Protect Your Margins With Colour
Making money in the fine jewellery business can be tough, especially in these days of online and large scale retail competitors. For a small to medium sized business it might seem impossible to compete and make any money. With coloured gemstones, however, you have a great opportunity to protect your profit margins and be successful. All it takes is a little creativity in positioning coloured gemstones to attract the attention and interest of your potential customers.
How does colour help to protect your margins?
Mixing coloured gemstones into your inventory right alongside traditional white diamonds is an effective way to draw in more customers while protecting your profit margins quite well. Why? Primarily because unlike white diamonds, there is no truly accurate published price list for coloured gemstones. This allows you to set prices according to a combination of factors related to your costs and your business, rather than according to a generic price list that may or may not accurately reflect your particular situation.
As more and more buyers of gemstones use the internet for research, information, and comparison shopping, it has become harder and harder for the small to medium size business to compete. Traditional white diamonds are a well known commodity and your potential customers have very likely been looking around and have a general price in mind for a certain quality of stone before they even walk in your door or visit your website if you have one.
Promoting colour to promote healthy margins
Coloured gemstones give you a promotional edge when it comes to attracting customers, closing the sale, and ensuring healthy margins for your business. Be bold about showing plenty of colours in creative ways in order to attract and keep the attention of your customers. Remember, because coloured gemstones provide you with higher profit margins, the more you can entice customers to buy them (either separately or in combination with each other or traditional white diamonds) the better you will be at protecting your margins at a healthy level for your business.
Some retail experts will tell you to keep coloured gemstones entirely separated from traditional white diamonds in your displays, but this is outdated advice that really doesn’t work. Yes, you’ll still want to have your gemstones laid out in general categories, but it’s a great idea to mix some coloured gemstones in smartly with your traditional white diamonds. This serves two purposes:
- It allows the customer to see the terrific assortment of coloured gemstone options right alongside traditional white diamonds, which in turn gets them started thinking about including a coloured gemstone in their eventual purchase
- It promotes coloured gemstones as a terrific complement to or even substitution for traditional white diamonds
- By mixing your collection up somewhat, your customers will inevitably see your coloured stones.
However take care when doing this as customers can be turned off by your display if it comes across as too mixed up.
Once you have captured your customers’ attention by showing them the beauty, attractiveness, and flexible use of coloured gemstones, you are that much closer to closing the sale. What they see is interesting jewellery that is beautiful, unique, and extremely desirable. What you have accomplished is to capture their interest and convince them to include coloured gemstones in their purchase, which in turn means you are ensured of a healthier profit margin. Of course this takes more effort to market, but the days of easy sells are long gone. You need to know your product and gain your customers’ confidence, if you’re going to sell them something they wouldn’t ordinarily consider. But the bottom line is –It’s worth it!
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Let us know what strategies work for you. How have you succeeded in selling coloured stones over diamonds?
