The price of gold is up. For a wave of young jewelry brands that built their businesses on the promise of high-quality pieces without the high jewelry price tag, that’s a problem.
The gold spot price, which measures the metal’s real-time market value, crossed the $3,000 per ounce threshold in March 2025. By January 2026, it crossed $5,000 per ounce — a 162% increase in the last five years. Global market turmoil is the cause: investors see gold as a safe-haven asset and tend to stock up on it during periods of high inflation or a weakening US dollar. This has raised the cost of materials for jewelry brands, forcing many to increase prices. The consensus so far is that heightened gold prices are not significantly affecting consumer behavior for luxury jewelry brands; there, customers are willing to pay for what they see as a high-value investment. But in the world of demi-fine gold jewelry, which sits in between fashion and high jewelry, there is a marked shift in shopping behavior.
“Jewelry generally is the canary in the coal mine, in the sense that whenever the US consumer struggles, jewelry is the first to get hit because it’s not a necessity. It’s a pure discretionary purchase,” Ankur Daga, co-founder and CEO of Angara, says. The brand most recently raised prices in December, and Daga says it typically updates prices twice a year, but that it might need to pivot to quarterly price increases. Daga points out that high-end jewelry customers are more willing to accept higher prices. “In the mid-tier, we’re seeing the exact opposite.”
Demi-fine jewelry customers seem to be mirroring what many are calling the K-shaped economy: shoppers are splitting into two segments when it comes to solid gold, either opting to shop lower 10-karat items and other precious metals or staying steady with 14- and 18-karat pieces. This leaves brands with a choice: keep prices steady by lowering karat count, or raise prices and risk alienating demi-fine customers.
The transition to 10-karats
The current climate is helping create a new karat category in demi-fine jewelry. More brands whose pieces previously started at 14 karats are shifting their offerings to include 10k solid gold pieces that balance maintaining the precious metal as a key selling point while offering a product at a more affordable price point. Ten-karat gold contains 41.7% pure gold, whereas 14-karat gold contains 58.3% pure gold. This makes 10-karat options less fragile, unlike a more pure gold metal that’s softer, but it also makes 10-karat pieces the least hypoallergenic of gold karatages.
“Ten-karat, in our opinion, is the same durability as 14 karats and our intuition was that customers were completely open to that new category,” David Benayoun, co-founder and CEO of Ana Luisa, says. The brand focuses on affordable jewelry staples, selling fashion jewelry, 10k solid gold, and 14k-plated pieces. It began offering 10-karat pieces in March 2023, and Benayoun says that over the last 18 months, its solid gold category has tripled in sales.
Today, other brands are following suit, like Mejuri, the latest affordable luxury jewelry brand to focus on the 10-karat space. The brand previously only offered 14-karat items and 18-karat vermeil.
Mejuri announced a price increase in a letter to customers on March 9. Some of its bestselling pieces, like its 14k hoop earrings with a mere 18-millimeter diameter, went up in price by more than 20%. They now cost nearly $400. “This shift ensures we never compromise on the quality or the values that brought you to us in the first place,” the brand’s CEO and co-founder, Noura Sakkijha, wrote in her announcement.
Sakkijha also said that Mejuri is “focusing on introducing more 10k gold into our collectsions alongside 14k gold. This lets us offer the durability of solid gold at a more approachable price, while still designing in 14k for those who prefer it.”
Even if 10k gold is cheaper, it can still be expensive for brands as they navigate unpredictability in price. “We’re trying to find ways to mitigate the volatility of the metal, and it’s almost like every technique they used to have in the industry for the last couple of years is out the window because the volatility has increased so much,” Benayoun says.
Benayoun is using gold locks, in which the brand pays a deposit on the gold it plans to use over a set timeframe. This costs Ana Luisa more upfront, but the deposit helps keep jewelry costs stable and, in turn, pricing less volatile, even if the market price of gold changes.
Undiluted and unflinching
Some brands want to avoid diluting their solid gold lines and plan to maintain higher karatage. For these labels, cutting costs — without sacrificing product quality and raising prices as little as necessary — is key.
Monica Vinader CEO Sebastian Picardo is working hard to “find opportunities to unlock operational efficiencies”. Right now, that has included looking into “standardizing components like clasps across key categories to achieve economies of scale”, he explains. Having the same clasp across different products can mean, for example, the company can order them at a better price, just because it’s ordering more of them.
Picardo says his team is constantly looking at price elasticity, reserve values, and key price moves to anticipate future fluctuations. Picardo says the brand deploys financial instruments like forward contracts to “hedge some of these [gold] price increases… to have certainty as to what the price will be, so that when we buy and price the product, and we sell it, we know roughly what the cost will be.”
Production time plays another role in how a brand thinks about hedging gold costs. For example, Angara produces its jewelry made to order and buys gold daily. Eighteen-karat yellow gold sales are up over 100% year-on-year at Angara in February 2026. But the brand took a gross margin hit from December 2025 to February 2026, “thinking that prices, just because they went up so quickly, may come back down”, he says. In the future, the brand may need to update prices quarterly, as prices are rising so quickly. Daga now says the brand is considering using less gold and focusing new pieces on gemstones to hedge costs.
On the other hand, brands like Monica Vinader have lead times of three to six months from production to market. For Picardo, it’s particularly crucial that the UK-headquartered brand uses tools to predict future gold prices to protect itself from fronting the cost of massive swings. “We also use instruments to protect significant volatility on karats, as well, because we sell globally,” Picardo adds.
The 2008 similarities
The Great Recession reshaped the jewelry market at that time, especially the middle market. The financial crisis then opened the door for old companies to become hot players, like Pandora, thanks to their use of more affordable materials like silver.
Monica Vinader is a brand born of that time, and Picardo isn’t forgetting that as he strategizes how the brand will move forward in 2026. “The reason why this brand proposition resonated so well since then is that we were offering, and have since then, a product that was affordable, and that’s why we think that that needs to continue to be our focus,” Picardo adds, noting the brand is focused on the “value for money”.
A 2008-like metals shift might be on the horizon again. Taylor and Mackinley Hill, co-founders of Stone Fruit, are seeing growth in their silver pieces, in addition to mixed metals and vermeil.
“As gold prices climb, silver allows for bolder silhouettes at a more accessible price point. The silver look is back… not just as a response to gold prices, but as a styling shift toward bolder, more sculptural jewelry,” the co-founders say. They launched their business in September 2025, amid the precious metals pricing pandemonium, during which silver more than doubled in price.
Angara’s Daga also sees mixed metals, especially silver with gold accents, poised for growth. That’s led the brand to experiment with some pieces like this, which “has started to take off quite nicely. In the future, we’re going to see a lot more of that”.
Like in 2008, fashion jewelry may see growth, as well, as mid-market customers are squeezed. “What you cannot afford to buy in solid gold, you'll buy in fashion jewelry,” Benayoun adds.
Ahead, gold will likely remain volatile, Bart Melek, managing director and global head of commodity strategy at TD Securities, tells Replica Handbag Store Business. The precious metal’s meteoric rise over the last year has, after all, been unusual and bucked the normal trend it follows, he says.
On top of President Trump’s tariffs and potential interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve, Melek adds, “we’re in a war. We have no idea what’s going on. The first casualty of war is the truth. We’ll find out what the real situation is. At this point, the White House tells us that [the war] might end imminently,” Melek says, but reports on the matter are conflicting, and this will affect the price of gold.
As gold costs remain tough to predict, jewelers face a hydra of paths forward. They must think about keeping costs as unchanged as possible, all while either doubling down on higher karats, expanding lower karat options, or making design choices that maintain quality but shave off weight and, therefore, dollars. After all, Benayoun says, “every gram counts.”
Correction: Monica Vinader is a UK-based brand, not Canadian-based as previously reported. (March 18, 2026)
