Know what it’s worth. Before you sign the number.
Estate lawyers, insurers and pawnbrokers have to put a defensible figure on jewellery every week. There is no reference to point at. We are building one.
Nothing to try yet. One note when there is.
Three things make this hard. All of them are fixable.
A valuation has to survive being questioned.
An estate gets contested. A claim gets audited. A loan goes bad. The number has to hold up, and today it rests on judgement, a manual search, or a one-off appraisal that costs more than the piece.
Nobody owns jewellery price truth.
Watches have public indexes. Jewellery has none. Prices that were actually paid do exist. They sit scattered across houses, published on different terms, in different currencies, with no shared vocabulary for what was sold.
The winning bid is not the price.
Every house runs its own premium ladder, plus fixed fees, plus VAT and carriage. What a lot actually costs is a different number from the one on the screen, and it differs everywhere.
Built for the people who sign it.
Estate lawyers
Jewellery turns up in most estates. It has to be valued, defended, and sometimes divided between people who disagree.
Insurers
Underwriting and claims both need a figure that holds when the piece is gone and only a photograph remains.
Pawnbrokers and auction houses
Collateral gets priced daily, at volume. So do incoming lots. Speed matters as much as accuracy.
A band and a confidence, not a number pulled from the air.
The output is a range with a stated confidence, and the working behind it. A range survives a meeting. A single figure invites an argument about the last digit that nobody can win.
Where the evidence will not carry a reading, the honest answer is to say so. That rule is built in, not bolted on.
What an answer looks like
A band you can defend, and how sure of it we are.
No values shown. This is the shape of an answer, not one.
What we will not do.
Worth saying before you ask.
We will not publish prices.
Not as a search, not as a table, not as a downloadable file. The reference is for the people who subscribe to it.
We will not take your bidding.
Lotwise is a reference and referral layer. Bidding stays at the house, and the house keeps the relationship.
We will not answer on thin evidence.
A confidence gate decides whether a question can be answered at all. Sometimes the output is that it cannot.
We will not claim it works yet.
The method has not been tested against held-back results. Until it has, every claim about quality is a claim we have not earned.
The market this intelligence has to describe.
Price intelligence starts with knowing where the record actually is, and what a public result is worth as evidence. We write down what we verify.
We are not a marketplace, and we never take the bid.
Lotwise is being built to make buyers confident enough to bid, and then to send them to you. If you run a saleroom, here is where you would sit in it.
The buyer relationship stays yours
No wallet, no checkout, no consignments, and no commission on a sale. A buyer who decides on a piece goes to the house holding it. That is the design, not a phase.
Licensing rather than working around you
The intended path for realised-price data is a licence, on paid or reciprocal terms. If you publish results, we would rather agree how they are used than route around it. One conversation usually settles which.
Benchmarking, once there is something to benchmark
In time, how your categories perform against the wider market. Estimate accuracy, sell-through, where your premium sits. Sold only to you, and only about you.
Nothing above exists to buy today. It is what the thing is being built to be, and we would rather have the conversation early than present you with it finished.
There is nothing to try yet. You can be first when there is.
Leave an address and we will write once, when there is something to see. If you value jewellery professionally and have a live case, write to us instead. Those conversations shape what gets built.
Or write to marcusclay@lotwise.eu.