Hello Dinosaurs.
You have been making buying jewelry too hard for too long. If we can make jewelry buying easier, you will sell more of it. People want easy. The fastest way you can become easier to shop with is to start pricing your jewelry. Sounds simple, but we are the last industry on the planet not to tell shoppers prices. It’s nuts! It’s archaic and it should stop.
Think of when you had to buy something you knew nothing about. You felt frustrated. Now imagine shopping for that same item, but not only do you not understand the item, imagine now you don’t even know how much it costs! You go to your store every day, so you don’t realize how many people are scared to go to a jewelry store. I have heard cases of men running out, fainting, and even losing their lunch.
Do you want scared customers? No! You want confident, comfortable clients. Empowered people buy. Confused, ashamed people do not. The simplest way to give people the confidence they crave is to put prices in your cases.
Does any other industry do this? Imagine going into a clothing store where none of the clothes were priced. Or a place that sold refrigerators where you had to hear a presentation on each one in order find out the price. You would probably get frustrated and leave.
We want prices and transparency in every other industry, but we are blind when it comes to our own. We are not thinking like our customers. We hide behind this notion that the customer needs us to romance an item, when they are hardly listening to what we say anyway. They are buying because they want to feel rich, or loved, because her sister has one, or they saw Jennifer Lopez wear one, not because you told them it is .98 ctw of F VS2 melee. Plus they are more likely to listen to our presentation after they know the price! Before they know the price all they can think of is, “would he please just shut up and tell me how much it costs?” You can still romance the piece, the only difference is you are now romancing the piece to a more qualified, confident listening partner.
The ironic thing is that you have not shown your prices because you are scared people will think your prices are too high. When in fact by hiding the price, people assume it’s because its too high! You accomplish the opposite. Customers think you are ashamed of your prices. Pricing your jewelry shows you have faith in what you are charging.
I believe this is why people buy jewelry from Costco. Costco, Amazon, Walmart are proud of what they are charging so it makes the buyer more confident in the value as well. No one has time for games. Today everyone is too busy. Its a transparent world we live in, yet the retail jeweler is still creating fog.
A push back I hear is that prices make your displays look bad. Well let me give you an easy visual. Vegas, Hong Kong, any trade show – you walk around seeing gorgeous displays. Beautiful. No one is buying from them. Why? Because you think they must be too expensive! This is the same way your customers feel!
I was in Vegas this year and many booths where slow, but one booth had a line 14 people long every day. Who? The one booth that priced their items. They had a $1000 case, a $5000 case and they made a lot of money. You can make a lot of money too.
If your only concern is that prices don’t look as nice, there are hundreds of pretty, classy ways to show prices. At the end of the day you can have full, pretty cases, or empty one’s because you sold out. Do you want to be great at displaying jewelry or selling jewelry? Only one pays the bills! Stop worrying about how pretty the case looks and start really selling some jewelry.
If you think Aleah might have a point. here are some baby steps you can take.
#1 Start with social media. Next time you post a piece of jewelry, post the price too. You just might sell it.
#2 Look for attractive tags, small signs or other classy ways to show prices.
#3 Not ready for prices? How about using a range of prices. “Rings $2000 to $4000”. This gives them powerful, helpful information without nailing you down to a price.
Today’s customers buy the same day they shop. If you treat people like buyers they will buy. If you treat them like shoppers they will shop.
They want to buy. Help them buy. It’s long overdue that the jewelry industry opened up to our customers. The very least we can do is tell them how much they can purchase an item for.
Aleah Arundale is a 3rd generation GIA Graduate Gemologist, a 5th generation jeweler turned loose diamond wholesaler and the founder of the immensely popular Jewelers Helping Jewelers Facebook page. Selling diamonds on the road lets her share great ideas from hundreds of different jewelers from all over the country. Sign up for her Jewelry Sales Tips Newsletter by e-mailing her at Aleah@olympiandiamonds.com or calling 800-882-8900. “We are all in this jewelry business together, lets help each other!”
