Private Jeweler vs. Brick and Mortar Jewelry Stores
Diving deep into Where, What, When, Why, How’s of the two options:
Where?
Brick and Mortar companies sit high on their advantages in creating convenient shopping experience for customers of all price points. Having a storefront allows companies to showcase what they can offer as a physical product, and this creates convenience for clients to try things on in person and make purchases of the exact item on the spot. This is the biggest advantage they have over private jewelers who do not have a storefront with overflowing inventory of the actual goods in the quality of jewels we deal with. However, because the material cost is already really high for fine jewelry, even brick and mortar businesses have a hard time carrying high quality pieces at display, so they opt for cheaper quality items for lower prices to showcase to clients. This doesn’t necessarily mean that their prices are reasonable, because, easy math, lower the quality, the lower the cost to produce, and their mark up is still going to be higher than those of private jewelers due to their need to cover the costs of their overhead to maintain storefronts, staffs, and more. Whereas, for private jewelers with minimal number of staffs and no overhead cost of maintaining a storefront rental, their need for heavy mark up is much less of a necessity. This is why we can create a more competitive pricing than the brick and mortar businesses.
Besides the convenience on the consumer end, there are other ways that brick and mortar companies lower their costs. This is by having overseas mass-production, paying low labour fees and taxes in creating their pieces. Because production is done overseas and is rarely managed in person by the brands themselves, the quality of metal, polish, setting, quality of stones, and etc are not quality checked properly before the items land on the clients’ hands.
Private jewelers like OURI have production teams locally in Vancouver, BC and the US. We source all of our gemstones and diamonds from local dealers that have trace records to origins of the raw materials, allowing us to have full control over what we are serving to our clients. We pride ourselves for not only having the knowledge to pick the best for your needs, but also have strong sense of integrity, where we put ethics and skilled labour that is well compensated over anything else. We take on losses sometimes just to create the best that you deserve in conjunction with the high standards we have in creating every single jewelry at OURI. Our suppliers of metal, gemstones, and labour are all within North America, where labour cost and ethics standards are known to be high, and operate with gem dealers that have direct sourcing abilities to give us the best price for the gems that come through every jeweler’s doors. For example, we produce in the same production house as those that host well known brands with one of the biggest storefronts in major cities in North America. Meaning, our production team is highly skilled and is trustworthy in what they create for us, just like what you would expect designer brands to create for you with the 10 times markup.
What?
Because brick and mortar companies have abilities to source directly from the mines itself, they can have the first picks of the best of the best. Think about being shown all ten of marbles that the mines offer, having the first pick of the seven, releasing the rest of the un-picked three go all over the world to be offered at higher cost and to all of the competing companies. This is exactly what happens, when the world’s biggest mine holder and a high-end jewelry company works in sourcing their diamonds and releasing to the world to sell to as wholesale. They mine, source, wholesale, and retail all within their business, having a hold of the entire process of jewelry production. Therefore, their cost to produce is one of the lowest, as one can imagine. However, like mentioned before, to create this much of intimate distribution line create high costs of investment and marketing. Therefore, the cost of the final product that clients pay for is still very high, because they have all of these overhead to pay for with each product they sell. However, the high cost of affective marketing has some consumers absorbed by what they have seen growing up in the media. Clients link the brand image that they’ve been marketed with with what they want to experience, so they end up fixating their purchases to the specific designer brands. This is a totally valid purchasing reason, and is another great example of affective marketing of long standing brands that hold legacy.
As a private jeweler, this is not where we compete or do we even think about competing in this realm. However, what we can compete with is how much margin we are willing to leave and our ability to ignore the market price of each fine jewelry. Market price is set by the big brick and mortar companies. As an example, brick and mortar business can sell a 1k wholesale diamond for 10k at retail price, therefore setting the price of said diamond at 10k market price. Private jewelers may buy this exact caliber of diamond at, say 2k (higher than those that have direct purchasing power from mines as explained above), and sell it for as low as 3k. Why? because we are able to, and we find pride in providing the best for you regardless of the industry pricing standard. Literally.
Custom Emerald cut diamond ring with E VS2 0.52ct Natural Canadian Diamond on 14k White gold setting with two round 0.2ct accent natural diamonds on the sides of the center diamond
When?
When clients are on a time-crunch or are in a rush to find a ring, it’s definitely beneficial for clients to be shown ready to ship items that the stores carry on-hand. The speed at which these stores enable customers to go from walking-in to swiping their card on a payment terminal is something that private jewelers cannot compete with. Although there are more that goes into what makes these jewelries-displayed-for-purchases, there are clients that still prefer this method out of convenience. Then when would clients prefer private jeweler?
Because we start from scratch at every production, like a kitchen that makes your order when it comes in to provide fresh food served warm to you, we are able to create a fully customizable fine jewelry from the point you place the order. We walk you through the entire process from what type of metal, size, quality of stones, setting style, design details, hidden messages, to the type of final polishing you want. Not only that, because we have full control in-person to know every step of the sourcing and production, we are able to fill you in on every detail of how the jewelry is going to come out to be. However, this process takes anywhere from 2 to 8 weeks depending on the complexity of the design, some clients cannot wait this long. Although we try to meet everyone’s deadlines, we always encourage our clients to start their process earlier than their plan of proposal or wear to allow for room in production time, accounting for human errors that could sometimes delay the estimated timeline of completion. Most of our clients choose to work with us, small private jeweler, because of their ability to get involved in every step, making their custom jewelry that much more meaningful and personalized.
Why?
Companies that have been around for a long time create history, trust, value, stories, and legacy tied to their brand name. Most of this is further emphasized by long duration and budget for aggressive marketing. Hence, the consistency of these brands’ image-making gets wired into consumers’ minds, making them associate the brands as a place they want to buy from and experience the stories they’ve seen on the ads, and obtain a portion of the fairytale they want to be a part of. This is the power of having high budget for branding that these companies hold in their hands. Without these big pockets of marketing budget, private jeweler have harder time creating these imagined trust and community of customers right off the bat. That is why we rely heavier on word-of-mouth and referrals from past clients. Even though this is the greatest and the most affective marketing without costing us a dime, it costs us something that is not tangible; extra efforts in creating genuine connection and care we build with clients through our work that makes them proudly share their experience with their friends and family. This is why we work tirelessly to provide something beyond the tangible, beyond what money can buy; more of what we believe should exist in human experiences. It’s not just a sale for us at the end of the day, but rather the humanistic approach that reminds us of why we are in this business. People, our clients’ are at the core of why we do the work we do and enjoy it. Creating and bring their ideas to life of something they can cherish forever, associate the physical pieces with memories, and even hand-down generations after generations is what keeps us going.
The intimate experience of creating something customized, personalized, and being a part of the creation every step of the way makes our clients spread their love for us, beyond the physicality of our custom jewelries they love. Knowing and sharing in great detail of what our clients are paying for and receiving is more important than how the jewelry looks to us. Keeping our clients in the loop of the entire process allows our clients to feel much involved and secure. This is why most private jewelers operate with integrity and genuine connections with clients, and that is what truly sets us apart from the brick and mortar companies. Not only can we provide the exact same caliber or even better quality of jewels, we provide an experience that the clients can tell their partners and families for years, while their jewelries are cherished and worn forever. Competitive product, local production, trust between all chain of distribution, working with integrity, and providing exceptional service and experience to our clients - that is what we carry in our hearts when working with our clients at OURI.
How?
Brick and mortar companies that have direct link to the diamond mines or gemstone mines are bound to have the lowest pricing in buying the raw materials, but it is also up to them to mark up however much they want. Meaning, the process of creating margin is completely in their hands, which enables them to markup up to 10 times the price they pay to produce the product.
Creating competitive pricing follows educated understanding of the gemstones and the market values of them. Private jewelers come in many forms, but at OURI, our CEO/Head designer is a graduate student of a full-time metalsmithing diploma and gemmology under Canadian Gemmological Association (CGA). Having professional knowledge in the craft we perform is our priority - mostly to create trust from our clients knowing that we have, not only their best interest at heart to create something they can cherish under their budget, but what is worthy of their money and what it is that they are investing in in great detail.
We believe in transparency, and we are not afraid of telling our clients the truths within the industry that are often clouded with romanticized marketing online. We have clients that come to us with skewed judgements and comments based on what they read online, and sometimes clients will believe what they read online so much that they don’t believe the truths we tell them about how we can make their purchases better. This is no one’s fault per se, but the downside of overflowing information provided by non-educated writers online. Making critical judgement when reading media is important, but it gets difficult when the industry you are reading is full of non-professionals sharing advice.
At OURI, we rarely try to convince someone to make them trust us or believe something they don’t truly believe. We foster educational environment where we provide factual and beneficial information to our clients, and leave the judgement to them to decide what they want to believe. At the end of the day, we are here for our lifetime to stay responsible for our work, so being honest is only going to benefit our business and get us further. Lying to our customers for one or two sales is not going to keep us in business long term. Our focus in having our clients’ trust in us has gotten us so much further than we expected in such a short amount of time that we know what works and are incentivized by staying truthful and genuine in this business.
We went through the 5W’s of what would make one choose a private jeweler over brick and mortar jewelry business. We hope it was informative and educational! We believe in sharing knowledge at no cost, because we live in the world of abundance of information, and being a part of adding value to the great platform of information called Internet makes us feel very fulfilled.
If you found this informative and want to talk further about creating something meaningful and special for you, please feel free to check out: Custom Project at OURI
and reach out to us at anytime at Dear@Ourifine.com
Chera Kim, CEO/Head Designer and gemmologist at OURI fine 