How Long Should a Custom Jewelry Quote Take?
For most independent jewellers, a single custom quote takes 33 to 70 minutes. That number sounds acceptable until you calculate what it costs across a month and what it costs in quotes you never get around to sending.
Where the time goes
Custom jewelry quotes take a long time because the calculation is genuinely complex — but most of the time is not the calculation. It is the surrounding friction.
| Task | Typical time |
|---|---|
| Looking up today's gold price | 3–5 min |
| Finding the right stone price from last invoice | 5–15 min |
| Running the metal calculation manually | 10–20 min |
| Formatting the quote document | 10–20 min |
| Emailing the PDF to the client | 5–10 min |
| Total per quote | 33–70 min |
And that is before accounting for back-and-forth with a client to clarify what they want, revisions after a client changes their mind on karat, or hunting for a past quote to use as a starting point.
The real cost of slow quoting
If you complete 10 custom jobs this month and each quote took you an hour, that is 10 hours of non-bench work before a single piece gets made. With GemQuote, the same 10 quotes take under an hour total. At $70/hr, that recovered time is worth $630 in a single month.
Some of that time is unavoidable: gathering requirements, communicating with clients, thinking through a design. But the mechanical parts — gold calculation, PDF formatting, email — can be eliminated almost entirely.
There is also a second-order effect. When quoting is slow and painful, you quote less. You defer follow-up. You let prospective jobs go cold because the friction of building the quote outweighs the energy you have left. Slow quoting is not just a time problem — it is a revenue problem.
What a fast quote actually looks like
The goal is not to cut corners on accuracy. A fast quote that is wrong costs more than a slow quote that is right. The goal is to eliminate the friction that is not adding value.
A well-run quoting workflow for a custom piece might look like this:
Describe the piece in plain language (or enter specs directly)
Confirm the AI-filled fields: karat, weight, stones, services
Adjust margin and add client name
Send — client receives a branded PDF with a live approval link
Total: under 5 minutes. The math is the same. The metal price is live. The PDF is professional. The time cost is a fraction.
The 5-minute quote is not cutting corners
There is a version of "faster quoting" that does cut corners: rounding to the nearest hundred, skipping stone pricing, using a flat labour rate that does not reflect actual time. That is not what this is about.
The 5-minute quote is fast because the software does the calculation correctly and instantly — not because the calculation is skipped. The live gold price is more accurate than looking it up manually. The diamond price table pulls from figures you set. The margin calculation is exact, not estimated.
Speed here is a side effect of having the right system, not a tradeoff against accuracy.
How many quotes can you realistically send per day?
At 60 minutes per quote, setting aside half a day for admin means you get through 4 quotes. At 5 minutes per quote, the same half day gets you through 48 — though the realistic improvement is less dramatic because client intake and relationship time does not compress the same way.
A more realistic outcome when shops switch to efficient quoting: quote volume increases by 2–3×, follow-up becomes consistent because the barrier to sending a revision is low, and close rates improve because clients receive quotes while the conversation is still warm.
From 60 minutes to 5 minutes
GemQuote was built to get a custom jewelry quote out in under 5 minutes without sacrificing accuracy. Live gold prices, your stone costs, your margin — all calculated automatically with a branded PDF that goes straight to your client.
Start quoting faster today