Promoting And Merchandising Colored Stones

2007: It's really inspiring, to read Jacques Sabbagh's views on how to sell colored stones. He wrote/addressed this nearly three decades ago, and the truth is his concept still works today. You can still deal with the same sophisiticated, well-informed consumers the old fashioned way.

(via Journal of Gemmology, Vol.XVII, No.3, July 1980) Jacques Sabbagh writes:

It is a privilege for me to address you this evening on the subject of promoting and merchandising colored gems, and it would be a pleasure indeed if I am permitted to do so in an informal way. By your leave I shall start, if I may, on a rather personal note. People who happen to know about the story of my life, seventeen years of which were devoted to medical studies and to the practice of medicine, often ask me with astonishment, ‘How come you changed horses midstream? What made you quit this most noble, this most essential profession, to get involved in the business of colored gems?’— these and similar transparent questions thus implying that my present activity in the jewelry trade is a comparatively futile one and colored gems are rather superfluous commodities. Well, not only do I immensely enjoy my present occupation, but also I happen to be very proud of it. Indeed, I do not believe that jewels are superfluous commodities. I am convinced that they satisfy one of the basic needs and that jewelers cater for one of the fundamental requirement of human nature.

As Thomas Caryle, the 19th century Scots essayist and historian said: ‘The first spiritual want of barbarous man is decoration.’ By this he meant self-adornment, and this is an anthropological fact, substantiated by our observation of the behavior of primitive man of aboriginal tribes still inhabiting certain recesses of the jungle and isolated areas of our planet, as well as by various archaeological findings. Caveman, primitive man invariably demonstrates a tendency for self-adornment by using any handy object that lends itself to this purpose. At the same time, he would attribute occult powers to articles he uses for personal decoration, whether they be perishable items such as bird feathers or plant seeds, or non-perishable objects, as for instance sea shells, animal teeth and claws, or mineral crystals. He would pierce them and then string them and wear them for their often inextricably ambivalent functions: the supernatural power of talismans and charms and the beautifying property of jewelry. In actual fact, excluding the other members of the genus Homo, none of the components of the animal kingdom, even the higher primates, the anthropoid apes, our closest evolutionary ancestors and collateral relatives, exhibit any marked sign of beauty appreciation. It seems that the emergence of a sense of aesthetics, sufficiently compelling to induce artificial additions to the anatomy of even sometimes minor surgical alternations of it, has occurred more or less parallel to the development of language, tools and culture.

Now, with your permission, I would like to venture a diagnosis. Jewelry enterprises that neglect the field of colored gems, that to various degrees discard them from their inventory, are—forgive me for saying so—colorblind. The same way an individual affected by Daltonism, that is colorblindness, misses out on a lot of the beauty, of the glory, of the colorfulness of life and nature around him, seeing them as it were, in different shades of black and white as though he were watching a telecast on the screen of a non-color television set, or a black and white movie picture, a jewelry concern that persists in ignoring the field of colored gems is missing out in incalculable opportunities for profit-making.

Let me sketch out for you a very familiar sequence. When a young woman is considering buying her first piece of jewelry she will, as you know, seek the jeweler almost invariably for a diamond ring. The reason for this is twofold:

1. Diamond, the King of the gem world, is the most prestigious thing to wear, and

2. Diamonds, like pearls, can be used quite indifferently with practically any dress color or style.

Later on, as and when affluence brings its mixed blessings into her life, this young lady will again look up the jeweler for, probably, a diamond brooch or pendant. Sometime later, she may consider changing her ring for a large and more important diamond. To cut a not very long story short, she may eventually look for a pair of diamond earrings; and here it will very likely come to an end, the point of saturation being reached.

On the other hand, once this very same lady develops a sophisticated taste for colored gems, something which requires a certain gratifying dexterousness, some degree of selectiveness in seasonal as well as color matching of jewel and dress—once she starts buying and using them, this new sequence will never end. Her desire for colored gems will prove quite insatiable, due to the enormous variety and the practically endless combinations. The point of saturation in this case is unreachable, it is elusive, unattainable. To put it in a nutshell, colored gems constitute a dimension that extends far beyond the dimension of diamonds. We can have only one monarch: Diamond. The number of princes and barons on the other hand is theoretically unlimited; consequently, colored gems offer, literally, a golden opportunity to the jeweler.

Now, we have to face this question: How can the individual jeweler get into the field of colored gems, or if he is already handling colored gems as a sideline, or even as a main line, how can he develop this branch to its maximum potentiality? In answer to this question, three factors have to be considered. These are:

1. The inventory

2. The point of sale merchandising

3. The sales techniques

Promoting And Merchandising Colored Stones (continued)