[SpaceNeedle]

Their price on loose 12-13mm round Tahitians A/B grade is within my budget. I was about to give up on getting a couple of pairs of good quality Tahitian earrings that are within my budget. Oh boy... I'm EXCITED.

[jshepherd]

Those would be necklace-grade pearls, that is my only concern. If you are making earrings they will have quite a few visible blemishes...

[SpaceNeedle]

Originally Posted by jshepherd

Those would be necklace-grade pearls, that is my only concern. If you are making earrings they will have quite a few visible blemishes...

Thank you Jeremy. I'll ask if they can find peals with minor blemishes which are not visible from the front. Otherwise...

[jshepherd]

But then at $195 per pearl it is not really the greatest deal. That would be a moderately blemished necklaces for about $7000.

[SpaceNeedle]

Ouch!!! That's a pretty darn expensive strand. Jeremy, thank you for pointing this out. I was confused with A/B quality mentioned on the website. I thought that was based on A-D system.

[Admin]

And for spamming the forum and members as Aloha Pearl has done in the past, a big thumbs down for them.

[jshepherd]

Apart from the obvious reasons of spamming the forum with their pearl-powder products like soaps and other things, there is another reason why I would never trust Aloha Pearls.

When they started their business in Hawaii just a few years ago, the founder called me to order pearls and had all sorts of questions. Kept me on the phone for more than an hour - just friendly conversation, supposedly.

One month later (October, 2004) Aloha Pearls was born at AlohaPearls.com. Every picture on alohapearls.com was stolen from Pearl Paradise. The product photos, the grading photos, the pearl information, even the text was copied word for word, and they made a point of stating that you should NOT buy pearls from skyscraper land (Los Angeles) you should buy them from Aloha Pearls - closer to the source.

Actually they were amateurs buying cheap stuff from the Hongqiao pearl market in Beijing and selling it with our pictures. Needless to say, I do not really like those guys. They finally removed our photos and information after we filed DMCA complaints and prepared to sue them.

Aloha Pearls is not an honest operation.

[boo]

Not much in the way of aloha there...

[jshepherd]

Definitely not much of an "aloha" indeed. Copyright and trademark infringement on such a scale as what Aloha Pearls did is something we rarely ever have to deal with - even with eBay sellers in China.

It was not even the fact that they stole all our photos and information and used it on alohapearls.com. That can be construed as a mistake. A very unwise and amateur mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. But the deceitful way they went about it was not just a mistake. It was very dishonest and underhanded. Those are not really the character attributes you try to build a jewelry company on.

[Josh]

Ouch. It's good to have some background.