizes four to nine and co-op advertising. "And, knock on wood," says Namdar, "it's working. Of course, it's a category jewelers are afraid to inventory, so we make it as idiot-proof as possible: three basic styles, but the full price range, from $500 wholesale up to 5 carats plus. At first, the indies are terrified, then we show them this"—a "one-of-a-kind" stock item with tapered baguettes—"and now I can't make them fast enough."

Part of Namdar's success comes from breaking out of the platinum trap, keeping cost down with both white and yellow gold, 14k and 18k, though they also do a lot of platinum. The early lead in palladium eternities belongs to Frederick Goldman's ArtCarved lines. The expansion into eternities came, says a company source, from "jeweler demand. We pride ourselves on innovation, but really, it was those guys who saw the change in their demographic, and told us about it." SI goods, all with spacing bars, the diamonds show big in their unusual double-shared prong settings and pack a lot of punch for the money: 1 carat total weights are $875 and 3 caraters $3,200, both wholesale, with markups ranging from key to 2.5.

"Like so many fashion trends," says Wadehra, "innovation begins in Europe and then comes here." By the time it hits the U.S., of course, diamond content can grow very large, very quickly. So can styling. Designers like Gregg Ruth tend toward fancy colors to increase style and diamond content. At a recent show, Ruth showed me case after case of fancy bands. Many had pink diamonds. "When the market evens off for pinks, even for a second," says Ruth, "I buy."

Designers known for their balance of style and elegance, like Martin Flyer, New York, have found a niche in layering rows of shared prong eternity rows in a single band. By the time you get to triple rows, you're looking at a major wall of diamonds with so little metal it's hard even to think of it as an eternity band. But it is, part of the "Flyer Fit" line, which the designer is marketing in programs. "They're designed either as engagement rings, or as matches for a variety of solitaires," says Alan Flyer. "For the bigger bands, clients will at times wear them on different fingers, even the other hand, so as not to overwhelm the solitaire."

"When you're talking eternity bands in the tens, even hundreds of thousands," says Howard Grant of New York's House of Baguettes, "you're moving almost into a new category, where diamond specific qualities like color and clarity become so much more important. Even in the smaller sizes, color and size have to be very well-matched for the eternity look to succeed. When you're talking 16-stone pieces, total carat weights 10 and up, if clarity, size, and color aren't perfect, forget it."

For a former sightholder like Dehres LLC., New York, specializing in important diamonds, cut is of huge importance. "It's hard enough to put together a suite of stones for a piece like this," says Simon Abraham Zion, showing me the king of eternity bands with 13 carat-plus asschers, D/F, IF/VS2. "Would I want all D/IF, all exactly the same size? Sure. But this is okay."

It's hard to know what such a ring is. Bridal? Evening wear? Anniversary? Maybe it's the 800 pound gorilla, sitting wherever it wants. It brings to mind the childhood game of figuring out the highest number. Is it infinity, or infinity plus one? Or maybe it just brings the eternity full circle.

"When the eternity first appeared under its current name," says Gad, who researched the band for her book Wedding Rings, "diamonds were big. We follow celebrities now, but then it was the wealthy that set the standard, and big meant better. Regardless of diamond content, however, with the eternity, what makes it work is that full, perfect 360-degree look, particularly when it's well made. It's 100 percent, and you can't get bigger than that."