ByJulie Goldenberg,
Contributor.
L
ike many future brides, Nicole Wegman went on a frustrating, months-long hunt for the perfect engagement ring with the man who became her fiancé. It wasn’t that she couldn’t find the right cut, color or clarity after multiple trips to New York City’s Diamond District to find the ideal sparkler—it was the whole process that turned her off. Wegman ultimately found the antique ring of her dreams—with a 4.5-carat Old Mine Cut diamond—at a small boutique in the District, months later. “I was drawn to it because it was feminine and had personality and the owner of that shop was a woman,” Wegman recalls. “She just felt like a kind, trustworthy individual in a sea of men.”
The then-26-year-old Wegman knew she wasn’t alone and after her own wedding in 2013, she became what she had sought in the first place—a ring concierge. The New York native with a degree in apparel design from Cornell, began advising friends and other women on ring shopping in the back room of a jewelry store in the same Diamond District that had vexed her when she was getting ready to say, “I do.”
