Pearl Factory

Purchased an oyster and got a beautiful pearl, Dana assisted me by putting in a pendant. It turned out beautiful! Since then I have bought 6 additional pearls love them all!

So the pearls were beautiful. And the service was fantastic. UNTIL we said that we don’t want to make it a necklace or have her poke a hole into the pearls. Then, the horrible service started. She dropped her smile and collected money without any emotion and was just plain rude. She collected the money, then told us to sign the receipt. She just left our pearls on the tray and left. She didn’t even give us a bag. When we asked for a bag, she literally just threw down the bags and didn’t say a word. Beautiful pearls yes, but HORRIBLE service. What’s worse is her fakeness in the beginning. I remember her name clearly: Cindy

This store has nice jewelry, but beware: they tell you that if you buy something above a certain amount you get to pick an oyster and open it to find a pearl, which will be «free». This is true… except that they don’t tell you (or at least they didn’t tell us) that once you’ve done that they’ll then try to sell you another setting for your pearl, for a few hundred dollars more. You can walk away with just the pearl, but just be aware that this is a sales trick to try to pressure you to spend more money.

We are staying at the Palazzo so we were walking through the Grand Canal Shoppes. It was my fiancé’s birthday so we were in a good mood. I stopped to look at the oysters because after opals (my birthstone), pearls are probably my favorite type of jewelry. Joey (or Iokepa, his Hawaiian name) came over to talk to us about the process.
He had my fiancé pick 4 different oysters and I chose the final one. We did the Aloha ceremony (tap oyster, yell Aloha, Joey rang a bell)… It’s a bit silly but it’s pretty cute, it’s an enjoyable experience, and yes, it’s a marketing scheme, but a fun one.
I got a nice-​sized, very shiny pink pearl. I was ecstatic because pink is my favorite color. Joey showed me an example of what the average person gets, which was slightly smaller and more silver. I honestly don’t care if that was or wasn’t true, because I thought my pearl was beautiful regardless.
We picked out a setting in a comfortable price range with no pressure. Of course we were shown top-​of-​the-​line stuff first, because it is a business, but when we asked for items more in our price range, that’s what we were shown. I went with a ti leaf setting and it is beautiful.
Long story short: we had a fun time, heard some lovely stories from Joey, and got a pretty piece of jewelry.