How often have you looked in your jewellery box, and wondered how much the contents are really worth? I’m not talking about the valuation for your insurance company, or what you bought it for, but the intrinsic value of each piece.

Not an easy question to answer. When you buy a piece of jewellery from any retailer, you’re paying the shop price – that’s the cost of the article, plus their mark up. True, you can buy during a sale and get a lower price, but generally no retailer sells any items for less that they bought it for. And how about the mark up that the manufacturer makes? A harder figure to guess, but once again no manufacturer makes anything they can’t sell for a profit.

So what’s the true value? One way to look at it is the value of the materials used to make the item. Say you’ve a ring made of a precious metal like silver or gold. You can weigh it, and look up the current trade price for that material, and get a rough idea of the cost of the components. It will be a shock, let me tell you. Generally the scrap value of jewellery is about 10 – 15% of it’s retail price. So how else can you put a value on your treasured possessions?

The best rule of thumb I can give is your jewellery is worth what you can sell it for, or the value it has to you. A piece of jewellery with great sentimental value is worth far more than an unwanted Christmas present, even if the present cost more when bought.

I have my own jewellery company, Azuni, and we make our own collections of jewellery from silver and semi precious stones. When we cost any item, we have to look at the cost of the components, the cost of the labour to make that piece, and the time cost of developing a collection. Sometimes we do all that and realise the piece is too expensive, and we go back to the drawing board. For me, creating designs that have broad appeal and whose value reflect the cost of making the piece is the right way to design, and ultimately the way any product's success can be gauged is based upon the sales it achieves, and the satisfaction it gives the purchaser.

There are many other factors that I’ve not covered in this article, one of the most important being the perceived value that is given by endorsement, be it through public relations activity resulting in press coverage, celebrity patronage or simply great word of mouth recommendation, but in the next few week I intend to put pen to paper and shed some light on the true and perceived value of the press.