Our story
One farm town, every strand checked by hand.
FreshwaterPearls.com works with a team on the ground in Zhuji, China, the town that grows most of the world's freshwater pearls. We buy finished strands from family farms we know by name, check every one ourselves, grade it on a scale you can read, and sell it to you without a store in between.
FreshwaterPearls.com founder & CEO Aylam Rosenthal and his mom
The founder
I started this because the pearls were never the expensive part.
“I remember when I was young and my mom would sort her jewelry for trips, she would always end up bringing pearls because they worked for everyday wear as well as special occasions.
I started FreshwaterPearls.com to provide people with better access to quality pearl jewelry, without any over-the-top markups. Since pearls have no objective scale of quality like diamonds do, trust is especially important. There’s an old Russian saying my mom taught me: ‘Trust, but verify’, and I apply this deeply to my own relationship with the family-run pearl farms we buy from. Over time, we’ve built relationships with them where we’re confident they’re always going to send us their highest quality harvests. But we still verify every shipment by hand to ensure the luster, surface quality, and roundness are worthy of making the cut.”
How we gradeHow we inspect
Four steps between the pond and your door, and a person at each of them.
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01
At the farm
We see each lot as it comes in and choose whole lots, not strands picked out of them. What we turn down stays with the farmer.
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02
First sort in Zhuji
Every strand goes on a white tray under daylight-balanced light. Luster, surface and match are checked pearl by pearl. Roughly 7 in 10 strands do not make it past this table.
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03
Graded and measured
Each strand that passes is scored 1 to 4 for luster, surface and roundness, and measured. That score is the one printed on its product page.
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04
Knotted, checked, photographed
Strands are hand-knotted on PE fiber, clasped and checked once more. Then they are photographed exactly as they are and issued a certificate.
The farms
Family farms in Zhuji, and a relationship that runs on being there.
Zhuji, in Zhejiang province, grows most of the freshwater pearls in the world. The farms we buy from are family-run.
Trust here is practical, not sentimental. We’ve built working relationships with farmers which give us confidence that they’ll send us the best of the harvest, and our own inspection ensures that what they send us lives up to our high standards.
By buying directly from farms, we’re able to provide the top quality of each harvest to customers at a lower price than other retailers.
About our sourcingThat is the whole story.
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