Why I stopped making palladium jewelry

Update – May 28, 2021; February 24, 2023 – Palladium is still too high, so I am still not bringing it back as a metal offering

A quickie economics lesson from someone with experience pricing jewelry and making jewelry – sometimes jewelry materials are really really expensive. Reductive? Yes. True? Also, yes.

Palladium prices are always changing, but damn.

Metal prices change daily with the market. Most jewelers I know take a look at the metals market at least weekly, if not daily. I will admit that one of the first apps that I open on my phone in the morning is Kitco to check on the day’s gold prices.

While I track the day-to-day changes, it’s the year to year changes that can shift enough that we as designers and jewelers will take a step back and reevaluate our pricing. Such is the situation I’m in with palladium today.

Price was the main reason to use palladium in the first place

Palladium is a tricky metal to work with. It has a prettier color than 18 or 14 karat white gold (Full disclosure that I have OPINIONS about metal colors and which ones I like and I think that regular nickel white gold can go in the bin), which makes it great for bridal jewelry, but it isn’t as easy to work with as platinum or white gold.

It takes heat from a torch very weirdly. Trust me, it is extremely weird to solder and melt this metal. And this makes it a more technical metal to work with and it takes a lot more time to make almost all of my palladium jewelry.

In the past, the relatively low cost of palladium made it worthwhile since you could make a piece that has a prettier color than white gold, and at a price point that was slightly less than 14 karat white gold.

Palladium takes a lot more work

The extra work was worth it to be able to make something in a white metal that could still be in an acceptable price range for my clients. It’s also a sturdy metal with a lot of qualities similar to platinum, but without the weight and density. It also used to be a fraction of the price of platinum.

That’s all been changing in the past few years. The price per ounce of palladium has grown high enough that some of the rings I made in palladium are almost as much as the same ring in platinum. With all of the changes to palladium costs, I’ve been recommending to more and more clients that they simply upgrade a little bit to platinum.

My Palladium rings are discontinued

This is all to say that part of the reason why my palladium rings are discontinued is that I won’t be able to recreate these rings at a price that would appeal to most of my customers. I’ve tried re-pricing some rings in palladium and most of these rings would all be almost double their current prices. This may be the last that you see of the solid palladium rings until palladium prices come down.*

So what’s the alternative? Well, believe it or not, the alternative now is platinum. This is good news for the consumer, platinum jewelry is even more durable than palladium, and weightier too! And with palladium being so high priced right now, you may as well buy platinum jewelry.

*If they ever do. Currently, palladium prices are driven up by an increase of the use of palladium in car exhaust filters – it is keeping your air clean of pollutants. Take a metal in high demand, add limited mining output of palladium and presto! Increased metals costs. Citation from Bloomberg News

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