The German and I bought our wedding rings last week and followed the most awesome tip from a friend. Forgive me if this is totally obvious but we had no idea that we could do it so I thought I would share…
We went to Hatton Gardens, which, for those of you who aren't from London, is just one whole long street of shiny jewellery shops, and found one that looked nice enough to go into (The German chose on the basis that it had an aquarium and a pretty girl in it). We sat down, chose rings (I had no idea there were so many different sorts of plain gold bands, crikey), got them to write down exactly what it was that we had just picked… and then wandered up to the other end of the road to a wholesaler called Cookson's where we picked exactly the same rings for less than half the price.
I felt a bit bad for the pretty — and extremely helpful — sales lady in the fancy shop; the wholesalers is a rather unmagical Argos sort of a set-up and you take home your rings unpolished and in a little plastic bag. But hey, it turns out we actually prefer the unpolished finish and instead of costing £665 they were in total £281.75 (£90+vat for mine; whatever the rest of that is for The German, fat fingers). Admittedly £140 each still really hurts but the blow was definitely cushioned by the totally astonishing saving. And of course we LOVE them.
Anyway, I assume it's possible to do this all over the country, not just down here, so thought I'd share.
