LustreMag.com |

In every issue of Lustre, our guest editors, the top luxury jewelry retailers in the country, share some of the secrets of their success. In this special issue, we celebrate the good advice they’ve given us in the past six years. Without enough room for six years of great stories and useful tips, we focused on the best practices that spanned many of their columns. These are the rules of luxury retailing: create an experience, empower your people, build relationships, celebrate your community, understand the luxury consumer, respond to a changing world, personalize your style, and differentiate or die. These talented professionals don’t just tell us how to build successful businesses, they do it, day after day. We’d like to thank them all for making good advice such a good read, too.

CREATE AN EXPERIENCE

“It is the experience—not the merchandise alone—that will drive the independent jeweler forward and allow us to compete with the impersonal world of the Internet. Pink may be the new black on the fashion scene, but relationship shopping will never go out of style.”
— Howard Tapper, Tapper’s Diamonds & Fine Jewelry, West Bloomfield, Michigan, November 2004

“In today’s business climate, in order to survive and prosper, it is important to have more than the right product, location, and price. Our goal is to make luxury experiential by creating that unforgettable, personal experience with our luxury jewelry customer. We try to provide an extraordinary shopping experience for our customer—from product, to service, to environment.”
— Michael Littman, Gary Michaels Fine Jewelry, Manalapan, New Jersey, March 2007

EMPOWER YOUR PEOPLE

“Building a corporate culture where sales associates are defined as professionals is key to the success of our business. I see my sales staff in a way that some of my peers don’t. They are not invoice writers. Each is a creator of business. They are professionals and work largely independent of management control. Each handles all aspects of the client relationship. They are held accountable for developing their clientele. A great sales staff, continually trained and authentically empowered to produce profit and volume, is the single most powerful tool for permanent success and for distinguishing your store from the competition. Build one, and you will win.”
— Tom Tivol, Tivol Jewels, Missouri and Kansas, July 2003

“We recognize our people are the company’s greatest assets, and we promote an entrepreneurial environment. Because our people are our brand strength, the caliber of those people must separate us from all luxury retailers, not just luxury jewelers in our regions. Investing through education, advancement, and rewards generates tangible results. Since 1994, we have brought new associates to our semi-annual Lee Michaels New Hire University. We also send our managers to the Luxury Jewelers Resource Group’s Leadership Academy. Selecting the right people, providing them with tools to engage their training, and then creatively making room for them to grow yields the best possible leadership pool. Perpetually building our business requires excelling at personal service and client relationships.”