Back in the day I bought my wife's ring from Ashford.com by buying a lose stone and picking a setting. I had a spreadsheet and built a simple pricing model bas

Back in the day I bought my wife's ring from Ashford.com by buying a lose stone and picking a setting. I had a spreadsheet and built a simple pricing model based on the 4C for the stones in their database and looked for stones that were underpriced in my pricerange. They called me twice to make sure I wanted the ring. I lived in houston and picked the ring up in person, and the manager there let me know they'd had a data entry error on the stone and had transposed the first two digits of the price, the $24xx should have been $42xx. Ashford doesn't do the lose stone business now... One small hint, if you set a stone in platinum you can pick a stone with a lower color grade and have it look just as good. Being able to go down a color grade or two means a lot more discount or larger stone.