Modern Jewelry Trends

Nearly half of consumers, a surprising 47%, plan to make at least one holiday purchase online this year, up from 36% three years ago. Many more consumers will also use the Internet to browse before heading to stores to buy. According to the survey, 89% of consumers regularly or occasionally research products online before buying in a store. These numbers are from a new survey conducted for the National Retail Federation by BIGresearch. Shoppers, who are expected to spend $791 each this year on holiday presents, say they will do an average of 28.9% of their shopping online. The highest percentage of consumers, 23.6% say they begin their online research at Google.com. It’s not too late for an affordable Google Adwords local text ad: target your city name and important jewelry words and phrases like engagement ring, circle pendant, Journey pendant, and the major brands you carry.

A new search engine on steroids called What’s Online is offering visitors a chance to win a diamond a day. The company has teamed up with Lazare Kaplan in a sweepstakes and sponsorship of the No. 49 car in the NASCAR Nextel Racing Series. “Our sponsorship of NASCAR, as with all of our promotional efforts, is ultimately intended to drive traffic to our retailer’s doors,” explains Marcee Feinberg, Lazare’s Vice President, Marketing. The daily diamond is a rough octahedron crystal. Consumers will be sent to the Lazare Diamond website , where they will be directed to a jeweler in their area. Lucky winners will be able to visit these retailers in order to set or cut their new diamond in the rough. NASCAR fans are an excellent target market, Feinberg says. With 75 million fans, it is the number two sport on television and the number one in terms of fan loyalty. And 41% of NASCAR fans, 40% of whom are female, fall within the $50,000+ income bracket, 12% are in the $70,000-$100,000 income bracket and 11% are in the $100,000+ income bracket. The first race for the WhatsOnline/Lazare Diamond car was at the Dover 400 on September 24. During the week of October 9th, www.WhatsOnline.com received more than 711,608 hits. In one week, approximately 6,280 consumers entered online to win a Lazare Kaplan rough diamond. So far, 20 lucky winners have received their rough octahedron. Hey, those are pretty good odds! Try your luck today!

We got a request today from Dave Levison of Levison’s Jewelers in Coconut Grove, Florida, for some good proposal ideas for a client looking to pop the question with his beautiful new Levison’s engagement ring. Since most jewelers are faced with the “question” question pretty often, we put together some links to proposal ideas online. First of all, www.adiamondisforever.com has a short but sweet set of lavish proposal ideas. (Wasn’t the movie-of-you idea a DTC commercial?) There is also a book of proposal dos-and-don’ts that might make a nice gift to a client. There are sites where people post their own proposal stories, sites that give planning advice, sites that suggest proposal poetry, and sites with ideas for proposing on Valentine’s Day and Christmas. Actually, a proposal ideas section is a good idea for every jeweler’s website. Ask your customers for their best stories. Here’s a nice example from Wilson Diamonds in Provo, Utah.

Create Your Own Engagement Ring tools have been a popular website feature for more than five years now, with most online retailers featuring their own versions. Designers like Timeless Design and the popular Diamond is Forever consumer site also have Design Your Own Ring tools. Now retailer Tiffany & Co. has come up with an interesting new twist on the concept. Tiffany’s new create your stack tool allows consumers to mix and match different diamond and gemstone bands from Tiffany’s Celebration Rings Collection and see how they look stacked together. It’s far from perfect (you can’t change the order of the stack and not all rings are available in each position) but it captures some of the fun of trying on jewelry. I’d love to see a tool like this with all the stack rings from a company like Hidalgo or OGI, wouldn’t you?

Online retailers will offer free shipping and incentives to order early this holiday season, instead of sweepstakes, repeat customer discounts, and other types of sales promotions. A survey of 80 retailers by Shop.org and BizRate Research also found that 63 percent of the online retailers will begin holiday promotions before November 4. Free shipping often ranks first among offers that consumers say they look for when buying online. A recent survey from the Jewelry Consumer Opinion Council had it ranked at almost 90 percent, neck and neck with lower prices. If you have an online store, you might consider an early offer of free shipping on jewelry purchased online (you could also offer free in-store pick up) and promote it before Thanksgiving to your email mailing list. No email mailing list? Start collecting today!

This Christmas, diamonds will speak louder than words. The theme of the Diamond Trading Company holiday campaign is “This Christmas, Say Everything without Saying a Word.”

The new theme will be most elegantly communicated in a new television commercial without dialog, called Sleeping Beauty , which will begin running in mid-November. This ad will have two versions: one with a journey pendant, the other with a three-stone ring.

In an unusually unified strategy, the men-targeted Seize the Day print and outdoor campaign will also reflect the theme. In the now-familiar black with white type format, quote marks have been added around the pieces of diamond jewelry depicted, which include Journey necklaces, three stone necklaces and rings, diamond stud earrings, diamond solitaire necklaces, and diamond right hand rings. Advertisements with lines like “Be a Man of Few Words,” “Speak Love Fluently,” and “Show Her You Mean Everything You Never Say” will appear in 18 men’s magazines as well as online, on the Reuters and Nasdaq boards in Times Square, and throughout Grand Central Station in New York. Marketing materials, including a free downloadable ad slick featuring the line “This Christmas, Say Everything without saying a Word,” are available at www.dps.org. The Diamond Promotion Service is encouraging the trade to use the new theme line in their holiday marketing and merchandising campaigns. Customizable television ads for journey diamond jewelry and three-stone jewelry can also be created online at www.spotrunner.com/dps.

If you are an independent jeweler, sometimes it can seem as if the web is stacked against you, with thousands of sites advocating buying jewelry online and few talking about the advantages of buying jewelry the old-fashioned way, in person. To help balance the information available, Modern Jeweler has created some custom online content to promote the advantages of buying from your local independent jeweler. There are two versions of this article which we are making freely available to jewelers and others to publish online. The first, Ten Reasons to Buy From Your Local Independent Jeweler, is designed for sites like this one. You can use this article on blogs, community sites, anywhere you like. The second version, let’s call it Ten Reasons to Buy From Us, is written in the first person. This article is designed to be personalized with your store’s name, charities, brands, and services and posted on your own company web site. We put it in a pop-up window so you can easily “view source” and copy the html to post it on your own site. We’ve also created a custom version for IJO jewelers. We hope freely distributing these reasons to shop locally will spread them widely across the web and help remind consumers everywhere of the advantages of choosing an independent jeweler that you can know and trust. Do you have even more reasons? Submit them in the comments and we’ll add them to future versions.

Remember those book and record clubs? Once you signed up, you would get a delivery of a pre-selected item every month. QVC is now applying the concept to jewelry too with its new Auto-Delivery Jewelry program. For example, you can buy a sterling silver Judith Ripka cross charm bracelet for $84.78 plus shipping and then every month for five months they will send you another cross charm to add to that bracelet and bill you $35.54 plus shipping. Other Auto-Delivery jewelry items include a collection of thin 14k Eternagold bangles for $186 each, sterling turquoise pendant collection, each $127.62, and a Judith Ripka heart charm bracelet. This seems like a clever way to get beyond price point resistance. That charm bracelet is $292.30 and the stack of four bangles is $768.88, perhaps beyond the impulse level for QVC customers. Does it work? Both Ripka bracelets are “waitlist only,” so maybe it does.

Sterling has relaunched the Kay Jewelers website and now offers online shoppers the choice of shipping or free in-store pick-up.  This option, common in electronics, isn’t common for jewelry yet (Zale.com doesn’t offer it). New bells and whistles at Kay.com include 360 degree views of jewelry in its exclusive Leo Diamond collection. Actually the pendants are 180 degree views, they don’t show the back (Must not be pretty!) The interactive 3D views are pretty nice but not quite as good as the 3D-view movies at JamesAllen.com. But since both are created with 3D modeling, not product photography, they never really look real to me. I still prefer beautiful photographs with multiple views. And if there is too much retouching I assume they are hiding something.

Photography is really important to the appeal of any website and is especially critical for ecommerce sites. According to a recent consumer survey by the Jewelry Consumer Opinion Council, 85% of consumers said more detailed photos would help their online shopping experience. That’s behind only better prices (89%) and free shipping (95%) in level of consumer interest.

The web is a great way to spread positive (and negative) word of mouth. When you Google your store name (which of course you do regularly, right?), pay particular attention to mentions on consumer review sites.

Although most of these shopping rating sites focus on online stores, there are a few that also include reviews of bricks & mortar stores as well. For example, one place to look for consumer comments about your store is Insiderpages.com. Do a search for jewelry and your city and see if there are any reviews.

Of course, we aren’t recommending that you review your own store (or trash the competition: let’s face it, the anonymity of the online world can lead to dirty pool, which is why you are Googling your store name regularly, right?) but you can and should encourage your customers to post their compliments online.