The other day, a new customer placed their first order. It was a good sized, respectable order of over 200 items, mostly necklaces and fashion rings. We’ll never see this customer again. This time next year they won’t be in the jewellery business.

How do I know this?

We can spot a jewellery business that is likely to succeed based on the contents of their shopping basket. And we can spot a jewellery business that is likely to fail in the same way.

What do I mean by success?

Selling jewellery that women want. Selling jewellery that sells itself. And selling lots of it.

We’ve been in this business a long time, first as retailers, then wholesalers, now importers. As retailers, we sold our jewellery in huge volumes. We knew our customers, we knew what they wanted, and we gave it to them. We didn’t care what the shop next door to us was selling, we sold jewellery in our shops that nobody else in Ireland or in the UK had, and we travelled across the world to find it. And we did all this because it was what our customers wanted. We did it because it sold.

Even though the economy is weak, and there isn’t as much money floating around as there used to be, women still do not want cheap jewellery. This is hard for a lot of jewellery business owners to accept, that it’s not about price. That it’s never about price.

Let me say that again: JEWELLERY IS NOT ABOUT PRICE! IT’S NEVER ABOUT PRICE!

Women want jewellery that looks good, and they’ll find the money to pay for it. They don’t want cheap jewellery and they won’t buy it. Their 12 year old kids might buy it, but they won’t, not in any sort of volume.

So what did our new customer do wrong?

They bought based on price. They bought over 200 lines of necklaces and fashion rings, and they bought only from the lowest price blocks available in our catalogue. You know the stuff I’m talking about: the £1.40 necklaces and the £0.85 fashion rings.

There’s nothing wrong with these lines in small doses. They sit well in the middle of more expensive items, and they do sell – in small doses. But when this is all you have in your jewellery display, when your customers are forced to buy cheap and only cheap jewellery, you can kiss your business goodbye.

Now, we make as much profit on an order of cheap jewellery as we do from an order of more expensive jewellery. Our markup is the same, so in the short term it makes no difference to us which items our customers choose.

But in the long term it makes a huge difference. Customers who buy only our cheap lines will not succeed as well as customers who buy our expensive lines. They will not return and place large orders every couple of weeks, and in all likelihood they will not be around to buy from us next year. And the reason for this is that their customers want the better lines. These retailers may not realise it, because they’ve always bought based on price, but their customers do not want cheap necklaces retailing at £5 or £6, they want stylish, classy necklaces that their friends will notice, and they’re willing to pay £20 or £30 or more for them.

We have regular customers who started off buying cheap items every couple of months. Then one month, for whatever reason, they added a few necklaces at £5.50 each. And a week later they’re back, and they’re spending a couple of hundred pounds on the top end of our catalogue. Then they come back for a third time and they order in volume, probably for the very first time in their lives, and it’s all high end stuff: chunky, colourful necklaces, heavy metallic necklaces, charm bracelets at £5 each, and our expensive fashion rings.

Why? Because the more expensive stuff sells! It flies off the shelves.

I don’t expect to convince anyone that they are better off spending more money per item. This belief that price matters is ingrained far too deeply in some retailers minds, usually those at the very bottom rung of the ladder. But the reality is, if they ever want to move up from that bottom rung, they need to realise that Jewellery is never about price.

So if you’re that person, my advice to you is next time you order, choose 20  expensive items instead of 100 cheap items. You’ll never look back.

We supply a large number of jewellery retailers in Northern Ireland. Most of these retailers find us through Google searches and a very small number through word of mouth recommendations. Our Northern Ireland customers are very similar to our remote Scottish customers, in that they buy from us out of necessity rather than convenience.

Northern Ireland is very much a remote area when it comes to wholesale jewellery suppliers. Its geographic location and small population make it a no go destination for suppliers of many kinds. The bricks and mortar jewellery wholesalers of Manchester and London are a plane trip away, as are the fairs and trade shows from which many retailers find new suppliers. A journey to the recent Home & Gift show in Harrogate would have been an expensive undertaking for any jewellery retailer or gift shop owner in Northern Ireland. And its geographic isolation make it an expensive trip for many of the jewellery sales reps who work for the larger British jewellery importers.

There are a small number of suppliers in Northern Ireland, as any Google search will show, but they tend to lean towards the higher end of the jewellery market with little in the way of costume jewellery.

There’s Ellison Brothers and Gardiner Brothers, both in Belfast and both dealing primarily in precious metal jewellery – not ideal for the average gift shop – and there’s a costume jewellery wholesaler in Warrenpoint, Co. Down who doesn’t seem to have a business name.

And that’s about it for Northern Ireland. A glance through 4NI, Northern Ireland’s primary portal and resource website, does throw up a few other names, most of whom are either out of business or possess websites that lead to nowhere.

Northern Ireland is clearly a jewellery supplier black spot, not dissimilar to the highlands and islands of Scotland. Unfortunate as this is, it does play a major part in our own success when selling to retailers up North. Buying from jewellery suppliers online, though a bit of a risk the first time, does level the playing field between small, independent retailers, and their larger counterparts. And this is a market segment we’re happy to fill.

Our Costume Jewellery Catalogue >>