Celeb Jeweler Wafi Shows Off Jewelry Made for Lil Baby, Young Thug & Polo G | On the Rocks | GQ

I think in my genre of the jewelry business, which is very interconnected with hip-hop, artists use jewelry to express their individuality, their creativity. Instead of having a piece of art hanging on the wall, they prefer to have it around their neck. What's up, GQ? This is Wafi from Jewelry Unlimited, and you're watching On The Rock. I started working in my dad's little kiosk when I was 12. Our average ticket item was $50, so it was really from the bottom up. In 2008, I started my own company, and today is where we are. We have always operated as a family-run business where our customers feel like family. I enjoy selling jewelry face-to-face. I enjoy having relationships with clients. Wafi responsible for at least about $400,000 or $500,000 worth of the jewelry that I got. Shout-out to Wafi, Jewelry Unlimited. I got this from Wafi. These two was made by Wafi. Wafi, you watching this, you owe me a percentage of your shit, don't forget. Don't think I forgot. This QC piece was made for Lil Baby. P, who's the owner of QC, wanted to do something special for him last year. It has the QC logo, but it also say can't be fucked with. P liked it so much, he's like, make me one too. He's all emerald cuts in the back, invisible set. The QC is raised with big stones, pointers on the top. The Cuban was also made to match this where it alternates emeralds and round-cut diamonds. It cost P close to $200,000 a piece. Sourcing of diamonds. It comes down to purchasing power. If there's a jeweler that doesn't make that many pieces, they would buy diamonds just for that particular piece. If there's one who is capable of purchasing larger quantities and holding in stock, get a little bit better pricing, and then there are jewelers that are buying straight from mines and cutting out the entire wholesale market, they get the best prices. And they buy the largest quantity. I'm proud to say that I'm dealing directly with the mines. So this is Drummer Gang logo. This was made for a rapper out of LA, his name's Greedo. He's currently incarcerated. This whole conversation and this vision was communicated directly by a phone while he's in a jail cell. He wanted to make this, we did. We wired us the money, and here it is. And it's just waiting for him to get out and being able to enjoy it. It's his logo. It's got multicolored diamonds with this infinity link with emeralds in the little pockets, wherever we could set them. All hand-set, very heavy. So something like this would take 25 to 30 different parts. So this hand is one piece, this glove is a piece, the drumstick is a different piece because you can't make this out of a single casting. 200,000, it's heavy, I need to put it down. This one actually, Young Thug placed the order to make it for his friend. I showed it to him and he loved it so much he ended up buying a different gift for his friend and saying, you know what, just customize it for me. So we further customized it where we added a second S on top. I think we are malleable in the way that we can cater to the clients. So if there was something new that a client would bring to me, I would be very capable of presenting it to them and executing. The idea might sound crazy from the beginning, but I mean, we've put full-on circuit boards in pieces of jewelry where, like a fully functional traffic light or a fully functional Rubik's Cube. Everything is crazy until it's not. This is another piece for Lil Baby. Again, CBFW, can't be f***ed with. This one, he wanted to incorporate large stones and this is pretty much the largest pointers you can put on a pendant like this. These are 70 pointers, meaning each stone is 0.70 carat. And sourcing these 43, I think 43 big stones in the air, matching quality. It's a task. So this is Polo G's, 1300, and then it has these street signs that intersect on the bail. He wanted the burgundy diamonds on top, three-dimensional. This is a big piece, it's almost six inches. So this Polo G, this was, I think, when his first album came out. He wanted his album cover in the face of the watch, which was, I've never seen that before. And this is a Patek Philippe, which was a lot less money back then, but now it's a lot more. But this is also Polo G's. This is his label, ODA, Only Dreamers Achieve. This is done in emerald cuts along with round cuts around it, which round is just your basic round brailling cut. These are the other cut, which is baguettes. Baguettes tend to be skinnier, longer stones. Emerald cuts are shorter, wider, but they take up less surface area. And therefore, not only does it cost more per carat, but it also, you end up using more carats to make jewelry. This is a piece for somebody from the FBG camp, FBG is Future's label. We made him one, and now I've made maybe two dozen of these in different sizes that are for his crew. I made one like this for ESTG. However, this is for one of his partners. The partner wanted it to be able to spin. Yeah, this one is about 60,000, maybe like 80 carats of diamonds. This one was made for QC artist Bankroll Freddy. He's from Arkansas and he loves his state. And here's another one, both of them for Bankroll Freddy. This particular one was 60,000. Again, incorporating emeralds. Everything's casted in its entirety and the diamonds are all hand-set BBS, so it gets expensive. This one was 35,000. These two were made for Gervonta Davis. This is his company, GTD. And this was a piece he had me make earlier. I'm not sure why. This, the pendant alone was 45,000. This one, the pendant alone was 25,000. So the Wolfpack piece was, I made it about three years ago. It's for the owner of Wolfpack Global, which is the label that signed Lil Baby. It was also all virgin set, heavy, heavy piece with these gold accents. About 75,000 for the pendant. The Cuban was not included, but that was about a 50 more. So this pendant I made for one of our good friends. He's a local entrepreneur. His name's Vic. Pendant includes larger pointers on the bezel, emerald cuts in the back. That's his logo in the middle, held up by this beautiful baguette tennis chain that graduates from a smaller to larger size. And the larger size really gets large. It's about 12 millimeters in the middle. Very expensive stones when you get into those sizes. Yeah, it's one of the prettiest pieces. Watches is actually the reason I got in the business. I have a special affinity, liking towards watches. These are a few of the brands we carry. Rolex, Richard Mille, Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe are dominant brands today. Patek Philippe is my favorite brand. I mean, I've wanted one since I was making $5.50 an hour. And I was able to buy one in 2008, which was probably the best purchase I've ever made. It was a $25,000 watch, which is now worth $250,000. Something very interesting is going on in the watch market, which is our economy is seeing hyperinflation. So the inflation on luxury products are through the roof. For example, this watch right here, pre-pandemic, $120,000. Today, $300,000 is a great deal. There's not many investments one can make that they can enjoy, wear, own while making money. And it goes across the board. Even diamond pieces like these, this watch itself, this is a Patek Philippe 5726, which is a moon phase, larger case size. This used to be selling for approximately $90,000. Today, $200,000. It's a good deal. Supply, again, is so limited, but anybody who comes in to sell me a watch is not leaving with that watch, because I'm buying it. I attend these watch shows. I have my reputed dealers that I've been working for years. But sourcing them is always, sourcing them for the right price is the challenge. I mean, technically, as a jeweler, I need to purchase the watch plain and then add the diamonds to it. Now, there's only a few models I can say that today cost less than plain. And here's an example. Like this model right here is a Patek Philippe 5980. This watch is probably the only watch that would sell a little bit less than the plain version would. Because of the lack of production of this watch, because they're so hard to find, and the demand has skyrocketed. Same with these skeletons. The watch actually, today, the plain watch has outperformed the iced out watch. I enjoyed dressing it up. When I say dressing it up, I mean icing it out. That in itself isn't hard, because you get to manipulate the diamond setting and do things that have not been done before. These two are the exact same watch, but this one has been iced out with significantly larger stones. There's about 60 different sizes of stones that go into creating one of these. This is our big stone setting. This is literally exclusive just to us. This is something that is honeycomb flower set. One of the best settings available in the market, but this is just something with that extra pizzazz where you were able to manipulate 20 more carats of diamonds into the same surface area. That's something that we did last year that has been very, very popular, and for good reason. These are just our presidential. So Rolex makes many different models, presidential being one of the best investment pieces. There's solid gold. There's rose gold, white gold, yellow gold, and there's a platinum right here. This is your classic. I think a lot of people associate a Rolex with a solid gold Rolex with this type of bracelet, which is the presidential bracelet. I think this is the 40th anniversary presidential, which comes with a green face that, again, has skyrocketed in value today, trading at like 95 to 100,000 when, beginning of the pandemic, I remember selling some for 28, 20, 32, and now it does 100, and that's triple. People have understood that, and it has made more money than the stock market recently. This is a special piece. This is our RM 1103 Red Quartz. It is one of the lightest time pieces for its size. The entire case is fabricated out of red quartz. I think the retail on this might be around 200,000, but trading at around half a million. Here's a little bit older model. It's a 1101. This one, the case is made in rose and titanium, now trading at about 300,000. This one is a 1102 that came out after the 1101, before the 1103, probably around 275, and this is a limited Mancini. I think he's a race car driver that they made in collaboration with titanium, around 260,000. And this is a small, small sample of the pieces we've made. We, as a company, like to push the envelope and try new things. The biggest pieces and the craziest pieces that I have in mind are the ones I'm working on today. Thank you, GQ, for stopping by my shop. Hopefully we can do another episode in my new shop that opens up this year.