If you were lucky enough to get a peek inside the vault of your local main street jeweler, you would probably be amazed at the small fortune in diamonds you’d find. Even tiny jewelry stores have dozens of diamonds on hand and ready to show.

So just imagine what you might find in the vault of a big online diamond discounter – you know – those guys with the diamond "search engine." They sell hundreds of diamonds a day and offer as many as 100,000 on their web site. So they must have a huge vault packed with tens of thousands of stones, right?

Think again. The online diamond guys are Internet gurus, not real jewelers. They’ve never seen the diamonds listed on their web site, and they never will. The information about each of those stones comes from the wholesaler who actually owns it. When the website takes your order, the diamond is drop-shipped to a jeweler somewhere else who mounts it and then sends it on to you.

If it all sounds very impersonal, you’re right. When it comes to buying airline tickets or DVDs, getting the lowest price is all that matters. But diamonds are not an interchangeable commodity. Every diamond is unique. Even two stones that seem identical on paper can look very different from each other.

So how do you get the advantage of a jeweler’s expert eye combined with the value of the high volume online stores? When you choose an Endless Embrace engagement ring, you get the best of both worlds – the cost savings of an online store, combined with the expertise of trained jewelers and gemologists.

Ursula is just one member of the Endless Embrace family who invests enormous professional pride in her work. She manages our diamond department, and her team's responsibilities include sorting, hand matching, and individually re-inspecting each stone before it goes to one of our diamond setting experts.

"The difference is the personal touch that goes into every piece we make," explains Ursula. "I always recommend Endless Embrace to my friends and family, because I know how much care everyone here puts into our jewelry.

As a consumer, you have many options when selecting an engagement ring. You can purchase a ring from the kind of store that your parents or grandparents shopped at, or you can buy it the same way you get your books and music. But with Endless Embrace, you can get the security and assurance of purchasing from an expert jeweler, combined with the value of buying online. So why compromise when you can have it all?