Paraiba Tourmaline: Some of My Investment Gems
Having blogged about investment gems several times this year, I would now like to share with you some of the gems that we at CRD have chosen to invest in - in this blog, in particular, I will focus just on paraiba tourmaline.
To me, an investment tool is not static in price. If I buy stocks or bonds, I hope for them to appreciate in value until they are sold. It is the same with gemstones. Whoever can hold on to them the longest will accrue the largest value increase. One crucial difference, however: the markets fluctuate in price, and stocks can go down in value. I have never owned a gem or heard of a gem going down in value. In the 15 years that I have been in this business, there has been only one direction: up. And what are some of the gems that have increased in value the most? You guessed it: paraiba tourmaline. (But ruby, sapphire, emerald and just about all other gems have changed price significantly ever since they have been marketed online).
Because of their constant rise in value, these paraibas are not listed anywhere with a fixed sales price. Etsy doesn’t allow items listed without a price or with a “please inquire for pricing” button, the way other websites do. So until I have the opportunity to change prices based on market conditions on my own website (or add a pricing button), these gems will not be on any website.
Side note: it is of course possible for me to change my prices on Etsy, but I think that causes confusion. Retail prices do increase of course – as the current 6% inflation amply illustrates. But there’s something distasteful about websites with constantly changing prices. In my industry, we tend to just not offer gems out for sale if we prefer them to appreciate in value first. For instance, 15 years ago the market became flooded with Mandarin garnet. Rather than lowering prices, vendors simply stopped putting them up for sale and set them aside for when the market recovered. Now, 15 years later, all the vendors who did that are able to move mandarin garnets at much better pricing conditions. This allows the profit margin to be much higher than if these vendors had decided to lower prices simply to move product.
In my opinion, gems are very different from other goods in this respect. They do not spoil like perishables, go out of date like technology, become unfashionable like clothing, break like appliances or cars, or depreciate like houses when they are not well maintained or upgraded. They are easy to store and need no maintenance like art or antiques. Their beauty has intrigued mankind for thousands of years, and they have been a status symbol for rank or wealth for about that long too.
Jaimeen Shah, owner of Prima Gems, once said to me: “you can measure the health of a gem business by the amount of time it can hold on to its merchandise without the need to sell.” And he should know, he grew the business from scratch into a multi-million dollar enterprise in just a few years. It took my business a lot longer to grow as I did not have investors. I have always been a one-woman show and didn't want my third career to be a CEO. That said, I now feel confident I have a good amount of paraibas that I can show to you and find buyers for. That could be now, a year from now, ten years from now. You hear gemstone vendors say so often: "I wish I hadn't sold that stone, I sold it too cheap." In which case, why the rush unless you need money? The gem trade isn't just about resale. It is also about inventory and investment accrual.
Once my new website is up, it will have a section for gems without price, and at that point I will put these up. In the meantime, feel free to send this blog around if you know someone who loves these gems as much as I do. My pricing will be fair and not at the top of market but it will orient itself on the sales of that current year. Many of my paraibas on Etsy have pricing dating back to 2022, so they are not part of this list at present. Eventually they will be but for now I will concentrate on inventory I haven’t shown.
Now let's have a look at what paraibas I have available for you:
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