Seller’s Remorse: A Winza Story

Buyer’s remorse fades. Seller’s remorse compounds. A meditation on the parcel of Winza Ruby we sold too early.

The trade is built on talking about buyer’s remorse.

Every consumer-facing piece of jewellery content ever written is, in some way, addressing buyer’s remorse. Did I overpay, did I get the right stone, did I make the right call, was she happy? The entire architecture of retail jewellery, with its certifications and appraisals and return policies and lifetime warranties, exists to soothe the buyer’s anxiety about having made a good or bad decision.

Nobody talks about the seller's remorse. But it is the deeper category. In this trade, it is the regret that compounds, follows you for decades, and wakes you up at 4am in a hotel room in Bangkok thinking about a stone you should have kept.

I want to tell you about a parcel.

Winza, Briefly

In 2007, in central Tanzania, in a village called Winza in Mpwapwa district, rubies began appearing. Within months, a full-scale gem rush was underway. Tens of thousands of artisanal miners moved into the area. A market sprang up overnight. Stones flowed out of the region through Arusha to Bangkok, to Geneva, to the world.

The Winza rubies were unusual. They had a specific colour signature, slightly purplish red, sometimes with blue zoning visible in the rough, that nobody had seen before in any other locality. They were often unheated, unusual for African ruby in that price range. They had moderate fluorescence, lower than Burmese and higher than Mozambican, that gave them a distinctive presence in daylight. The gemological community got there fast. Vincent Pardieu and the GIA team documented the field within months of discovery. The Swiss labs developed identification protocols. The Winza locality became, briefly, one of the most thoroughly studied ruby fields of the modern era.

And then it ended.

By 2009, the productive deposit was essentially exhausted. The miners moved on. The village market dissolved. The total productive lifetime of the Winza ruby field, as a meaningful commercial source, was about two years.

The stones that came out in those two years are now collector trophies. They are documented, unheated, and from a locality that produced briefly and will likely never produce again. The market has revalued them substantially. A 2-carat unheated Winza ruby today, with proper documentation, sells in ranges that approach lower-end Burmese. When they were coming out of the ground in 2008, they were trading at a fraction of that.

The Parcel

We had a parcel of Winza material in 2008.

I am not going to tell you exactly how big the parcel was, or exactly what we paid for it, or exactly what we sold it for, because Keith reads everything I write before it goes up and he has feelings about disclosure of historical trade prices. But the parcel was substantial enough that what happened with it has become, in our shop, the parcel. When somebody says “remember the parcel,” everybody knows which one.

We bought it in Bangkok from a dealer who had bought it directly from a Tanzanian consolidator who had bought it from village-level dealers in Winza itself. The chain of custody was short, the documentation was good, and the stones were extraordinary. We brought them home to Vancouver. We had them set, mostly into solitaires and three-stone designs. We sold them.

We sold them at, by the standards of 2008, fair retail prices. The clients who bought them got beautiful rings at honest numbers, and as far as I know, every single one of those rings is still being worn and treasured by the women they were made for. So that part of the story is fine.

The other part of the story is that, had we held those stones, or even a meaningful portion of them in inventory, uncut or in safe storage, they would today be worth several multiples of what we sold them for. Not because we had done anything clever. Just because the locality was exhausted, the market revalued the stones, and time did its work.

That is not the regret, exactly. The regret is more specific.

What the Regret Actually Is

Buyer’s remorse is the regret of a wrong decision. Seller’s remorse, in this trade, is subtler: the regret of a correct decision made without the information that would have made you decide differently.

In 2008, when we sold those stones, we did not know the Winza deposit was going to be exhausted within twelve months. Nobody knew. Vincent Pardieu was still publishing field reports. The market was still expecting more material. The valuation we put on the stones was, given the information available at the time, correct. We priced them honestly, sold them honestly, the clients got fair rings at fair prices, we made our margins and ran the business.

The regret is not having been able to see around the corner. The regret is realising, in 2014 or 2015 or 2018, that the stones I sold for X are now selling for 5X, and that the difference is information that was not available in 2008 but that, in retrospect, may have been hinted at by the structure of the deposit, the small geographic footprint of the field, the extractive intensity of the artisanal mining, and the chemical signature that suggested a narrow geological event rather than a sustained one. We could have known. We didn’t. We sold.

This is a different category of regret from “I overpaid for that stone.” Overpaying is a known mistake the moment the cheque clears. Selling too early is a regret that materialises slowly, sometimes years later, often in the form of an auction catalog landing on your desk and you flipping to the page and going: oh.

What the Trade Actually Requires

There is a school of thought in this business that says you should hold inventory. That a serious dealer maintains a private collection of stones, the ones too good to sell, the ones from exhausted localities, the ones you know in your bones will revalue, and that this collection is the long-term wealth of the business while the daily flow of inventory pays the bills.

There is another school of thought that says hold nothing, sell everything, keep the cash flowing, and let the next generation worry about the next generation’s stones. This school argues, not unreasonably, that sentimentality is the enemy of profitability and that any stone you keep is a stone you did not get paid for.

Both schools are right and wrong. The truth is more nuanced and more annoying. You should hold some stones: the ones from localities you have specific reason to believe are time-limited, the ones that are anomalously good for their price point, the ones the trade is overlooking for reasons you can articulate. And you should sell everything else. The discipline is knowing which is which, and that discipline can only be developed through experience. Experience in this trade is mostly the residue of selling too early.

The Lesson, if There Is One

I think about that parcel a lot. I think about it more than is probably healthy. Every time I see a Winza ruby in a Geneva auction catalog, or hear about one moving in a private sale, I do the math, and the math is always the math.

But here is the lesson I have actually drawn from it, which is not the lesson you might expect:

The stones that went into those rings are still in the world. They are on the fingers of women who love them, who chose them carefully in our shop in Vancouver, who built lives around them. The economic asset I “lost” by selling early was, in fact, not lost. It was transformed into objects in human lives, each with its own meaning and its own weight. The increase in market value since 2008 is real. So is the fact that, had we held them in a safe in Vancouver, they would have produced no joy for anyone, only a number on a balance sheet we could have looked at occasionally and felt clever about.

The trade is the flow of stones from where they are dug to where they are worn. The buyer has joy. The seller has regrets. Both are part of the work. You cannot do this job without participating in both economies, the economy of objects and the economy of meanings, and the regret is, in some ways, the fee you pay for being in the meaning-making part of the trade.

So when I think about the parcel, I think about it with two minds at once. One mind says we should have held them. The other says they are being worn, and that is what they were dug for, and the women wearing them are happier than any safe deposit box would have been. Both minds are correct. I have learned to live with both.

What I tell younger dealers, when they ask, is this: hold a few. Not many. Hold the ones from localities you have specific reason to believe are running out. Hold the ones the market has not priced. Hold the ones that, when you look at them under the desk lamp at night, you cannot imagine letting go of. Sell everything else, and sell it honestly, and don’t let the regret of the few you should have held poison the satisfaction of the many you sold to people who loved them.

That is the discipline. I am still learning it.

There is, by the way, exactly one Winza ruby in the safe in Vancouver right now. It is small. It is from that 2008 parcel. It was the one we could not bring ourselves to set. Keith and I have joked over the years about selling it, and we have never sold it, and I do not think we ever will. It sits in a small box in the back of the safe, behind the working inventory, with a piece of tracing paper around it that has the weight, the carat, and the date written in pencil in my handwriting from 2008. Sometimes I take it out. I look at it under the loupe. I put it back.

That stone, alone among that parcel, did not get to be in a ring on a hand. It got to be a memory instead. I am not sure which is better. I have decided to stop trying to decide.