What is the difference between an Apple Store and a Currys Superstore? Visiting one is a pleasure and visiting the other is a chore. Buying an iPod in an Apple Store is as much about the buying experience as it is about the iPod, whereas buying a TV or a stereo in Currys is hard work.

Yet the Apple Store sells less than 10% of the stock on offer at a similarly sized Currys, and they only sell one brand. There’s no big secret here - it’s all about the display, and how that display creates an experience that makes people want to buy.

As a jewellery seller, you too can create a more enticing buying experience. It doesn’t matter if you own a small shop, or sell in people’s homes in the evening out of plastic bags - by showing your goods at their best, and making it as easy as possible for people to try them on, you encourage them to buy.

Trickery doesn’t come into it - you’re not fooling people into buying something they don’t want. What you are doing is removing some of the barriers that may prevent them from buying in the first place. The other day I was browsing some jewellery auctions on eBay, and something struck me about many of the auctions I visited: I was unable to work out if I actually liked any of the jewellery on offer. Now, chances were that much of that jewellery was good stock, in fashionable or contemporary designs, but the quality of the displays and images were such that I simply could not decide.

And this does not only happen in the online world. Not long ago, walking through one of Ireland’s larger indoor markets, I was drawn to a small stall tucked away in a corner. The stall owner was selling Ikita jewellery, and every single necklace was sitting in a large pile on a flat table - tightly wrapped in plastic. Despite the popularity of Ikita, no one was stopping; and no one was stopping because most people didn’t even realise he was selling jewellery. With a proper display, and a little effort, this could have been the most popular stall in the market. Instead, the owner packed up and went home early, probably never to return - no doubt telling his friends that Irish women just weren’t interested in jewellery.

So how do you display your goods to their best advantage?

There are two things to know when it comes to setting up your display: Firstly, you need some props, and secondly, you must give yourself enough time. If you’re planning a jewellery party that kicks off at 8pm, get there by 7, and spend that extra hour laying out your stock so it looks as attractive as possible.

A whole industry exists to make this easier for you. Whether you’re selling necklaces, bracelets, earrings, or rings, careful use of props can present them in such a way that will remove indecisiveness from your buyers. Be sure to take everything out of its plastic wrapping, and get that same wrapping out of sight, preferably under a chair somewhere. Necklaces should be displayed on proper necklace stands that allow people to picture them around their own necks.

Bracelet displays should show each piece from many different angles, giving buyers the opportunity to see how they hang from a wrist, as well as how they compare to other styles. Do remember to make it easy for your customers to try on each item.

Earring displays are often forgotten, but it is very important for people to be able to see how they hang. Unlike bracelets and necklaces, they are rarely tried on, so your display must present a good picture of how they would look when worn.

Displaying rings is relatively straight forward, and because they are so small, setting up a large and varied display is not difficult.

The props shown in the photos above can be built up over time, and the decision as to which should be used for a particular display is something that will get easier as you gain more experience. I would suggest however, that you not overdo it - start small, and work up. Very large, cluttered displays, are almost as bad as no display at all.

Over time, we’ve built up a lot of contacts in the jewellery business, as we sourced stock, packaging, and displays from various suppliers. If you’re looking to purchase display props similar to those above, we’d recommend a Birmingham based company called Talbots. Their website is small and does not carry a full stock list, but their catalogue is comprehensive and contains all the information you might need before deciding which props are for you.

Careful use of props and elegant displays can have a major impact on sales, but it doesn’t stop there. Once the sale is made, you have a final opportunity to impress your customer and make them want to come back for more. This opportunity lies in how you pack your goods.

Do you normally drop those sterling silver necklaces into a paper bag and move on to the next customer? Why not box the necklace instead? There are a whole range of packaging options available to you, with different boxes and bags designed specifically for rings, necklaces, and bracelets, in many different styles and colours. And they do not cost an arm and a leg either. Again, these items can all be purchased from the supplier mentioned above - one more reason to get your hands on that catalogue.

The question you should ask yourself, is how do you want your customers to look at you and your business? Do you want them to see you as a Currys Superstore - cheap, drab, and crowded - somewhere they really don’t want to go? Or do you want them to picture you as an Apple Store - elegant, tasteful, and a pleasure to visit.

Getting that display ‘just right‘ is not as easy as it sounds. Whether it’s the clashing colours of your bright necklaces, or the ocean of sterling silver casting a bit of a dampener on your tiny collection of cubic zirconia rings, it’s difficult to present your stock at its best without hours of work.

And it’s even more difficult when you have to do it every morning, only to pack it all away again at the end of the day. For many of us, the retail side of the business is not a cosy little high street shop or a corner of a fashionable shopping centre, and we don’t all have the luxury of hiring a 17 year and paying them a minimum wage to pack and unpack for us.

Back in our retail days - not that long ago - we made setting up our stock in as presentable a manner as possible into a fine art. And one of the most important tools in our arsenal was the humble paint brush.

Now, it’s true that you could spend cart loads of money buying professional equipment to polish your rings and pendants to gleaming perfection, but we learned early on that a basic paint brush purchased from B&Q would do the job just fine. Tiffany’s may disagree, but then their prices are just a little higher than ours, so I’m prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt.

It was our Sterling Silver necklaces that caused most of the problems. All that packing and unpacking, not to mention the strange locations we found ourselves setting up in over the years, made the dust and dirt pile up. Take the heart shaped pendant pictured below for example.

Sterling silver necklaces of this type were amongst our top sellers for some time. Every morning we’d be faced with the daunting task of unpacking, opening, and setting up a few hundred of these, and every morning we had to de-dust them before the public descended upon us. The paint brush is the perfect tool for this. A couple of quick swipes with a two inch brush and they’re ready to face the world.

It’s worth remembering that many of the professional tools used by jewelers for centuries are merely variations of existing tools used in everyday life, and like an artist who is just starting out, you don’t need to be spending vast amounts of money on expensive brushes and canvases when the cheaper varieties will get the job done just fine.

Our web presence is centred around our wholesale business, which aims to deliver fashion jewellery at the lowest possible prices. As such, we tend to focus on smaller items - first of all because they weigh less, and as such the purchase price and delivery costs are low, and secondly because many of our buyers like to pass on these low prices to their customers.

With expensive, heavy items such as large sterling silver bracelets or heavy amber pendants, this would simply not be possible.

When it comes to retail, we sell a number of bulkier items that have proven very popular to buyers looking for something a little beyond the normal. Though we do not sell these wholesale, I thought I’d introduce you to few lines just to give you a taste of what’s out there.

The first is a very large Baltic Amber pendant that weighs almost 12 grams. It’s a sizable piece as you can see, coming in at just under 5cm in length. We sold a number of similar pendants in the weeks coming up to Christmas last year.

Crosses have always sold well for us in Ireland, whether of traditional Celtic design in sterling silver or the more glamorous cubic zirconia pictured below. Though not to everybody’s taste, large CZ pieces such as this never go completely out of fashion and certainly add to any shop window display.

Smaller items, with their lower price tags will always outsell the more expensive pieces, but you should bear in mind that having a few larger ‘out of price‘ pieces may have an impact on how much your customers are willing to spend.

Have you ever bought a new business shirt at Marks & Spencers? All their men’s shirts are positioned side by side, from the cheapest to the most expensive. Most people choose a shirt somewhere in the middle. But would they buy the same shirt if all the expensive ones were in another part of the shop? Or would they pick a cheaper shirt, chosen from the middle of the few that remain?

It’s a sales tactic that’s been around forever, and there’s no reason you can’t use it too.

We like to know who our customers are. When it comes time to restock or source new lines of fashion jewellery, the more we know about our buyers and their businesses, the better able we are to meet their needs.

Over the past year, it’s become clear to us that we attract different sorts of buyers in different countries. In Ireland we sell to a lot of market traders and small independent shops - in Denmark there ARE no market traders. And in the UK and US, a high proportion of our customers are Jewellery Party Planners.

When I speak of Party Planning, I’m not referring to weddings or corporate events. Think Ann Summers and you’re nearly there: small, intimate groups of women gathering in one person’s home or hotel, a few bottles of wine too many, and an opportunity for one aspiring entrepreneur to sell their wares. Fashion jewellery, necklaces and rings are very common items to sell at these events, as are handbags and watches.

There are companies set up specifically to ‘manage‘ these sorts of events - selling pre-prepared, mixed packages to the party organisers, who work on a strange kind of commission. They offer little choice in terms of stock, but call their buyers ‘Consultants‘ to compensate.

So why are the Jewellery Party Organisers choosing to buy direct from us? This quote from one Party Plan web-site sheds a little light: “As an Independent Consultant you will earn 25% commission on total party sales.”

WHAT?

You sell a very attractive sterling silver ring or necklace for £10 and you make £2.50 profit - and that’s before you factor in petrol and babysitting costs. Is it any wonder many financially-aware buyers choose to bypass the hand-holding of these companies and source their stock themselves?

And it’s not only these poor profit margins that make buying direct from wholesalers a huge advantage. These ‘party packs‘ always seem to contain a few items that just can’t be sold. Now, this may be because the seller or party organiser is just not that good a salesperson, but it’s far more likely that whichever company put together the party pack in the first place made a poor buying decision and found itself with a number of difficult to sell lines. For which YOU pay the price.

The advantage of buying from wholesalers is that you choose exactly what to buy, and how many of each item to buy. You know your buyers better than we do, and better than any ‘Party Planning‘ company or organisation. People’s tastes in London and Cardiff are NOT always the same, and twenty-somethings do not buy the same styles as their mothers.

All our fashion jewellery and watches are sold and priced individually and you always see exactly what you are getting beforehand - the same goes for many other wholesalers. So if 25% profit margins sound as silly to you as they do to us, maybe it’s time you dropped the title ‘Consultant‘ and began to work for yourself.

The final boxes of new stock arrived a couple of days ago, and is now available for browsing on the website. This includes 55 new Necklaces in the Fashion Jewellery section, 34 sets of Necklaces and Earrings, and 17 large Bracelets.

The new Fashion Jewellery contains a small number of necklaces made using semi precious stones, none of which we have stocked before. The modest price tag of £1.85 makes them a real bargain.

As part of our recent site redesign, we’ve added a new section for Celtic Jewellery. Celtic designs have proven very popular over the past few months, with our American as well as our UK buyers, but until recently we simply didn’t have the volume to warrant a separate section.

Malene and Bob picked up a number of interesting Celtic themed pendants and rings on their buying trip a couple of weeks ago, all of which can now be accessed from the Celtic Jewellery page. We have 29 individual pendants and 14 rings available, all sterling silver, and all unique designs.

We hope to add to this in the future, building our collection to a more sizeable level. In the meantime, buyers particularly interested in Celtic designs might want to take a look at some of our plainer sterling silver rings and pendants, as there is a lot of crossover and many similarities between the different categories.

The new stock went live late yesterday evening, and we’re very pleased with the results. It took a few days longer than we anticipated - so apologies for that - but we wanted everything to be just right. The volume of new stock, coupled with the changes we made to allow all of our Baltic Amber and Sterling Silver pieces to be selected individually, meant that a complete overhaul of the website was needed.

Your first port of call should be the Catalogue page, which breaks everything down for you, and helps you quickly find what you’re looking for. We’ve broken the catalogue down into eight sections:

• Rings
• Pendants
• Earrings
• Fashion Jewellery
• Celtic Jewellery
• Ladies Watches
• Bracelets
• Chains

Each of these categories is further broken down. For example, the Rings category lists Sterling Silver, Baltic Amber, Cubic Zirconia, Marcasite, Shell and Celtic. A new set of navigation links are positioned at the bottom of every page listing all of these same categories, making it very difficult to get lost.

We’re not quite finished yet, as a number of late arrivals are still sitting in warehouses around the world gathering dust, but we thought it more important to get the bulk of the new stock out as quickly as possible.

As always, any questions of comments you have, please get in touch, and we’ll do whatever we can to help.

Malene and Bob returned from their travels a few days ago - bags loaded down with Sterling Silver and Baltic Amber - and have been busy working away ever since preparing the new stock for sale.

It’s a long and tiring process, and involves many hours of photography, sizing images, preparing web pages, and deciding which lines best go with which. Boxes have been arriving from far flung destinations all week, with the Fashion Jewellery the last to arrive.

If all goes well, the new stock should begin appearing on the web-site in just a few more days. There will be all new lines of Sterling Silver and Baltic Amber - rings, pendants, earrings, and bracelets - as well as some more unusual items that we’re fairly sure you haven’t seen before. I won’t spoil the surprise, but shells do play a part.

As promised, these new lines will be sold individually, rather than as part of pre-prepared lots. This will enable you to pick and choose the rings and pendants you feel best suit your customers. It’s all good stuff, but tastes do differ - varying country by country, or region by region.

We’ve had a number of enquiries lately about Ikita Jewellery, with customers asking when, or if, we will be getting our hands on new Ikita stock. The answer, I’m afraid, is not soon. We have many new Fashion Jewellery lines that will be appearing on the web-site shortly, but Ikita is not amongst them. Having said that, we’ll keep our eyes open and let you know when we do manage to source some Ikita.