JIS and JCK Luxury Miami Shows

Last May Reed Exhibitions, operator of many jewellery shows including the JCK Las Vegas Show, bought the venerable Jewelers International Showcase (JIS). JIS has been in operation for four decades serving retailers in Florida, South Eastern US and the Caribbean.

For their debut event, Reed combined the JIS with the JCK Luxury Show. The JCK Luxury Show ran from October 13-16 while JIS opened on the 16th through the 18th, allowing one day of overlap. Personally I would like to see the shows running concurrently instead of a staggered schedule.

The JCK Luxury show features top brands including: Doves by Doron Paloma, Simon G Jewelry, Frederic Sage, Stephen Dweck, Effy BH, A. Link and many more. The JIS show offers a full spectrum of suppliers from fashion and silver through loose diamonds, fine jewellery and designer goods. A few of the vendors from the Luxury Show opted to stay open for both events.
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Pre-registration is now 100% online. Badges are no longer mailed in advance. Instead, a bar code is emailed to attendees to be presented at the registration booth. It was the quickest and most efficient process I have ever experienced. I had my badge within 60 seconds of presenting my bar code.

This was one of the largest JIS shows in its history with over 1250 vendors. I noticed that the focus is shifting back to higher end fine goods. Of course there will always be a strong presence of fashion accessories and price-point merchandise to serve the robust tourist and gift shop trade.

Throughout both shows, styles featuring broad fields of pavé set stones or larger coloured stone centres surrounded by pave were prominent. At the luxury show the pavé was mostly larger melee diamonds while at the JIS, there were smaller diamonds or semi-precious in the pavé settings. Fashion and silver styles contained large and very large coloured stones, mostly in cabochon or slab cuts.

Attendance, at least on the day I was there seemed rather sparse but those that showed up were actively buying. Mid-range gold and diamond jewellery booths were fairly busy. I can’t report on loose diamonds because it was Saturday and most of the diamond dealers were closed for Sabbath.

I did not see as many buyers from the Caribbean retail stores as usual and those that I spoke to reported they were just hanging in there, still waiting for business to recover. It seems to be improving, but very slowly.

The marriage of the JIS and JCK Luxury show be a good thing. The combined shows provide a broad coverage of the jewellery spectrum that is needed in this important market.

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