Samuel Madrid’s diagnosis of the affordable moissanite market fits in one sentence: the stones were good enough, and too much of the jewelry built around them was not. In his view, buyers kept meeting moissanite through poorly constructed pieces, with bulky settings and stones that drifted out of line, and many of them judged the gem by faults that belonged to the work.
Madrid, a first-generation jeweler, studied jewelry for about ten years before he opened Miami The Jeweler. The business is three years old, and its founding idea has held steady since the first day: the problem was never moissanite. The problem was mediocre moissanite jewelry.
A gemstone with its own chemistry
Moissanite is silicon carbide. Diamond is carbon. The two are separate gemstones, and a knowledgeable jeweler or gemologist with the right equipment can tell them apart. Moissanite scores about 9.25 on the Mohs hardness scale against diamond’s 10, which places it among the hardest gemstones used in jewelry. It also has a higher refractive index and greater dispersion than diamond, the two optical properties behind brilliance and fire.
Miami The Jeweler sells moissanite as moissanite. The shop does not market it as a stand-in for anything else. Madrid’s position is that a well-cut, well-set moissanite earns its place in fine jewelry on its own properties, and that the shop’s job is to build pieces worthy of the stone.
Where the pieces fell short
A solitaire ring puts one stone on display. Much of Miami The Jeweler’s catalog runs the other way: tennis chains, Cuban prong chains, Miami Cuban chains, spike tennis chains and iced pendants that can carry hundreds of stones. On those pieces, a small flaw repeats down the length of the piece. One stone reads a shade warmer than its neighbors. One row wanders off line. One prong sits thicker than the rest. Multiply that across a chain and you get jewelry that looks off even when the wearer cannot point to the reason.
The shop’s view is that a buyer can own an excellent gemstone and still own a mediocre piece of jewelry. The stone is one component. The product is the entire piece.
The standard Miami The Jeweler set
Madrid built the moissanite line on VVS1, D-color stones set in 925 sterling silver. VVS1 sits near the top of the clarity scale, with inclusions that are very hard to find even under 10x magnification. D is the highest grade on the color scale. Through its own sourcing and production, Miami The Jeweler has found that using D-color stones exclusively gives a chain the crisp, colorless, uniform look the shop wants from end to end. Yellow pieces in the line carry an 18K gold-plated finish over 925 sterling silver.
The stones cover half the job. The shop’s craftsmanship standard covers the rest: precise setting with small, clean prongs that hold each stone without letting metal crowd it, even spacing and alignment, consistent setting height, proportions that suit the design, substantial construction with appropriate weight, clean finishing and plating, and clasps that work. Madrid holds that list to a blunt test. “Everything we do has to be perfect,” he says, “otherwise it’s not ready for our customers.” When a piece misses, the production team melts it down and starts over.
Diamonds under the same rules
Madrid did not build a moissanite-only shop. Miami The Jeweler also sells diamond jewelry, natural and lab-grown, set in solid 10K, 14K or 18K gold depending on the piece and the customer’s request. The shop applies the same expectations for spacing, prongs and finish to a diamond bracelet that it applies to a moissanite one, and it labels a lab-grown diamond as lab-grown.
Customers split along the same lines. Some prefer moissanite for its brilliance and for the stone coverage it allows. Others want the rarity, tradition and material value of diamond in gold. Some buy both for different occasions. The shop treats each decision as a matter of what the buyer values, and it keeps the craftsmanship constant across both.
Where the shop stands three years in
Miami The Jeweler works from a showroom at 22 NE First St, Suite 225, in downtown Miami, on the same street as the Seybold Jewelry Building. Madrid says he has sold pieces to celebrities and influencers around the world, and his clientele leans toward people who understand what jewelry does for their image and their brand. Custom work runs through both the moissanite and diamond lines.
His ambitions run well past one street. Madrid wants the business to become a pillar of the moissanite and diamond industry and the leading source for unique jewelry with exceptional quality. “I want to ice out the whole world,” he says.
The collections, from tennis chains to custom pendants, are on view at the downtown showroom and online through Miami The Jeweler.