Promoting And Merchandising Colored Stones

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

The inventory
A carefully chosen, well-balanced stock of colored gemstones is logically the starting point. You cannot sell what you do not have, except on the rare occasions where you act as a broker and/or sell from goods consigned to you. Furthermore, sales are in the numbers: the bigger and wider the choice in your arsenal, the greater are your chances for scoring direct hits.

However, it is not necessary to have all your inventory of gemstones mounted. There is no need to tie up more capital unnecessarily. It is, on the contrary, desirable to leave a substantial part of your stock in the form of loose stones. This way, you will be leaving the door open for the option of custom made, hand tailored pieces of jewelry that would exactly fit the taste and requirements of the eventual buyer.

All right, so you have to build up an inventory of colored gems. What are these gems? What are the characteristic properties of gemstones? I do not propose to tax your patience or offend your knowledgeability with a detailed dissertation on gemology; I am sure quite a number of people present are more versed than I in the topic. I intend however, to tough very briefly on certain elements of the subject. I would like first to enumerate the characteristic properties of gemstones. These are:

1. Beauty

2. Durability

3. Rarity

and 4. A property which has been somehow persistently overlooked by gemologists and consequently its mention in gem books consistently omitted, and this is, portability.

Beauty
A gem has to be attractive enough in order to trigger the urge to acquire it, in order to stimulate the desire to possess it, in order to incite a willingness to pay for it, to buy it.

Durability
The second property is the resistance to scratching; it is what we commonly call hardness. A gem has to possess hardness enough to retain its beauty. You see, unlike similar luxurious but perishable commodities such as fur coats and precious leatherware, as for instance crocodile handbags and shoes, jewels are expected to be longlasting, eternal; they are meant to be handed down from generation to generation.

Rarity
The third characteristic of a gemstone, and an exponent of this quality according to the inexorable, all-pervasive, omnipresent law of supply and demand, is price. It must be rare enough in order to fetch a decent price.

Portability
Gemstones constitute value in compact size, they are a form of condensed wealth. One can carry literally in one’s pockets tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of pounds in the form of a few tiny parcels of gems. In the course of history, gemstones have surreptitiously or openly crossed borders between countries, they have continuously changed hands, being bought in times of affluence and sold in times of depression. They have repeatedly served to finance a king or a prince to wage war or to buy a peace settlement; they have been used along with precious metals often to appease the appetite of an aggressive imperial power or as ransom for many a crowned head. If gemstones were to disappear overnight from the face of the earth, most people would go on living as usual, practically unaffected; but on the other hand, had gemstones never existed, many a chapter of human history would have to be rewritten.

Another point I would like to expose is one that has to do with nomenclature. Traditionally, jewels are divided into precious and semi-precious. The members of the precious class are four: first is the universally acknowledged king of them all, diamond. The other three princely members of this class are emerald, ruby and sapphire. The rest of the aristocratic members of the gem world have all been lumped together under the heading semi-precious. However, over the last few decades, this elementary classification, this simplistic terminology has been increasingly eroded by the gradual realization that the line of demarcation between the precious and the semi-precious gems is indeed a very hazy one.

The dividing line is so blurred that there is in more than one area factual confluence of the two conventional categories; because, what are we to use as a yardstick in order to differentiate between precious and semi-precious stones? Is it the first characteristic of a gem, that is, beauty? But beauty is a dual property: the objective or inherent factor related to form, color, harmony and symmetry, and the subjective element of assessment and appreciation, which is largely dependant on fashion, taste, the times and geography. To give one example, Pliny tells us that in ancient Rome emeralds were much appraised than rubies, whereas if we focus on Renaissance Florence some sixteen centuries later, we hear Benvenuto Cellini informing us that rubies were considerably in higher demand than diamonds and were fetching prices eight times as much. Shall we then use as a yardstick the second property of a gem, that is durability, or hardness? But emerald, a notable member of the precious group with a hardness of 7½ on Moh’s scale, is less hard than either chrysoberyl with a hardness of 8½, or topaz with a hardness of 8; both members of the semi-precious group. Is it rarity and its exponent, price, that we shall go by to distinguish between the two categories? We find that this too, does not apply to several cases, for example, a demantoid garnet or an alexandrite chrysoberyl can fetch high prices, both being rarer finding than a rather nice sapphire.

The realization of all these facts had led the participants of an international convention of retail jewelers a few decades ago, to pass the half-measure resolution of arbitrarily shifting the demarcation line between the two groups of gems to the hardness immediately above that of quartz—that is 7 on Moh’s scale. They chose the hardness 7 because it is that of silica which is abundantly present in sand as well as in the dust suspended in the air carried by the winds, which would scratch any stone of a hardness of 7 or below, thus prematurely showing the signs of wearing. So, according to this resolution which takes into consideration only the property of hardness, all gems that possess a hardness superior to 7 are precious and all those with a hardness of 7 or below are semi-precious.

It has been quite some years now since the French members of the trade have discarded the illogical term semi-precious to replace it by pierres fines whose closest English equivalent would be gemstones. Quite recently, at the last annual conference of the International Federation of the Jewellery Trade, CIBJO, in Paris, the use of the term semi-precious was considered at length, it being reported that some Scandinavian countries and West Germany had made progress by getting official acceptance of the term precious. However, there were difficulties for some, it was said, particularly in respect of Customs authorities, in redefining the expression semi-precious. The U.K delegation considered that we should do everything possible, in the U.K, to discourage the term, which is a down-grading one. They believe it is better to use precious stones or gemstones. At long last we can see the light at the end of the tunnel and I trust the day is near when the derogatory expression semi-precious will become obsolescent and the conventional classification of gems will be past history.

Now let us focus on an important point related to the building up of an inventory of colored gemstones, namely its investment value to the jeweler. In inflationary times like these, continuous price increases of practically every marketable item of service have become a familiar aspect of the economic landscape. Over the last decade or so, colored gems have steadily figured among the commodities heading the list of price increases. Between January, 1969 through December, 1978, these gems, in the rough, at the sources—whether in Brazil or Colombia, Africa or Sri Lanka, Australia or Afghanistan—have undergone, across the board, increases in prices by leaps and bounds, so that at present they fetch in terms of pounds sterling between nine and a half to almost eleven times their prices in the beginning of 1969. Evidently the same has applied to the world gem cutting and jewel manufacturing centers, whether around the mining areas or in such traditional, or recently developed, centers as, for example, London or Birmingham here in the U.K, Idar-Oberstein in West Germany, Jaipur in India, or Bangkok in Thailand. What is perhaps even more interesting is the fact that at no point during this last decade, has the curve of price increases ever been deflected downwards, as happened in the fifties and early sixties. It is thus obvious that, even after price indexing against currency depreciation, colored gemstones have shown a true up-valuation. It follows from this that one should not think twice to invest in colored stones.

Promoting And Merchandising Colored Stones (continued)