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Across independent jewelry stores, Q1 2026 revenue was up nearly 27%.
On paper, that's cause for celebration — but units sold were down 12%.
More revenue, fewer sales, and a lot more to the story.
To find the jewelry retail trends shaping the industry, we went straight to the source — transaction data and survey answers from independent jewelers.
Let's look at what the numbers tell us.
One size doesn't fit all in 2026.
We scored every survey respondent across factors like tenure, lab-grown posture, digital orientation, and custom focus — three clear profiles emerged. The percentages show how our survey respondents broke down across them.
Find yours below.
You've been around a long time. Customers trust you and your business runs on relationships. Gold prices are squeezing you more than most.
Move the back office to the cloud.
Put heirloom redesign front and center.
Automate repricing so gold swings don't eat your profit.
Get your processes out of people's heads and into a system.
You're bringing the business into a new era. You're thinking about lab-grown, social media, and making things run more efficiently.
Use Instagram to get people in the door.
Make sure in-store and online inventory are synced.
Lead with lab-grown for bridal and let natural earn its premium.
Get your point of sale (POS) system and website talking to each other.
You do exceptional custom work, and now the challenge is building the infrastructure to match your ambition.
Document your best work.
Price custom jobs on current gold rates.
Set up systems that can handle more than one location.
Invest in an intake or work order system before volume breaks your bench.
Across 132 jewelry stores and 117 survey responses, a few things came through clearly.
The average ticket price jumped from $660 to $807, but transaction volume didn’t follow suit. Rather than selling to more people, jewelry stores are selling the same amount of metal for more money.
Two-thirds of independent jewelers already sell more lab-grown than natural in their engagement cases, or expect to by the end of the year. 85% of jewelry stores now stock both lab and natural, while 9% remain natural-only.
90% of jewelry stores are seeing more custom requests. 65% of that work involves melting down and remaking pieces customers already own.
94% of independent jewelers surveyed named yellow gold as the most popular metal in their jewelry stores.
90% of jewelers say social media influences what customers walk in requesting, but 94% still close almost every sale face to face.
The surveyed jewelry store owners have seen gold spikes and recessions before, and the prevailing response across the industry isn’t panic.
Holiday 2025 revenue grew nearly 25% across 132 jewelry stores, but the number of transactions barely moved — up just
1.9%. Every dollar of growth came from a higher average ticket, driven by record gold prices.
Holiday avg. ticket
Up $660 from the year before
Transaction growth
This number barely moved
All the growth is price. By Q1 2026, transactions are actively falling (~15%).
Across a separate pull of 41 jewelry stores, transactions fell 15% year over year while the average ticket jumped 26% to $322.
Over the full two-year arc — Q1 2024 to Q1 2026 — revenue is up 27% on units that are down 12%.
What this means: When planning staffing and inventory, focus on your transaction count, not just revenue. A 25% revenue gain that comes entirely from price is not the same as 25% more customers. When each sale is worth more, but there are fewer of them, you need to price every ticket on live metal rates so you don’t leave margin on the bench.
The numbers make it hard to argue otherwise — lab-grown diamonds are the industry standard.
Three out of four bridal stores expect lab-grown diamonds to account for more than half of their engagement ring sales this year, and the broader market has already adapted. 85% of jewelry stores now carry both lab and natural, leaving just 9% holding out as natural-only.
For most jewelry stores, lab-grown engagement sales already make up the majority.
What this means: Lab-grown is the starting point. Natural diamonds still have a place, but they have to earn it. The jewelry stores figuring this out put lab-grown at the entry and let natural be the premium, story-driven choice. The question is how to merchandise each so they both earn their place in the case.
When Gold Gets Expensive, Customers Bring In Grandma's Ring
Record gold prices pushed customers to get creative with what they already own.
84% of jewelry stores say gold prices are changing how people shop. Instead of purchasing new jewelry, customers are showing up with
old jewelry and asking what you can do with it.
What this means: Melt-and-remake is margin-rich work that online jewelry stores can’t touch. Make "redesign what you already own" a front-window offer and price it on live metal rates. If you don’t tell people you do this, they don't know to ask. And if yellow gold isn't the first thing someone sees in your case and your feed, that's worth fixing today.
Online discovery hasn’t replaced the in-person sale. If anything, it’s feeding it.
90% of jewelers say social media shapes what customers ask for when they walk in, yet 94% still sell almost entirely in person. Of those, 99% still close the sale face to face.
What this means: Instagram and social are where demand starts. Turning that demand into foot traffic comes down to your website, Facebook, and Google. 61% of jewelers say their digital presence is what drives visits.
What this means: Use Instagram to get people interested, then make sure your website, Google, and Facebook are converting that interest into visits. If someone finds you on Instagram and lands on a website that doesn't make it easy to reach you, you’ve already lost them.
Keep in mind: Most jewelry stores have characteristics of more than one profile, and that's fine. The point isn't to put yourself in a box, but to identify which pressures are loudest right now and focus there first. Do the right thing for where you are.
Beyond knowing your profile, there's a bigger set of challenges jewelry stores are navigating in 2026, and a common set of priorities emerging across the industry.
We asked jewelers about the biggest challenges heading into 2027 and the goals they're focused on for 2026.
The answers were more connected than you might expect.
What this means The top challenge and the top goal are two sides of the same coin — metal costs are squeezing margins while the number one priority is growing revenue. The jewelry stores navigating this best are protecting margin through heirloom redesign and custom work, and investing in foot traffic that converts.
The jewelers we surveyed have seen it all before.
They’ve seen gold spikes, recessions, and the internet rewrite how customers shop. Even with that experience under their belt, the prevailing response across the industry isn’t panic.
Expect to grow in the next 12
months
Expect a decline
Have been in business over 40 years
What this means: Veteran optimism is real, but it's not the whole story. The same Q1 2026 data that shows revenue growing also shows foot traffic falling. We’re not saying these jewelry store owners are wrong to be optimistic, but the Q1 2026 data is an early warning. The jewelry stores that will still be growing in five years are the ones taking it seriously now.
You’ve seen the data, now here’s how you can act on it.
Put it in your window, on your website, in your feed. A lot of customers want this and don't know to ask. It doesn't require buying new inventory, and it's some of the most meaningful work you'll do.
Gold moved a lot this past year. Manual repricing is time you don't have and a door open to mistakes. It's one of the more straightforward things you can fix.
An honest explanation of the difference between lab-grown and natural diamonds can help you build trust with your customers.
Post the custom piece you just finished, the before and after of a redesign, the ring someone picked up after six months of layaway. A product photo on a white background might not cut it the way it used to.
If it's on sticky notes or a spreadsheet that only one person understands, it’ll eventually cause a problem. It’s worth fixing before you miss a deadline or lose a detail.
Nothing in this report is estimated or modeled. Here’s where the numbers came from.
We surveyed 144 independent jewelers through industry channels including the Retail Jewelers Organization (RJO). 117 responses were complete enough to include. The group skews experienced — half have been in business over 40 years, and 78% for more than 21 years.
We pulled anonymized transaction data from 132 jewelry stores that were active during the holiday season in both 2024 and 2025. Comparing the same stores across both years is what gives us the year-over-year numbers.
We also looked at a separate set of stores from Q1 2026 (January–March) to see whether the holiday trends continued into the new year. These are two different groups of stores covering two different time periods, so they complement each other but aren't directly compared.
Knowing what the data says is step one. Having the tools to act on it is step two.
Jewel360 is an all-in-one POS system built specifically for jewelry stores, with live gold pricing, custom and repair tracking, and inventory that syncs in store and online.
Book a demo and see how the jewelry stores pulling ahead in 2026 are using it.
Stores' POS data
In business 40+ years
In business 21+ years
