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Cover
Retail Rap
By Phyllis Schiller
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| Yael Designs |
The 4Cs are not the only things that make a piece of diamond jewelry a sales winner. In an ongoing series, Rapaport Magazine explores the “3Ws” — what’s selling, what’s not and why — by going straight to the people who really know — jewelry retailers. Each month, we ask a sampling of retailers to comment on the important issues that are facing the industry today. Here is what they had to say when asked: “What is your holiday game plan? Are you stocking any new items or going with what worked in the past?”
“We are gearing up to what we expect to be a very busy holiday season. We haven’t seen any one specific piece for the holidays like Journey or the Love Knot that people have been selecting over the years. I don’t think there’s anything like that right now. We’re stocking really across the board, everything from Pandora and Kendra Scott all the way up to Rolex and beyond. And fashion jewelry, diamonds and colored gemstones — we recently sold a gorgeous padparadscha natural sapphire. We’re known for fine jewelry but we try to keep a price point for everyone.”
“We’ve been to a couple of shows recently and were looking for different products or ideas, like the dancing diamonds that were so big last year. But we just couldn’t find anything to replace that. So we’re going to continue with those, some slightly different, and hope we have the same success this Christmas as we did in 2014.
“We will be stocking fashion gemstones, including morganite and rubies and emeralds as well. We’re seeing a little more of a trend toward yellow gold here in the Midwest and we’re working on that too. But other than that, it’s a lot of sterling silver, a little bit larger pieces than we had years ago.”
“We’re different in that we make a lot of our jewelry ourselves. My plan is to do my own personal catalog and feature a lot of our key pieces. I do a lot of high-end color. I buy my own stones and we have five custom jewelers, so we do really different things, each one of a kind. We’ll have some brands, like Kwiat, and we’re going to do watches and some fashion pieces. But I’m not a huge designer brand store. We make jewelry ourselves and give the customer a much better value. For the past four or five years, we’ve been doing this religiously, and it’s working like a charm. I think we’re going to have a great holiday season. We had a great August and we’re already light years ahead of last September this month so far. So we’re doing very well.”
“I think the bread-and-butter is going to be strong, the basics like studs, diamond pendants, diamond line bracelets, etc. There’s always a place for them. The core basic jewelry box pieces are going to be strong this year, as they were for us last year. We are seeing an increased business and requests for yellow gold, including bridal, and quite honestly, in the past week, we’ve had eight special orders for engagement rings in yellow gold and that’s pretty huge. I bought some additional basics in yellow gold for the holidays. And then also diamond fashion, which I think is going to be strong. Petite pendants and more dainty, delicate neck pieces and bracelets — we’ve seen an increase in our business for those items.”
“We have just taken on the Shinola watch line this year and we think that will be a hot seller for young people who are looking for a watch that they can wear and enjoy every day and tell the time without touching it. We’ll also be stocking a lot of colored gems. We have quite a few collectors in this area who love colored gems and people in the store here love selling color. We’re already stocking some new, unusual colored gemstone pieces. We have basic diamond jewelry and we carry the Kwiat line, which we have for years. But we do more of our business in vintage — we sell a lot of vintage pieces and stock a lot of vintage. I think it’s too soon to tell about the holidays with all that’s going on in the world. We’re cautiously optimistic.”
“We’ve been doing a lot of custom pieces, unique one-of-a-kind things using diamonds we already have in stock. We’ve been doing a lot of designs with rose gold — it’s been really popular — lots of halos, double halos. There’s always something going on with the bread-and-butter pieces, but we’re doing some different takes. Instead of traditional tennis bracelets, we’ve doing cuff bangles, petite ones with diamonds on them. And jackets to go with diamond studs. Simon G. is one of the biggest designers that we carry — both bridal and fashion. We’re doing a trunk show with them in December. And also one with Spark Creations, one of our colored stone lines. We have a party and they bring a trunk show for our customers; that’s a really big hit for us, every year.”
“Diamonds and, what has been moving well, the colored diamonds — that’s what we’ll be stocking for the holidays. We just finished a big August sale and now we’re moving on to the holiday plans.”Article from the Rapaport Magazine - October 2015. To subscribe click here.
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