What is the markup from wholesale to retail in the world of costume jewellery? We get asked this question in a round about way quite often, so often in fact that we’ve added a recommended retail price to all of our jewellery – simply click on any image to open the popup dialog for that item to view the RRP range.

We recommend that your retail price be between 2.5 and 3.5 times the wholesale price + VAT. This would give a necklace wholesaling at £5 a list price in your shop of £15 – £21. That price assumes you are VAT registered.

Why the wide price range?

Different retailers selling in different places to different customers. A High Street shop might charge the higher price while a market trader might sell at the lower price. A jewellery party planner might charge a price somewhere in the middle. You should resist the temptation to charge more then this, as while you may sell a small number of items at the inflated price, it’s simply not sustainable. The markups for fashion jewellery are well understood by most jewellery retailers, and if you venture outside these bounds – higher or lower – you are likely to find yourself in difficulty.

Expanding on our previous post which looked at the price range of jewellery that you should be buying, what particular lines of jewellery should you be stocking?

This is a difficult question to answer, as it very much depends on who your customers are, what their particular styles might be, and how deep their pockets are. But there are ways to get an insight into what you should be buying. Experienced and successful jewellery businesses will already have a good idea what sells well, what they should be buying from their wholesaler, and in what volume, but what if you’re just starting out or not doing so well?

We’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: watch our jewellery best sellers page. This page is updated in real time as orders are placed, and lists the top 15 best selling lines of necklaces and bracelets. It changes many times a day, but there is a general uniformity to what appears here.

Items that sell well tend to stay on or near the best sellers page until they have sold out, and similar looking items to the top sellers tend also to sell well.

As the page relies on actual orders to fill itself, you can be sure that the top sellers are being bought by many jewellery retailers across the UK, and that these retailers are coming back to buy the same items again and again.

If the items on our best sellers page look like jewellery you have never stocked before, if they look a little too expensive, or a little lacking in colour, then you need to look at your buying model. These items are what is selling on English and Scottish High Streets today. If you’re not stocking them, or items similar to them, then chances are you don’t know your customers as well as you think.

We have new customers buying from us every day. Some of them will be small jewellery shops or other High Street shops who sell jewellery in display cases, others will be party planners or market / craft fair traders. We can usually tell the experienced jewellery retailers from the contents of their first shopping cart.

What marks a customer out as successful?

They don’t zero in on the cheapest items. A common mistake amongst retailers starting out selling jewellery is that they buy only cheap items, incorrectly thinking that a large number of cheap necklaces and bracelets is better than a small number of higher priced items.

This is not the case, but sadly, many retailers never learn this lesson.

In the world of fashion jewellery retail, the highest profits are to be made by stocking and selling mid to higher priced jewellery. Items that retail for £15 – £35. Lower priced items – what is often called Junk Jewellery – is the domain of cheap chain stores, not independent retailers.

If you attempt to target women looking for junk jewellery, you’re business is unlikely to thrive or grow. This is explained in greater detail in our free eBook “Starting a Successful Jewellery Business.“

We often get emails from women who are thinking of starting up in the jewellery selling business, whether as jewellery party planners, market traders, or running a website selling jewellery.

The initial enquiry runs along the lines of “Will you sell to me?” or “What do I do to be allowed to buy from you?”

We get so many of these requests that our automated reply, built into our contact form, answers the question for us. Just place an order. We don’t vet potential customers beforehand or insist that they jump through hoops prior to placing that first order. Our sole requirement is that you have the funds available to pay for the stock you are ordering.

This alone is usually sufficient to deter the time wasters and the armchair business people who are all talk and no action. You’ll find that most jewellery wholesalers take a similar approach to new customers.

On top of this,  I would recommend that anyone thinking of getting started in the jewellery businesses take a look at our free eBook: Starting a Successful Jewellery Business. The sections dealing with what sort of stock to buy are particularly important, as this is one area that new and established jewellery businesses often get wrong.

If you see something you like, how many should you order? This is a tough question to answer, as what you like may differ to what your customers like, and if the two are not in synch, you’ll be left holding stock you can’t sell.

The difference between extremely successful jewellery sellers and jewellery sellers who are just doing well, is that the most successful sellers have confidence in their buying decisions and are not afraid to stock up on necklaces and bracelets that they know will sell.

At this time of year, if you are ordering one each of jewellery from our bestsellers page, then you really should rethink your strategy. With strong selling necklaces, you can easily sell 7 or 8 of the same style at a single event, so stocking only one or two is a false economy. While it may be a strong strategy in March and April, when sales are slow, in November and December, your busiest time of year, it can backfire on you.

Remember, as November progresses, the strong sellers will be the first to disappear from our catalogue.

The heart shaped necklace above was our top seller for the past few weeks. It’s now sold out and we will not be able to restock it this year. Retailers who have been buying large volumes of this item over the past couple of weeks will be well covered for the Christmas rush; those who bought only one or two will miss out. Take this to heart when buying from our best sellers page.

Do you want to remove much of the risk from your stock choices? What if you knew in advance if a necklace or bracelet was likely to be a strong seller?

Did you know that in 2011 necklaces with a heart or flower shaped design are out selling every other necklace design by a factor of three?

Relying on your own sales figures to determine which are good sellers is time consuming and costly. It could take you years to really know your customers and what they want, and by then tastes will have moved on. But what if you could lean on the sales figures of 400-500 other jewellery retailers today?

This is what our bestsellers page offers you. It’s a top 15 page, listing our current best sellers. The items on this page are out-selling the rest of our catalogue by a factor of 10 or greater, as jewellery sellers from London to Cornwall to Scotland keep ordering them.

The best seller page is updated in real time, as orders are placed. If you want to have a very good Christmas, check it out now. Then Bookmark it and check it out again tomorrow, and the day after. Use it to help you choose which styles to order.

Here’s the link: Our Bestsellers Page

And remember, best sellers sell out fast, and all of our customers know about this page. Christmas is just around the corner, and you need to be ready. If best sellers are sold out, look for similar styles or check back tomorrow, at which point new necklaces and bracelets will have risen in the rankings.

While some individual retailers may not be great at choosing popular lines, collectively, 400-500 retailers usually DO know what they are doing. Trust them and you won’t go far wrong.

Once again, here’s the best sellers page:

http://www.NirvanaWholesale.com/?cn=15

In recent years Irish jewellery suppliers have suffered from the same blight that has infected suppliers of just about every product in Ireland – ridiculously high prices charged for stock, which in turn was then passed on from retailers to consumers.

While Ireland’s current economic problems should have lead to a correction in this regard, the truth is that those Irish jewellery wholesalers who supply Irish retailers have yet to wake up to the reality and lower their prices.

At a recent trip to a wholesalers trade fair in Dublin, we witnessed a near empty jewellery hall – not empty of suppliers, they were all there, but empty of buyers. And the reason became obvious as we walked down the aisles. Prices were still as high as they had been during Ireland’s boom years.

Independent jewellery shops still exist in Ireland, and some of them are doing quite well. So where are they sourcing their stock?

Online and from UK suppliers. Retailers in Ireland who stuck to old models and continued to buy from over priced suppliers in Dublin were to first to go out of business when the economy turned. And many of their suppliers have either followed them and closed up shop, or are close to doing so.

Adapt or die. Irish jewellery wholesalers need to get real and adjust their prices to competitive levels if they want to survive, especially in a world where buying from overseas suppliers is now easier than ever.

If you’re a jewellery retailer who shifts large volumes of stock, you’ve probably considered trying to source new lines directly from manufacturers or suppliers in China. Websites such as Alibaba and Global Sources make it look so easy, and you’re bound to have stumbled across success stories of how someone somewhere made a killing from these very suppliers.

So should you try it?

Not unless you can afford to lose every penny you spend. You might strike it lucky, but you’re just as likely – if not more so – to find yourself opening boxes filled with broken necklaces or poorly manufactured jewellery that you cannot resell, than you are to receive goods that are in a halfway decent condition.

If you want to buy from China or from Chinese suppliers, you need to be prepared for disaster – financially and otherwise. If you cannot stomach these sorts of loses, then you should stick to jewellery wholesalers closer to home. Let them deal with Chinese manufacturers and suffer the loses that might ensue. Yes, it’s more costly buying locally, but one of the reasons for that cost is to cover the loses that so often arise from poorly manufactured stock.

Our new eBook “Starting a Successful Jewellery Business” is now available for download, or to read on our website. This eBook is based on our own experiences, first as jewellery retailers, then as wholesalers and importers. It should help you learn how to navigate the jewellery business, from selling at markets to dealing with suppliers.

The book is focused on retailing in the UK and Ireland, which is where our experience lies, though it might still be useful to anyone thinking of starting a jewellery business in other countries.

Click here to read it now or to download it for later >>

Things are tough for retailers in the UK right now, especially for jewellery retailers. Money is tight all around, and the temptation is always there to cut costs by buying cheaper stock. For jewellery and fashion accessory shops, this can be fatal.

The fashion accessory market rises and falls with the economy. Many small businesses will die before things pick back up and consumers begin spending again. So how should you combat this? What should you do?

The key to surviving and even thriving in a tough economy when selling what many perceive to be luxury items is not to work harder, but to work smarter. You need to work out where your real profits lie and invest in those items. Turnover is not profit. Number of items sold is not profit. A busy twelve hour day is not profit. You could be working fourteen hour days, seven days a week, selling lots of necklaces and bracelets, and still find yourself close to the edge and on the brink of closing down.

Our experience with jewellery and accessory retailers in the UK and across Europe has been that the segment that best survives turbulent economic times is the one that targets the middle of the road customer – the customer who doesn’t want cheap plastic accessories and stays away from expensive metals and stones. The £20-£40 customer, not the £4-£6 customer.

Though we do sell some cheap lines that would suit those on a lower budget, our best customers are still buying necklaces that we wholesale for £4-£6, and they are still buying these in large numbers. Don’t fall into the cost cutting trap of buying from the bottom of the catalogue, because if you do you’re likely to stay in that market, and you’ll be competing against pound shops and chain stores for the customers with the least amount of money. Not somewhere you want to be when spending is down.

Our fashion accessories encompass necklaces, bracelets, fashion rings, scarves and watches, and most of these items are strong sellers that command strong prices.