Author: Dave Siskin

Forget everything you know about selling jewellery.

Meet your new customer.  Born sometime between the late 1970’s and the turn of the century and referred to as Millennials orGen Y; these are your new clients.  Some are still in their teens, but the leading edge is already…

Jewellery Retail: The Dissatisfied Customer Part III

The best way to deal with customerdissatisfaction is to prevent it from happening in the first place but that is not always possible.  A retail jewellery store needs to be prepared for customer service concerns by establishing sound policies, proper…

Are consumers losing their trust in diamonds?

I find this article, Diamonds are bullshit, quite disturbing, mostly because I agree with it.  The diamond business is based on one of the greatest long-term marketing plans ever conceived and it worked beautifully. Let’s look at more recent events that…

Jewellery Retail: The Dissatisfied Customer Part II

The Caribbean, where I do most of my work, is a major retail market for jewellery. Most of the customers are tourists and do not live on the island where they made their purchase. So when there is a problem,…

Jewellery Retail: The Dissatisfied Customer

We’ve all had them. They are the ones that make you wish you had just stayed home. They might be standing in your jewellery store, on the phone or even just an email but they can ruin your day. They are not happy;…

Is fear tarnishing our image?

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” ─ Marie Curie The jewellery industry took another hit to its image with a…

What’s in a name?

I had an inquiry from a client today about acceptable misnomers within the industry.  This particular issue was about coated quartz being sold as coated topaz.  He felt that since brown quartz and citrine have often been called “Smokey Topaz”…

Death of the Salesmen?

“He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine… A salesman is got to dream,…

Do we need gem labs?

There is a lot of current chatter, especially in the US, about the inconsistency of diamond grades from different gemlabs. Every few years someone does an experiment sending one stone to several labs to compare the grades. Without fail, each time this experiment…

It’s time to colour your Christmas

Let’s face it.  Christmas is the single biggest holiday event in the jewellery world.   For US jewellery retailers, this highly commercialized holiday typically accounts for 30-50% of the yearly business.  Now is the time to prepare for this important selling…