What Your Jeweler Can Do For You
June 8, 2009 by The Briefer
Filed under Features, Jewelry Lifestyle
These days consumers and jewelers alike have become more creative. The first to make the most of their jewelry on a tighter budget, the second to keep creating value for their clients. This dynamic has created a great service that I hope will continue to be offered long into the future: Collection Review, which is usually followed by redesigning of underutilized or out of fashion pieces.
Everyone that loves jewelry has a collection, whether that is what they call it or not. Every collection does well with a bit of curating. Many jewelers will make an appointment and spend time with their clients to review all of the jewelry in the client’s collection. With a keen eye for quality, fashion and knowledge of the client, the jeweler can recommend pieces that might make the collection more complete. For example, someone that attends charity luncheons should have a nice brooch or a strand of pearls, whereas a client that often attends black tie affairs should think about dress earrings. Clients can create a “wish list”, trade-in and or redesign.
Many items in your jewelry box can be reused or scrapped and put towards a new design. Earrings or a necklace that never sat right or are just never worn might be perfect with a few tweaks, new findings or a bit of embellishment. The price of gold is also around its record high making it a good time to sell your old gold, but reusing it for a new design remains a great option.
Look for a jeweler that offers Computer Aided Design (CAD) for any custom pieces. CAD will generate a design that will be specific to your stones; finger, neck or wrist measurements; and to your taste. The design can be easily manipulated during the creative process until the client is completely satisfied. The system can also be used with a milling machine to produce a hard wax, castable model for preview and approval. This system has replaced the hand carved model, and has brought efficiency and limitless design options to custom jewelry.
So, make an appointment with your jeweler, and if they don’t offer this service ask them to consider doing so, and tell them who gave you the idea!
Benjamin on Wed, 24th Jun 2009 9:57 pm
I believe that what you are recomending is a great idea and it can b created at store level. I like the President Kennedy
influenced headings…”What your Jeweler can do for you”, and to continue the legacy…”What you can Do for your Jewelers”, bring all the jewelry pieces that you don’t wear any more, the heirloom pieces, you’ll be surprise how many ideas can flourish sitting with your jeweler and going over piece by piece, and have him/her ultrasonic clean and loope your old jewelry.
I believe ladies and gentlemen of this industry that we all love, that we are in the times of creativity, and the more ideas that you can come up and implement to attract the jewelry retail buying customer, the more traffic that you
can create in your store, the better chances you have to drum
up business and create sales.
I have to give you a little personal story because when you are 62 1/2 years old like myself and been in the business since 1965, you kind of accumulate some of them.
Dianne my customer, told me that she had all these old jewelry that she was not wearing. It just happens that with in weeks we were having a Restyling/Remount show at the store
I asked her to bring all the pieces that she wanted to remount a couple of days before the show to clean them and check the stones. She had a heirloom piece that had a cluster of very beautiful rubies, the piece was an brooch. She also brought a bracelet that had rubies, blue saphires and diamonds. The
amazing thing was that the rubies in all the different pieces along with the blue saphires they all match. All the rubies had the same hue as well as the saphires.
As I got in touch with the Remount Team, the day of the show we were able to create a pendant and matching earrings set for Dianne that she wore home the same day. She brought me
five different referals after that show, and all of them are in my Restyling call list…Just a little story.