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　　Brothers Daniel and Ben Mardkha started their wholesale jewelry company Marke to reinvent how men shop for wedding bands: “We wanted to gut out all the lovey-dovey stuff”

　　Wedding band company Marke offers Wholesale Fashion Shoes just two styles, a classic rounded band and a flat one, as well as a home try-on kit customers can order before committing. PHOTO: RYAN SLACK

　　By Lane Florsheim

　　The wedding band company Marke values one thing above wholesale fashion jewelry all else: ease. When its founders, brothers Daniel and Ben Mardkha, realized how many men don’t know what they’re doing when the time comes to buy a ring, they set out to remove guesswork and confusion. Or at least, move it to their living room.

　　Before committing, shoppers can order a home try-on kit and Marke will send six replica rings in a mix of materials and widths, boxed in the company’s green packaging along with a ring sizer and a try-on guide. The company offers just two styles, a classic rounded band and a flat one. Each is available in three widths (slim, mid and wide) and materials (14-karat yellow, white and rose gold), priced from $299 to $629. It all follows the now-familiar direct-to-consumer model, but it’s for a purchase that’s supposed to last a lifetime.

　　Daniel and Ben Mardkha. PHOTO: RYAN SLACKDaniel, 30, wholesale how to set up a dropshipping website and Ben, 25, launched Marke after their first jewelry company, Everband, didn’t work. Everband offered jewelry retailers matching women’s and men’s wedding bands, to which wearers would add a diamond to every year celebrate their anniversary or the birth of a child. (Women would collect diamonds on the outside of the ring; men, on the band’s inside.) The idea, they now say, was too complicated. Employee turnover at jewelry stores meant it was hard to keep retail staff members trained in the Everband process, says Daniel. But the brothers noticed something when marketing the concept.

　　Guys coming in to buy wedding bands were like “lost little puppies,” Daniel jokes. “They didn’t know where to start and were kind of just being dragged around by their partners.” Wanting to take another shot at starting their own business, the brothers tackled wedding band shopping. Their family owns a Manhattan wholesale weave distributors jewelry manufacturing company near Bryant Park. The younger Mardkhas have had access to the factory and resources there as they build their brand. They describe themselves as their own target market. Daniel is married and wears a rotation of a few of the Marke bands; Ben is engaged and planning to wear a ring that isn’t offered right now, but “hopefully will be,” he says.

　　Marke hopes customers will appreciate its straightforward approach. “My fiancé had no idea what he wanted out of a ring,” says Emilie Mateu, 28, an associate TV producer who lives in New York City. “He’d never worn jewelry before. He didn’t know what color or shape—he really knew nothing.” She says the home try-on kit took away the need to go searching through the city. “It felt like a very millennial experience,” she adds. “The whole thing was very easy, it was online.” Her fiancé picked a slim classic band in rose gold.

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　　PHOTO: COURTESY OF MARKE

　　Jeremy Doroski, 32, and his fiancé wanted to get “classical, traditional-looking” bands that were made in New York. “I thought the home try-on kit was very cool,” says Doroski, the director of purchasing for a Broadway merchandising company in Queens. “I was like, ‘Great, we don’t even have to go in and talk to anybody.’”