Even though wedding rings are their specialty, you won’t find much—if any—gold at the Honest Hands Ring Co. workshop in Morrison, Colorado. What you might find, instead, are drawers full of shark teeth, mammoth tusks, fossilized plants, offcuts from wedding dresses, splinters from treasured log cabins, antlers, feathers, high school band instruments—you get the picture. The most unique ingredients? Probably the kaplan foil taken from a piece of the Apollo 11 a client won in an online auction. The finished ring was accented with specks of a meteorite from the moon, of course.
Ben Bosworth never expected to end up here when he made a wedding ring for himself in 2016. Like so many entrepreneurs before him, his passion-turned-side-hustle-turned-huge-success started out as a solution for a problem in his own life: He was getting married, and he simply didn’t like any of the options available to him. So, as an engineer with plenty of machinery in his garage for tinkering and making custom bicycle frames—his original business idea—he fashioned his own ring out of titanium and walnut.
“I was not trying to build rings for people,” he says. He just posted a photo of his ring on Facebook, to show friends and family, and from there it took on a life of its own. Loved ones asked him to make their rings, too, and then on a whim in 2018 he built a Squarespace website and started taking orders.
In early 2023, the revenue from Honest Hands was high enough to replace his engineering salary, so he left his job and started making rings full-time, along with a small team. In the two-year period starting just before then, he documented explosive growth—over 1,400 percent. Back when he was a one-man operation, he was making about 10 to 15 rings per month. Now, the company makes around 200.
Even at scale, custom rings are still at the heart of Bosworth’s brand, making up about 40 percent of their total ring sales. The rest of the rings they sell are made-to-order, but not fully custom. Non-traditional rings are a growing sector of the wedding ring market, and Honest Hands seems to have tapped into a desire for more whimsy, sentiment and individuality.
“There’s just so many options out there compared to what there used to be,” Bosworth says. “But more so than that, I think people are realizing that just diamonds are kind of overrated.”
Here are three takeaways from his success.
1. Smart inventory management is key
You might think that so many custom orders would slow them down, but Bosworth has a clear system for everything, making the process super-efficient from concept to completion. For starters, they photograph every single ring as soon as it’s finished, contributing to a portfolio that helps guide customers who arrive with the spark of an idea that’s not yet a clear vision.
Balancing so many custom orders with off-the-rack offerings, so to speak, requires expert inventory management. Instead of keeping rings on hand, however, Honest Hands only stocks materials. Every ring is made to order, which cuts down on waste and frees up inventory and cash flow as they continue to scale, Bosworth says.
“Because we’re making so many rings at any single time, a lot of it comes down to just really good inventory management and tracking where things are at in the process,” he says.
2. Don’t wait to put processes in place
Documented systems are a large part of what Bosworth credits with the company’s success. Right from the beginning, Bosworth implemented systems like customer management software earlier than he strictly needed to. His hope was that the company would grow into them rather than trying to urgently solve a growing need with an unfamiliar system in a time of stress.
This wasn’t always easy. When Bosworth started shopping around for software, some companies “were barely willing to give us the time of day,” he said. They told him he wasn’t answering nearly enough customer service tickets to make the software worthwhile, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer—he wanted to get comfortable with the system before he needed it. “That way, when we are fulfilling that number of tickets, it makes sense for us,” he says.
“I just knew that if we didn’t start now, by the time we were busy enough to start using those at their capacity, it would be too late,” he adds. “We’d have to restart all of our processes over again.”
3. Don’t quit your day job. No, really
Bosworth kept his full-time job until it became essentially impossible for him to keep doing it while managing Honest Hands. While it was challenging at times, he also says that helped the company to grow. With a full-time salary, he was able to invest capital in the company that he wouldn’t have had if he’d quit too soon. He was able to invest in some pricey camera gear, for example. On a shoestring budget, that might not have seemed necessary, but it was a vital tool for growing his online presence and attracting new clients. A TikTok video he posted got around 2.7 million views, he notes.
“I probably would’ve been a lot more conservative in my purchases for the company had I not had that backup of revenue at the time,” he says.
His advice for anyone in similar shoes?
“Stay a little bit longer than you think you probably should.”
Photo from Honest Hands Ring Co.
