With the exception of my sample or gallery pieces there are no prices listed on my web page. That's because I don't have a list of stock items that I offer or a warehouse full of pieces somewhere in New Jersey. Each piece is custom, the time and tooling expense is an unknown, so is the price. The best I can do is explain where the expense of titanium jewelry is.
Material	With a mass produced gold casting the price is easy to figure out, just weigh it. The expense of gold is the gold, not so with titanium. Titanium isn't very expensive, the cutting costs for my raw material are often almost as much as the titanium itself. I work mostly in commercially pure or CP. Not unlike gold, the more pure the material the softer it is - if you want to use the term "soft" on a metal that has a 50,000 PSI yield strength. There are titanium alloys which are much stronger than CP, but at some point you have to ask when is it strong enough? I can say that I work in pure titanium and I can offer shapes that nobody else working in aircraft alloys can...
Tooling	This is where the expense adds up for most titanium jewelers. They have large machine shops with very expensive equipment, each cutting process is expensive, and that's what you pay for, the use of the tooling. If you want to be able to say "this ring was made by a $100,000 machine", there are plenty of other titanium jewelers who fit the bill. My shop is a bit different, most of the equipment in my shop was purchased or built to make the pieces I sell. The difference is that you pay for the tools needed to create your piece, not some small fraction of the total cost of the machine shop.
Time	This is the biggest difference between Ti Designs and all the others. With a machine shop and a catalog of designs, each piece is turned out in a very short time. Most of them claim to be "hand made" or "hand finished", I've been at this for a while, I look at their products and don't see any hand work other than putting it in a box. I make plain wedding bands too, there's almost no hand work involved. When you look at a signature Ti Designs piece with it's flowing lines and complex curves, you're looking at the product of hours of hand work in creation and finishing. Time is money.
The bottom line: Add up the cost of material, the cost of tooling and the cost of an artist's time and you have the final price. I try to be fair about all of the costs involved. The tooling costs can include part or all of the price of a jig needed to make the part, depending on if I see that fixture being used on later work or not. The tooling costs also include breakage or wear of tooling - titanium is hard on cutting tools. The cost of working time is just that, working time. Working time means time in the shop working on what is to become the finished piece. If I screw up a piece and start over, the clock starts over as well. This is known as a fair price, something my customers have grown to appreciate. I invite anybody looking at this page to take a quick glance at the prices on my samples page, then follow the links on my links page to some other titanium jewelers for some comparison shopping. You'll see that they are less expensive on the simple rings they offer but more expensive on the complex stuff - and ask them about custom designs some time...