Running a Profitable Jewellery Repair Service

Most independents treat the repair counter as a courtesy: low-value, interruptive, a way to keep footfall while the real money sits in the cabinets. It is the wrong frame.

Per bench hour, a sizing and a re-tip often out-earn a display case, and the customer who trusts you with a grandmother's ring is the same one who comes back for the anniversary piece. The real question is whether you understand what you are running — not a retail business but a bailment one, where you hold other people's most sentimental valuables and the law makes you responsible for their safe return.

Turnaround is the product

Customers cannot judge your soldering. They can judge whether the ring was ready when you said it would be. Turnaround, not craftsmanship, is what they experience.

Which makes the honest date the most valuable thing you say at intake. A while-you-wait sizing and a job that goes out for stone work are different promises; blurring them turns a happy customer into a chaser. Quote the date you can actually hit — with slack for a stone that needs ordering — then beat it. And note the item's condition and the agreed job at intake: it is the record you will be glad of if a customer later insists the chip was your doing.

Price the bench hour, not the gram

The commonest pricing mistake is costing a repair from its materials. A sizing uses pennies of solder and a scrap of gold; price it that way and you give away the skill that is the entire point of the job.

Repairs are labour. Work out what an hour at your bench actually costs — the goldsmith's time, the tools, the light, the rent under the piece while it sits — and price up from there, with a floor for handling any job at all. That floor matters: the ten-minute jobs are the ones you quietly lose money on.

The published trade tariffs are a useful sanity check: ring sizing broadly starts around £30 for silver or 9ct and £60-plus for 18ct or platinum; rhodium plating runs about £35; loose stones are charged per stone. Sit far below and you are subsidising the work; far above and you had better be selling speed or reassurance. And always estimate before you start. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 a service must be carried out with reasonable care and skill, but the price is a separate agreement — a surprise invoice on collection is a dispute you created at the counter.

In-house bench or the trade workshop

The romantic answer is a goldsmith on site; the commercial answer depends on your volume. A bench and the person to run it are a fixed cost that only pays for itself above a steady flow of work. Below that, you carry a wage and an insurance loading to do jobs a trade workshop will turn around, pre-priced, in roughly two weeks — many shops batch a fortnight's intake and send it together. Outsourcing turns that fixed cost into a variable one and lets you offer specialist work you could never justify hiring for.

The honest answer for most independents is a hybrid: keep the fast, high-frequency, low-risk work in-house — sizings, chain soldering, cleaning, battery and strap changes — and send out the specialist and the high-value. But the outsource bench is not invisible: you remain the contracting party, and the customer's rights and your liability sit with you, whatever the workshop did. Your margin is the spread between the trade price and your price — so build a real markup for the handling, the risk and the fact that your name is on it.

The trade counter is a business, not a favour

Turn the outsource question around: if you have bench capacity, you can be the workshop other retailers send to.

Trade repair work — sizing, claw and stone work, polishing, plating, restoration taken in from other shops — is a distinct revenue line with its own economics. It runs on a published trade tariff, batch intake and a turnaround the sending shop can quote to their own customer. It fills the quiet hours and uses a bench you already pay for, without competing with your shop window, because the client is another jeweller.

But treat it as a favour to the shop down the road and you will price it too low, deprioritise it when retail gets busy, and miss dates that damage another business's reputation as well as yours.

You are a bailee, not a shopkeeper

This is the part the trade underweights. The moment you take a ring across the counter for repair, you become a bailee for reward — with a duty to take reasonable care of that item for as long as you hold it.

The sting is in the burden of proof. If the piece is lost, stolen or damaged while in your care, it is on you to show you took reasonable care — not on the customer to prove you were careless. And the standard scales with value: the security a court expects of a jeweller holding diamonds is far higher than for a shop holding second-hand coats, and a drawer under the counter is no place to keep engagement rings overnight.

Which is why the disclaimer on your repair ticket is worth less than you think. "All goods left entirely at owner's risk" reads like armour, but you cannot exclude liability to a consumer for failing to carry out the service with reasonable care and skill, and a notice that purports to sign away your own negligence is very likely to be treated as unfair and not binding. You can set fair, clearly communicated terms, but not use small print to make yourself unaccountable for your own carelessness.

Insure the peak, not the average day

The cover that matters here is a jewellers' block policy — specifically its customers' goods extension, which protects items left with you for repair, valuation or cleaning. General shop insurance rarely does this properly.

The trap is peak accumulation. Your customers' goods drawer on a wet Tuesday in February is one thing; the same drawer the week before Christmas, stacked with everyone's party-season repairs, is a fortune on your premises. Insure for that peak, because underinsurance triggers the condition of average: a sum insured that was 30% short lets the insurer cut the payout by roughly 30%, exactly when you need it whole. Value customers' goods at what it costs to make the customer good, not what the job was worth to you.

A repair can quietly break a hallmark

Repairs are not hallmarking-neutral. It is an offence to make an addition, alteration or repair to an article bearing UK hallmarks except with the written consent of an assay office — and an "improper" alteration can render a hallmarked piece legally unhallmarked.

The rules are stricter for new articles than for genuinely pre-owned ones, where an alteration is generally allowed provided the item keeps the same character and purpose. But a repair that adds a meaningful quantity of metal — shanking a worn ring, sizing up several sizes — or that touches fineness can cross the line. The remedy is a re-assay once the work is done. On any substantial alteration, the assay office's written consent is cheap insurance, not an afterthought.

When they won't pay, or never come back

Two endings ruin the economics if you have not planned for them.

For non-payment, you have a repairer's lien: because your labour has improved the goods, you may retain that specific item until the authorised bill is paid. But know its limits — it is a right of retention only. It does not let you sell the piece, and it evaporates the instant you hand the item back — so goodwill given at the counter is leverage lost.

For the piece nobody collects, the route out is the Torts (Interference with Goods) Act 1977: serve proper notice on the owner, wait a reasonable period, and you gain a statutory right to sell and account to them for the proceeds less your charges. It only works if you took a name, address and description at intake. Write a collection deadline and a disposal term into your repair terms from the start; they are close to impossible to invent after the customer has disappeared.

The bottom line

Repairs are not the loss-leader that props up retail. Priced on the bench hour rather than the gram, they are often your most profitable square footage and your most reliable reason for customers to return.

The risk was never the price list. It is that you are holding other people's valuables under a legal duty you cannot disclaim away, in a drawer that is fullest exactly when it is least insured. Get the flow, the liability and the hallmark right, and the margin looks after itself.