At its core the most essential part of any retail business, especially a jewelry store, is having a product in stock that a customer can and wants to buy. Often new jewelry store owners struggle to decide which products they will carry in their store and how the products will work together to help them run a successful business.
This article will explore some of the product strategies and tactics that successful jewelry stores use to make sure they have the right products available for their customers.
Product Mix
In retail business, the products and product lines offered in a retail store are referred to as the product mix. It is the total number of products that a firm sells to their customers.
Depending on the focus of your store, you may offer numerous types of products for diversified markets, depending on the size and objectives of your market. Some businesses will focus solely and sell only one type of product that they specialize in. These are often referred to as specialty stores.
Either of the approaches is a viable strategy. Your results will vary based on many factors including location, market, trends, etc. Therefore, businesses should carefully consider their mix when planning their product strategies.
Product Catalogs
Anything you can do to ease the ordering of products will help your store better serve your customers. The Jewel360 catalog system contains millions of products from hundreds of manufacturers and is great addition to your of mix of product strategies. While it is not a comprehensive listing of every product you might sell, it does contain many popular products from major manufacturers. Product catalogs are constantly updated and Jewel360 is building relationships with more and more manufacturers to broaden our product listings.
Choosing Your Products
Many new business owners are optimistic and ambitious. And that’s good. You must be when starting a new business. However this can lead to over estimating the amount of products you may choose to carry. But remember you can always add more products as they become necessary to your product mix and depending on your vendor choices you may be able to make special orders.
One of the keys to business success is focus and concentration. Each business owner needs to continually refine their core business. Your core business should account for 80 percent of your profits. Concentrate on becoming an expert in your core business and protect your core business from competition by continually improving your expertise in that area.
You need to defend your core business. Whenever sales decline, successful retail business owners retreat to their most profitable products and services. They focus on the products that yield the highest profits per unit of sale. They evaluate their sales to determine which products they will not stock again today if they had to do it over and which products they would keep. They’ll also make a plan for the products they will monitor and decide if they will continue to carry in store.
Customize Your Stores Focus
Beyond choosing your product mix, jewelry store owners need to choose the type of jewelry store they will be. Jewelry stores have become very specialized. While there are many general jewelry stores, some successful owners have focused their product selection.
Types of Jewelry Stores
The Basic Store
Basic jewelry stores carry a limited variety of moderately priced inventory. For the most part these retailers do not design their own jewelry or create unique pieces. This type of jewelry store will do some simple repairs, but may refer customers to another retailer. Their selection will be limited and often not distinctive. The main marketing message will be about price.
The Main Street Store
Almost any town of a moderate size has a Main Street jewelry store. In this store, customers will find a broader selection of more fine and artistic jewelry. This store will stock more unique pieces and may have a higher price point.
This type of store will have an individual or small staff of employees qualified to do simple to more complicated repair work. Often a Main Street store will be family owned.
The Boutique Store
Boutique jewelry stores will often carry “lines” or “collections’ of jewelry from independent creators and artists. Both line and collection are industry terms for fashion and jewelry. A line refers to a set of exclusively designed pieces in a specific category made by the same, often well-known designer. A collection refers to a group of different stylistically related design pieces within a line.
Jewelry of this type is usually more artistic and a higher quality of construction. The store may be an exclusive seller for the designer or designers within a defined geographic area.
The Chain Store
Chain jewelry stores will frequently be found in strip or enclosed malls. The sales staff may be experienced and knowledgeable or they may be new to the jewelry retail business. Chain stores are unlikely to offer custom design services and will only offer pre-made pieces. They may not do repair work on the site, and send repairs to a central repair center for many stores. This type of store will price their products with lower margins and try to sell more volume as one of their product strategies.
The Estate Dealer
An estate jeweler acquires their stock from individual purchases from individuals or in larger purchases from an estate. This may happen upon the death of an individual or when it is beneficial to liquidate the assets of an entity—generally a family. An estate jeweler resells pre-owned jewelry. The jewelry they carry may be fairly new or quite old and may vary in value. Due to the nature of how they get their pieces customers will find a broad range of one-of-a-kind pieces.
It often takes advanced training and an eye to know if a piece has market value.
The Tourist Shop
There are many fantastic and reputable jewelers throughout the world. There is a trend toward customers commemorating their travel and adventures with a piece of fine jewelry. Rather than purchasing some quickly forgotten souvenir buyers will purchase a more long lasting piece that will remind them of the occasion. These jewelry stores may carry pieces that have a unique tie to the local region.
Today any of these types of stores can benefit from adding an online ecommerce website. The jewelry business has long relied on building strong relationships with customers. A well designed website can help your jewelry store continue to maintain strong relationships.
Vendor Product Catalogs
And beyond the website, integrated point-of-sale systems can help you easily add products to your website and store.
Thanks to the technological solutions provided by Jewel360, it has never been easier to work with manufacturers. Product catalogs have become available online and many have created partnerships with software vendors to integrate with point-of-sale systems to make it easy to add new products, descriptions, images, and other details to your store’s selection.
Beyond the basic details of listing a product in your point-of-sale system there may be dozens of additional details and specifications. When adding these products from pre-loaded product catalogs, you’ll be able to quickly and accurately add these helpful details to your product listing.
High-quality software providers like Jewel360 will provide tools that help speed up the process and avoid mistakes.
Conclusion
There are many choices you’ll need to make when setting up your store’s product strategies. Product Mix, product catalogs, choosing products, deciding on the type of music store, and vendor selection are just a few. However, there are experts to help you. One of the very best things you can do is seek out their help. They can help you achieve success faster.