A wearer wrote to ask, very politely, whether we ever ran sales. She said she'd seen a SENMOMO piece she wanted for $182 and was holding off, hoping the price might come down. I want to write back to her — and to everyone with the same question — in one place.

The short answer: no, we don't run sales, and we won't. The longer answer is below. I'm including the actual cost breakdown of a representative piece because I think it's worth being honest about where the money goes.

Where the price goes

Take a Her Tenderness, our most-ordered piece, priced at $148 USD. Here's what's in it, in actual costs:

That's about $126 in direct cost. The piece sells at $148. Margin is ~15%. Most jewelry brands operating at our pricing level have margins of 60-75%. Many run 80%+.

Our margin is low because we made specific choices that prioritize the wearer over the brand: we cover international shipping, we hold reserves for lifetime service, mo charges what her time is actually worth instead of inflating it for "brand value." Those choices add up. They mean we're profitable but not generously so.

The reason for the choices

I made these choices because of how I want SENMOMO to relate to wearers. A piece that costs $148 retail should cost roughly $148 worth of work and materials to produce. Not $40 of work and $108 of brand markup. The honesty of the pricing is part of what we're selling.

This is the opposite of how most modern luxury works. Modern luxury — Hermès, Dior, Tiffany — charges 5-10x material cost. The premium pays for brand mythology, exclusivity, advertising, retail real estate, the perception of scarcity. There's nothing wrong with that business model; it's old, it works, and it produces some genuinely beautiful objects. But it's not what I wanted to build.

I wanted to build a studio where the price you pay tracks the work that was done, and the studio's profit comes from doing the work well, not from charging more than the work was worth.

Why we don't discount

Because we're not over-priced to begin with. When a luxury brand runs a 30% sale, the brand can still profit because the markup absorbs the discount. When we run a 30% sale, we lose money on every piece.

More importantly: discounts are a tax on your most loyal customers. The wearer who paid $148 in February for Her Tenderness would feel — accurately — that her loyalty had been punished if we sold the same piece for $103 in November. We won't do that to her.

Aesop has been operating for 40+ years without ever running a sitewide sale. Hermès never discounts. Le Labo doesn't either. The reason isn't snobbery; it's pricing discipline. The price is the price. The customer who bought today and the customer who buys ten years from today pay the same. The piece's value doesn't decay or surge with calendar promotions.

This means we never have a "Black Friday." We never have a "summer sale." We never run "20% off your first order." Our pricing is the pricing. It's the same in February as in November as in 2032.

What the consequence is for you

Two things, both honest.

You'll never feel like you paid too much, in retrospect. The piece you buy today won't be 30% off next quarter. The wearer who buys after you pays the same. The value of your piece — the social value of having bought it at full price — never erodes through promotional pressure.

You also won't get a deal. If $148 is more than you want to spend right now, we understand, and we're not going to lower the bar to convince you. We'd rather you wait until it makes sense, or order a different SENMOMO piece, or order from a different brand entirely. The piece you buy from us should be a piece you bought at the price it's actually worth.

Two pricing exceptions, and why they exist

We have one exception to "no discounting":

Founding 200. The first 200 wearers on our pre-launch list received priority access to pieces #128–#200, with their numbers reserved. They paid full price, but received a low archive number that would otherwise have been impossible to receive once the list closed. This wasn't a discount — it was a non-financial form of early-adopter recognition. We did this once. We won't do it again.

And one quirk that some wearers experience as a "deal":

Re-stringing service. All re-strings, re-sizes, and re-photographs are free. Forever. The cost of this service is built into the original price you paid. So if you've owned a SENMOMO piece for five years and sent it home three times for service, you've effectively received hundreds of dollars of work for the price of your original purchase. We can do this because we built it into the math from day one.

What I want you to feel

I'd rather we be a studio where you pay $148 once, know exactly where that $148 went, and feel ten years from now that the math was honest — than a studio where you pay $200, occasionally see $130 sales, and never quite know what the bracelet was actually worth.

I think the honest math is what wearers eventually trust. It's not as exciting as sales. It doesn't generate Black Friday traffic spikes. It doesn't get covered in deal-roundup articles. But it produces a quieter, longer kind of loyalty, and I think the wearers we want are the ones who would have come anyway, at full price.

So that's the price. $148–$215 across our current range. The same in every month. The same in every country (we cover shipping and customs differences ourselves so the wearer in Berlin and the wearer in Brooklyn see the same number). The same five years from now.

If that math works for you, we'd love to make you a piece. If it doesn't, we hope you find the right object somewhere else.