Wedding Forum - Online wedding rings...

can anyone recommend a good online place for plain white gold wedding bands pref court shaped

Thanks

can you pop the details on your wall showgirl and ill have a look

Oh, if anyone knows of any good online ring stores could you let me know too please? Showgirl, could you put your link on my wall please? We are after just plain gold bands, but rings in shops are out of our budget i think

Ive just had a look and the prices arent that bad! Thanks! Theyve got a store close to us, so im going to drag the OH in there and try a few on :)

When do rings normally go on sale? Autumn/winter?

We got ours from a company based in Hatton Garden; you can orde online and their prices are amazing. My OH has a 14.2g court-shaped platinum band (6mm) and we paid £1080. EJ do a 'super heavy-weight' 6mm platinum ring for £1750; I emailed to ask the weight in grams, and it's 11.5 :-s

IMO online (preferably Hatton Garden or Birmingham Jewellery Quarter based) is definitely the way to go; much better prices.

I was planning on looking for rings in January, I would assume jewellers have January sales like other shops do :)

Why does it have to be an online store? W@rr3n James and @rgos are cheap for wedding rings. For a plain band they should be fairly cheap in most places tbh, depends what metal you want. Other than those 2 places, I would say in the sales x

you can get a plain gold wedding bad in @rgos for 25 quid. I was over the moon with mine, another bargain for the wedding, I got a bridal set in Deb3nhams for £17.25!!! It is real silver with CZ instead of diamonds, but already had loads of compliments, and the wedding ring matches x

Tanya: yeah, it is a lot of money! My point was more to highlight the difference in cost between a high street vs independent/online jeweller ie my OH's ring would have cost easily double what we paid if we'd purchased from a high-street shop. Which is a HUGE difference!

April/MrsBull: personally, while W@rr3n J@m3s and @rg0s are certainly cheap, IMO the quality isn't there. My mum bought a stand in ring from the latter after she had a tendon injury to her ring finger and had to have her wedding band cut off, and wait 6 months until she could get it re-sized and soldered back together; and OK, she only paid £40 but the quality was awful; it was hollowed out in the middle and by the end of the 6 months was really badly dented and almost falling apart.

Ultimately you get what you pay for, and IMPO, and IME, the high street just does not offer good value for money at all. You can get much better deals elsewhere when it comes to what you're paying per gram (which, if you're getting a plain band, is how you should be paying).

Ive had a look at w@rr3n J@m3s and i really like their rings, and they arent too expensive. There is a store near us so i think we will be going there for a nosey. We might try out @rg0s too :)

they r also online so worth a look x

my ring for 139 is a 10point diamond white gold eternity ring.

get whatever u feel is for u i was looking at one from argos for 80 quid but then i saw this and it drew me in.

if u can visit stores id say its best to as a picture never lets u see how it sits on your finger etc. theres alot i likw bt on trying them im glad i didnt just buy online x

have to say i do love mine n saw it online first :-) (its out of stock tho now lol so i grabbed it just intime) x

Barbie86 can i ask what the company is you got yours from please and ill have a look as im just after a 2.5mm band, i stubbled across a jewellery store today with my h2b and think hes found his ring just need to convince him to buy it as hes wanting to wait but i want to get them done now. he a very last minute kind of guy but i like to do things straight away :)

Hey, if you accept my friend request I'll PM you with the details; the quality is lovely and their prices are really good; just had a quick look and a plain 2.5mm d-shaped band is £72 in 9ct gold. Had a look at a couple of high-street jewellers and their prices seem to be around £90-100 plus and they don't list the weight (ignore it if they say 'super heavy' etc: without a weight in grams it's meaningless (see my post above).

Also, I think a couple of other posters missed the point: as I said, I know that £1080 is a lot of money and not everyone can/wants to spend that. I was just using that example to illustrate just how massive the mark-up is gram for gram (ie OH's ring cost nearly £700 less than a ring just 80% of its weight from a popular high-street jeweller; the gram weight we paid was £76, with the other retailer it was £152 ie literally double the price). The company we used have rings starting at £55, and I can assure everyone that the quality AND the price is much better than other companies that have been mentioned gram for gram. I just think it's worth doing your research and making a like-for-like comparison so that you know exactly what you're getting for your money, that's all. I think it's particularly important to dot hat if you're working to a budget, so that you know you're not over-paying.

Thanks barbie ive accepted request x

Just to say: light/medium/heavy/super-heavy literally means zilch without the weight in grams, even from a local jeweller. I found it varied SO much between retailers, inc Hatton Garden based ones (eg I found a ring listed as 'heavy weight' with one for £950, and thought, 'wow, good deal!' (as OH's was listed as medium weight and £1080; I then looked at the actual weights and the first company's heavy weight was 10g; the medium weight one with the company we went with was 14.2g; ie, it was a better deal). So, if they're telling you they don't go below 'medium weight' it's kind of meaningless as they can set that weight at whatever they want; the company we used does light-weight ones for eg in plat and palladium, but their light-weight ones are the equivalent of heavy weight elsewhere; does that make sense? Personally I think it should have to be standardised as I consider it really misleading, but, there you go!

You can actually get the details from high-street jewellers if you email them; this is how I found out the weight of the 'super heavy weight' EJ one (took a few days for them to get back to me, but to their credit, they did).

Also, I've PM-d you both :-)

Flossie: the heavier weight, the heavier the ring basically (which I know sounds obvious lol). The heavier ones aren't better, IMO, just heavier; all their rings are good weights so in terms of durability you would be absolutely fine with a light weight or medium weight ring, and these will almost definitely be heavier in grams than ones of the same width and 'weight' (as in weight category eg light/medium/heavy) on the high street.

We went with a medium weight for OH's ring and could easily have gone for a light weight one which with them weighs in at 10.2g, which is the equivalent of a heavy weight with EJ. His ring is really heavy and we wouldn't have wanted to go any heavier; it just wouldn't be necessary and obv it means that the ring is thicker.

I bought a 2mm medium weight 9ct gold band for one of my bridesmaids, and it's very nice; definitely thick enough and looks and feels durable.

So basically, it's personal preference. I prefer thinner shanks on rings personally speaking; I'm planning on getting a plain palladium band as a 'stand in'/spare, and will go for the light-weight one.

I'd suggest starting by trying different ones on the high-street so you can get a rough idea; as a general guide you can probably fairly safely take them down by one weight category eg a 3mm medium weight from the high-street will probably be roughly equivalent to a 3mm light-weight from a Hatton Garden/Birmingham Jewllery Quarter based retailer, so if you like the look and feel of the medium weight on the high-street, order a weight down if you buy online.

Does that make any sense lol?

No problem :-) If you have any more questions, give me a shout :-)

They also do bespoke design (they custom-made both my rings) and the price for that service is on a par with their standard/catalogue pieces (ie you don't pay a huge mark up for the design element); my wedding band ended up costing less than one the same metal weight with the same carat weight and quality of diamonds (well actually, you can't get that quality of diamonds on the high street; they use I coloured SI2/I1 stones usually, mine are D VVS) on the high-street, and it was a custom-job lol.

So while I might sound a bit snobby to some, believe me when I say I always want the best value for money and really hate over-paying for anything, esp if I'm spending a lot.

Also: I know I've banged on about the company we use, and that's because I've had personal experience with them so can actually vouch for them (we've bought 2 standard rings through them and had 2 custom made by them; they also repaired my mum's wedding band after she had to have it cut off, and have done several re-sizes and repairs for me inc a re-shank (basically, I have a lovely EJ ring I got for my 21st, and the shank had almost worn away at the back it was so thin; they replaced it with a much thicker one for £40, bargain!)), if that makes sense. But there are lots of others out there and I can give you details of a few of the best ones I've found if you like, so that you can shop around. Again, just give me a shout :-)

Yeah we were the same with the rings: the rings and the photos were both really important to us. We were lucky and had a biggish budget for the wedding, but had it been smaller I'd have made compromises elsewhere to cover the cost of the rings, or else bought a cheaper one and upgraded at a later date.

That said, like I said I still wanted to make sure we got the best 'bang for our buck'/value for money, so did quite a lot of research and got a lot of quotes before settling on this particular company.

Done :-)

They'll have to start paying you commission at this rate barbie ;)

thanks barbie! Took me a while to get to your post as I had to get through the endless amount of adverts on my wall!

I had seen them before and thought they were too good to be true, so I am glad you had good feedback about them! :D

Hi Barbie86, I'd also be really interested to hear who you used and the list of others you found as I'm looking for rings now. Thank you