No one in this trade publishes how their prices are made. We think that silence costs buyers more than any margin does, so here is ours: what you are paying for, why our numbers look the way they do, and where we make our living.
What the trade charges
Some context you are rarely given. The traditional fine jewellery baseline is keystone: retail at twice wholesale. Industry data from 2025 puts average retail margins on lab-grown diamonds near 74 per cent, roughly four times cost, precisely because the stones got cheap faster than their price tags did. Loose natural diamonds run leaner, commonly 1.2 to 1.8 times cost online and more in a showroom. None of this is scandal. Rent, staff, insurance and risk are real. But it is worth knowing what the quiet numbers are before anyone tells you a price is special.
How this house prices
Our model is simple and we are content for you to know it. A finished piece is priced from what it truly contains: the stone as we bought it, the metal at weight, the making, and a house margin that keeps the doors open. On loose stones our margin declines as the stone's value rises, so the large stone is never punished for being large. We hold no showroom floor of aging inventory to finance, and most pieces are made to order, which is why the margin can stay lean without the business being fragile.
Two registers, deliberately. Our own pieces carry house prices: round, settled, decided. The loose stones in our search carry market prices, precise to the dollar, because they are priced from the live market each day and the precision belongs there. When you see CA$14,732 on a stone and CA$2,800 on a piece, you are seeing the difference between a market and a decision.
Why our numbers are round
A price ending in 99 is a checkout trick, and we find it beneath the work. House prices land on clean points, and the points scale with the range:
- Under CA$5,000
- Priced to the nearest CA$50.
- CA$5,000 to 20,000
- Priced to the nearest CA$100.
- CA$20,000 to 100,000
- Priced to the nearest CA$500.
- Above CA$100,000
- Priced to the nearest CA$1,000.
The engine leans upward: a true cost of CA$4,898 becomes CA$4,900, not CA$4,850, because rounding down past the midpoint would quietly eat the work. But a price sitting just above a clean point settles back to it: CA$5,010 becomes CA$5,000. And no Dagarias price ends in an eight or a nine. Ever. Deposits follow the same rule, floored to a clean CA$50 so a 50 per cent deposit is never rounded up against you.
Charm prices are for checkouts. We are a house.
House rules on price
No seasonal sales. No strikethrough prices. No markdown that arrives because a quarter is ending. No markups put there to be discounted from. The three reductions we do offer are stated up front: a welcome code on a first piece, a set price when two pieces are bought together, and a price beat on a loose stone another jeweller has quoted you for less. A price that moves for whoever bargains hardest was never the price, and a house that performs markdowns is telling you what its first number was worth. Ours move only by the rules written on this page, the same for everyone. If the market moves, our prices move with it, in both directions, for everyone at once.
The three reductions we do offer
There are three, and we would rather set them out here than have you discover them at a checkout. A welcome code takes 10 per cent off a first piece, capped at CA$300, one use, valid thirty days, on pieces only and never on loose stones. A set price takes 8 per cent off when two pieces are bought together in one order. They do not stack: where both could apply you get the better of the two, never both.
The third is for loose stones. If another jeweller has quoted you a stone for less than our price, and we hold the same stone or one of the same shape that is as good or better in weight, colour and clarity, send us the listing through a second opinion. Where we can still make our living on it, we will sell you ours for 10 per cent under their price and hold that for 48 hours. Where we cannot, we will say so, and if their stone is the one to buy we will tell you that too. It needs a listing we can see and a price in Canadian dollars for the stone alone, and it does not combine with the other two.
The welcome code arrives when you confirm a place on the Private List, and it would be strange to write a piece like this and not say so. It is the same 10 per cent for everyone who asks. It does not grow if you wait, it is not larger for a harder bargainer, and it never runs to a countdown. None of the three touches the list price of anything, which is the point: the number on the piece is the number, and these come off it in the open.
And no investment talk. Lab-grown stones are priced to a falling market and we say so. Natural stones are rare and getting rarer, but we sell them as stores of meaning, not as financial instruments. If you want the full argument, it is in our guide to natural and lab-grown stones.
DAGARIAS
A fine diamond jewellery house
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