Are you considering going out to buy an engagement ring to celebrate that crucial milestone in your relationship? Are you keen to get a truly great ring – seeing that if your relationship turns into a success; it is the only engagement ring you will ever get to purchase in your life? And are you put off by the ‘one size fits all’ approach employed in the factory made engagement rings that are the most commonly available – so that you are asking yourself whether it is possible to have an engagement ring made to design, just for you and your loved one? Well, in that case, you will be glad to learn that in modern online jewellery stores, that is indeed a possibility: to get an engagement ring made to design, just for you.

The emergence of these online jewellery stores that are willing and ready to design an engagement ring just for you can be traced back to the peak years of the dot com boom, when online stores of all varieties were emerging and when many found themselves really struggling to stay competitive in an online market that was bereft of some constraints (like the geographical constraint) that somehow hinder the other types of markets competition-wise. Faced with this unhindered type and level of competition, many online stores tried to compete on the price-front alone (by undercutting one another, setting up price wars which no one could really win…and so on), but it soon became clear that this was an unsustainable way of doing business.

It is in the search of more sustainable ways of competing that things like the situations where the various stores started exploring competition by things like ‘value-addition’ arose – and in the case of jewellery stores, that was through something like the arrangement where customers have the opportunity to design their own engagement rings, exactly as they wanted them, so that all that would be left for the store would be to supply them with what you told them to.

How exactly does the arrangement work, you ask.

As it turns out, getting to design your engagement ring on these online jewellery stores is not really hard. You just have to make up your mind what it is exactly that you want to come out in your engagement ring, as the first step in this easy process. Having made up what you want in your engagement ring, you describe it to the online store – typically through a form where you define the engagement ring of your dreams in terms of things like colour, style, metal, size and so on. Most even have a software system where you can actual sketch the ring of your dreams, and then upload it to them – to ensure that they really get it right (sometimes including some personalization features, like having your name engraved on the rings). Typically, the online jewellery stores that allow you to design your engagement ring will demand for some deposit before they can start work on it. And surprisingly, most of these stores that allow you to design your engagement ring don’t charge you too much for the ‘privilege’ – and you could find yourself actually paying for the rings you design just as much as you would have paid for the mass produced, ‘one size fits all’ variety.