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CHANGING THE RULES

Finally, we asked retailers: If there was one thing you could change about the jewelry business, what would it be? Better margins are a common wish: “Jewelers should remember that they are in business to make money and therefore should stop giving the jewelry away!” Other retailers would eliminate the gray market or make gem lab reports more consistent.

Diamond dominance is something that jewelers have long relied upon to help them sell luxury. But some retailers now see the dominance of diamonds as a threat. “I don’t like the fact that the business is so dominated by diamonds, that diamonds have been promoted to be the industry’s sole idea of romance,” one jeweler says. “Consumers think they have to have a diamond engagement ring. There is a single mindedness that makes it more difficult to sell other jewelry, some of it at better margins, because of the focus only on diamonds.”

Although Internet competition is a worry for many because of the pressure on diamond margins, other retailers are more concerned about designers selling direct from their web sites.

But other retailers say things that we didn’t expect. Sadly, many jewelers wanted to feel closer to fellow retailers. They don’t feel that jewelers help each other enough. “I would have retailers respect each other and try to stay on the same page,” one says.

In that spirit, we’d like to thank all the jewelers who spent so much time answering our intrusive and exhaustive questions without even a credit in recognition of their expertise. Perhaps it is a positive sign of more cooperation between luxury independent jewelers in the future. They did it for the common good, to share their knowledge about buying luxury with fellow retailers.