A Note for Jewelers On the matter of matched pairs, calibrated lots, and the patience of wives.
Direct from the market floorto your bench.
A trade program for jewelry brands that are tired of paying three middlemen to guess at what a stone actually looks like.
We work six days a week at China Fort Market, Beruwala — the largest colored gemstone trading floor in South Asia. Every stone you see from us has been held under a 10× loupe and daylight by the same person who will answer your WhatsApp.
Matched pairs, calibrated lots for tennis sets, and single stones on approval. Wholesale pricing. Fourteen-day unconditional return. Net-30 for verified brands.
Reviewed Tuesdays Roughly eight new brands are accepted each quarter. No newsletter, no nurture sequence. A reply by Friday or a polite decline.
The jewelry trade runs on trust — and trust is the first thing broken when a stone passes through four pairs of hands.
Your client paid a deposit three weeks ago. The design is locked, the wax is cast, the setting is waiting. All that remains is the stone. You have called your dealer twice. The stone does not exist yet — he is waiting on his supplier, who is waiting on another supplier, who is waiting on Bangkok.
This is how most colored gemstones reach a working jeweler in the United States or Europe: through four parties, each marking up the price, each one further from the person who cut the stone and the ground it came out of. By the time it arrives, the photograph you bought from is three months old and taken under studio lighting that does not exist anywhere in your workshop.
We built this program because a jeweler in Antwerp asked us, in 2024, to send her a pair of 1.2-carat cornflower sapphires she could actually match face-up. Six weeks of her calendar had been spent looking. Nine days later she had four options on her bench. She kept one pair. She returned the rest without a restocking fee. That is the entire program, in one transaction.
Six frictions a working jeweler already knows.
If you supply colored stones to your own clients, at least three of these have cost you a relationship, a margin, or a week of sleep.
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I
The middleman stack.
A stone leaves Sri Lanka at one price. By the time it reaches a jeweler’s bench in New York or London, three to five parties have marked it up between thirty and eighty percent each. The stone did not get better. Your margin did get smaller.
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II
The calibration deadline.
Thirty matched rounds for a tennis bracelet, 0.14 carat each. The standard industry wait is three to six weeks for tight calibration. Your client’s anniversary does not move. Your supplier does not care.
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III
Photographs lie. Loupes do not.
Studio lighting hides silk, feathers, and color zoning. You see them only after the package has arrived — and your client is waiting. Send it to them anyway, or quietly eat the return shipping.
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IV
MOQ kills experimentation.
Want to try teal sapphire for the next collection? Minimum parcel of four thousand dollars, untested, non-returnable. Your competitors launch new pieces. You reorder the same three stones.
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V
The certificate arrives too late.
GIA turnaround is two to three weeks. Real. Unavoidable. But your client bought a six-thousand-dollar stone today, and wants proof today. Selling on certificate coming is selling on trust you have not yet earned.
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VI
One hundred percent, always upfront.
Every invoice. Every supplier. Every time. Your cash funds their inventory, indefinitely. That is not a partnership. It is an interest-free loan you are paying them to take.
The China Fort Protocol
Buy as if you
walked the market
yourself.
A four-measure standard — no exceptions, no paid expedites
Dealers know what a stone is worth. Buyers do not.
This program exists to close that gap.
Russell · Gemologist, Beruwala
Four categories. All verified on the market floor.
No catalog. No “stock photos”. Every image we send you was taken within the week, on a stone we can still hold in our hand when you call.
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I.
Calibrated loose stones.
Eye-clean to loupe-clean grades, examined under daylight and tungsten before shipping. Sapphire, ruby, emerald, spinel, tourmaline. Round, oval, cushion, pear, from 3 mm to 8 ct and beyond.
Single-stone MOQ -
II.
Matched pairs for earrings.
Color identical face-up under a single light source. Weight within ±0.05 ct. Cut proportions aligned. Sapphire, padparadscha, ruby, spinel, alexandrite.
Face-up match -
III.
Uniform lots — ten to eighty stones.
Tennis bracelets, riviera necklaces, graduated series. Buffer stock held eighteen months for replacements. Per-stone price declines as the count rises. Written spec sheet per lot.
Series pricing -
IV.
Bespoke sourcing briefs.
You send species, color, treatment tolerance, cut, budget, laboratory. We walk the floor, photograph under controlled light, ship on approval. No brief fee for verified trade accounts.
On approval
Terms, on a single page.
No factoring. No invoice gymnastics. No small print designed to be forgotten.
- Pricing against US & EU retail −35 to −55%
- Minimum order after verification One stone
- Test batch on the first three orders 5–15 stones, 14‑day return
- Post-payment, for verified brands Net‑30
- Certification AIGS · GIA · GRS · Gübelin
- Shipping, fully insured Malca-Amit or DHL
Sanctioned-origin material — notably Burmese ruby — is geographically restricted. We do not ship Burma ruby to the United States, regardless of paperwork.
From application to the first stone on your bench.
Four movements. Nothing hidden behind a sales call.
Application
Brand, website, stone categories, approximate monthly spend. Three minutes of your time.
3 minutes
We verify you
We check that your brand exists, ships real jewelry, is not a dropshipper. Verified brands receive the private price list.
48 hours
Test batch or brief
Five to fifteen stones from stock with a fourteen-day return, or a sourcing brief — you describe, we walk, you approve.
Your call
Ongoing supply
WhatsApp-first. Photos under your specified lighting. Net-30 unlocks after three clean orders.
Long-term
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China Fort Market, Beruwala — photographed on the floor during morning trading, before the stones are taken to dealers’ private rooms.
Russell, on the floor.
My grandfather was a Soviet geologist who worked the Pamir mountains and the Karategin valley in Tajikistan. He brought home specimens: Pamir spinel, Karategin ruby, tourmalines from the deep veins. I grew up holding them to the window, learning what daylight does to color.
I do not send you the best photograph of a stone. I send you the stone I would buy for my own collection — if it were yours.
That curiosity brought me to China Fort Market in Beruwala, where the dealers, cutters, and rough traders who move most of Sri Lanka’s production work daily. I evaluate approximately a thousand stones per market day. Not because I have to — because it is the only way to know what is actually available this week, what the ceiling of quality looks like this season, and what a fair price is.
When I source for a jewelry brand, I am not pulling from a catalog. I am walking the floor that morning, selecting against your specification. There is no second party between us.
Three jewelers. Same pattern.
Unedited. WhatsApp screenshots available on the verification call.
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“
Six weeks of looking for a matched cornflower sapphire pair. VividCarat sent four options in nine days. Pair two matched face-up under my studio LEDs — something my local dealer had called impossible at this size.
Anna K. · Fine jewelry studio, Berlin
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“
First test batch: twelve stones, fourteen-day return. Kept nine. Returned three. No questions, no restocking fee. That alone is worth switching suppliers.
Marcus R. · Custom jeweler, New York
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“
Forty-eight rounds at 0.18 ct for a graduated necklace. Delivery in eleven days. Uniformity tighter than three Bangkok suppliers I had tried. Every collection since has sourced through them.
Lisa T. · Jewelry brand, London
Questions jewelers actually ask.
i. What is the minimum order after verification? +
One stone. There are no parcel minimums on this program. We do not punish experimentation — most new collections start with a single test piece, and it is in our interest that yours does too.
ii. How is origin and treatment confirmed? +
AIGS or GIA on request — $40 to $180 per stone depending on size and report type. GRS for padparadscha and pigeon blood ruby, where origin materially affects value. We do not inflate origin claims: if a stone is Madagascar, the report will say Madagascar.
For calibrated commercial material, stones typically ship without individual certificates (the cost makes no sense on sub-$500 stones). Certification is per-stone, your choice, at actual lab cost.
iii. What does “eye-clean” versus “loupe-clean” mean here? +
Eye-clean: no inclusions visible to the unaided eye at ten inches, under daylight. Loupe-clean: no inclusions visible under a 10× loupe.
Loupe-clean in colored stone is rare outside top-end material. We use the term honestly and only when it applies. If a stone is “eye-clean with typical silk”, that is how we describe it — not as “loupe-clean”.
iv. Payment and post-payment terms? +
SWIFT wire to our Sri Lanka corporate USD account. First three orders: 100% upfront on invoice. After three clean orders, Net-30 unlocks for verified brands with two trade references.
We do not factor invoices and we do not run credit on the buyer's side. The terms are deliberately simple.
v. Turnaround on a calibrated thirty-plus-stone lot? +
Uniform commercial-grade lot (same color, tone, cut): typically 2–4 weeks. Premium-grade calibration with tight tolerances (±0.03 ct, narrow saturation window): 4–8 weeks.
We quote a realistic window on day one, not the one you would like to hear. If your client's deadline is shorter than our realistic window, we say so before you commit.
vi. What happens if I return stones from a test batch? +
You keep the stones that fit your collection and send the rest back within fourteen days of arrival. We refund the full purchase price of returned stones within three business days of inspection. No restocking fee, no “damage deduction” on stones arriving in the condition we shipped.
vii. Do you ship to my country? +
United States, United Kingdom, European Union, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, UAE — fully insured via Malca-Amit or DHL. Sanctioned-origin material, specifically Burmese ruby, is geographically restricted: we do not ship Burma ruby to the United States regardless of paperwork.
Application — Trade Access
The price list opens after we verify your brand.
This is a verification step, not a sales form. If your brand fits, you will hear from Russell, personally, within forty-eight hours. If not, you will receive a polite decline and no further correspondence.
Issued by VividCarat (Pvt) Ltd, China Fort Road, Beruwala, Sri Lanka. · Reviewed Tuesdays. · © 2026. All trade terms subject to individual verification.