Photo Credit: Marietta Wülfing
I was surfing through Etsy listings the other day when I came across a masterpiece. It was an opulent Modernist 18 karat gold and sterling silver pendant set with a massive rough peridot gemstone. The artist who handcrafted this treasure is Marietta Wülfing, a jeweler who owns a boutique atelier called Sinnlích. Wülfing's retail operation is located in Buggingen, Germany, a small municipality just a couple miles from the French border that is sandwiched in between the picturesque Rhine River and the famous Black Forest.
But the truly shocking thing about this candy-colored treasure of a pendant was the price - only $876 on Etsy (note that the price fluctuates slightly based on the current dollar/euro exchange rate).
All this got me thinking. Although I typically gravitate towards vintage or antique jewelry for investment purposes, I will certainly consider a piece of modern jewelry if it has the right attributes. Much like a different handmade Etsy piece that I highlighted in a previous article, this scintillating peridot pendant hit all the right notes.
The contrast between this magnificent Modernist pendant and the nasty jewelry you'll typically find in chain stores like Zales or Kay Jewelers couldn't be more extreme.
First, this gorgeous pendant has a very high intrinsic value to price ratio, which is one of the primary things I look for when buying an investment grade piece of modern jewelry. A really good piece of jewelry will have component elements - gold, silver, gemstones, etc. - that constitute a significant portion of its value. Although it can take some searching, it is possible to find modern jewelry selling for no more than twice its intrinsic value.
In other words, for every dollar you invest in a good quality piece of modern jewelry you can expect to immediately "recover" 50 cents or more in melt/scrap value. This means that if you were forced to panic liquidate your jewelry, it would be possible to literally rip it apart and sell the component metal and jewels for at least a 50% recovery rate. Of course, we would never want to do this, as a fine piece of jewelry is always worth more than the sum of its parts. Nonetheless, it is comforting to know that your downside risk is limited in a worst case scenario.
The second attribute I value when shopping for contemporary jewelry is whether the piece is one-of-kind. We live in an age of mass production. As a result, I believe that unique, handcrafted jewelry will tend to appreciate in value much more quickly than similar pieces that are factory made. The handcrafting process really allows a jeweler's creative artistry to shine through, producing jewelry that is often closer to a miniature work of art than merely a ring or a necklace.
As an added bonus, handmade jewelry is invariably finished to a much higher standard than chain store jewelry. The artisans who create these masterpieces usually go to incredible lengths to ensure their work is both flawless and visually appealing. Unlike more pedestrian jewelry, you won't find pitted metal, sloppily-cut gems or bulky prongs on fine handmade jewelry.
The final hallmark of investment quality modern jewelry is the presence of one or more large gemstones. Gems are often the most expensive component in a piece of fine jewelry. Indeed, it isn't uncommon for a jewelry setting to serve primarily as a vehicle to display a particularly fine gemstone. In fact, this is undoubtedly the case with the rough peridot pendant pictured above.
But decades of unrelenting consumer demand has steadily sucked up all the fine colored gems the world can produce and then some. Every 10 to 20 years we discover new gemstone deposits (most recently Ilakaka, Madagascar in 1998 and Mahenge, Tanzania in 2007) that dribble out relatively small quantities of new stones into the gem starved jewelry market. But in spite of this additional supply, colored gemstone prices have more than doubled over the past 15 years.
Large jewelry manufacturers have compensated for this gem drought by designing settings that use a multitude of small, melee stones instead of a few larger stones. But make no mistake - this mass-produced jewelry, although impressive at a distance, is absolutely inferior to jewelry mounted with fewer, larger gems. Modern jewelry set with small stones without a large, central gem is a cost cutting measure that the serious jewelry aficionado should avoid by any means necessary.
Hand-Crafted Marietta Wülfing Earrings For Sale On Etsy
So when I invest in modern jewelry I focus on artisan jewelers who set their pieces with larger gemstones. Because of cost constraints, it is rather rare to find jewelry set with any of the big four gems (diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires) at a reasonable price. Therefore, many of the handmade pieces I gravitate towards use somewhat less expensive second-tier gemstones such as aquamarine, tourmaline, fancy garnet, peridot, spinel, tanzanite, etc.
These stones may not be as famous as the big four, but are nonetheless quite desirable in their own right. As an added bonus, many of these lesser-known gemstones are all-natural, completely-untreated stones. Nearly all rubies, sapphires and emeralds found in modern jewelry have been subjected to artificial treatments that can impact their durability and long-term color stability. Even diamonds, which were largely untreated up until the end of the 20th century, are increasingly lasered or fracture filled to improve their clarity. Treated stones, regardless of their type, are obviously worth less than comparable untreated gems.
So let's put everything together that we've learned in order to analyze the Marietta Wülfing peridot pendant pictured at the top of this article.
The rough peridot used in the piece is a top gem quality specimen from Pakistan (a classic location for high grade peridot). In addition, it is a huge stone, measuring 27 mm across by 18 mm high and weighing 28.3 carats. As a result, I'm willing to assign a value of around $5 per carat to the gem - about $141. If this peridot was given to a knowledgeable gem cutter, you could expect it to realistically yield two to three faceted stones totaling somewhere from 6 to 10 carats.
Although the item description doesn't state how much gold was used in this fine piece of modern jewelry, I'm going to take a guess that it has perhaps 8 grams - just over 1/4 of a troy ounce - of 18 karat gold. I'm guessing fairly high here because 18 karat gold is very high density stuff (about 15.5 gm/cm3), so it doesn't take a lot of volume in order to have quite a bit of weight.
In any case, according to this estimate there is $284 worth of gold in the pendant (with spot gold trading at $1,470 an ounce). I would also estimate the piece contains about $5 worth of sterling silver (which isn't visible in the photo, as it is used to back the gemstone). If you were really interested in purchasing this pendant, it would make sense to contact Marietta and ask her for the weight of the metals used in order to derive a more accurate intrinsic value calculation.
If we total all of these individual components together we get the following:
Peridot ($141) + 18K Gold ($284) + Sterling Silver ($5) = $430 Total Intrinsic Value
Our result gives us an estimated intrinsic value equal to almost 50% of the $876 cost of the piece. This is an excellent result, especially considering that the typical piece of modern jewelry will have an intrinsic value of only 5% to 20% of its cost - even for diamond encrusted engagement rings!
Our handmade peridot pendant also eschews small accent stones in favor of a single, huge primary gem. This is exactly what we want to see. And while large peridot gemstones are rather common, it is still somewhat unusual to find such a gigantic specimen of such fine color and clarity.
Finally, it is obvious that Marietta Wülfing is a master jeweler who has taken great pains to ensure that this handcrafted pendant is immaculately finished. Seriously, this thing is utterly superb in terms of its workmanship. In addition, this piece is a breathtaking example of Modernist design, which has been the dominant style used in fine handmade jewelry (as opposed to mass-produced factory jewelry) since the 1960s.
All in all, this peridot pendant is a great example of investable modern jewelry. It is the kind of piece that you can feel good about spending hundreds of dollars on because you know it is worth hundreds of dollars. In another 50 to 100 years, jewelry like this will find a ready market among vintage jewelry aficionados as superlative antiques.
Hand-Crafted Marietta Wülfing Rings For Sale On Etsy
Read more thought-provoking Antique Sage gems & jewelry articles here.
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