We supply a lot of Jewellery Party businesses. Some of them are successful, and have been buying from us for years; some are just starting out on their own after having worked as a consultant for one of the big party plan companies; and others are on their last legs, on the brink of closing down their business due to poor sales and lack of interest.

All are buying the same products from us at the same prices. So why do some succeed where others fail?

There are three areas where Jewellery Party organisers go wrong. They are:

1. Over pricing
2. Sourcing only the cheapest of jewellery
3. Not changing stock often enough

Failing in any one of these areas will put a serious dampener on your profits. Failing in more than one will lead to the demise of your business. Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

1. Over Pricing

The most common mistake made by new jewellery party organisers is to charge too much for their products. Your price should never be based on what similar items sell for in a Jewellers on the high street, or in a display cabinet at Next or River Island. It should be based on the price you paid for the item, plus any additional expenses that detract from your overall profit.

For example, say you purchase 5 of the above bracelet from us. The cost price per item is £2.31, and when VAT and shipping costs are added, you’ll be looking at just over £3 per bracelet. Charging £15-£18 at your first jewellery party may seem like a good idea, and you may very well sell one to a sister-in-law or a friend from work, but you’ll never sell another to the same person.

Far better to charge a more enticing £7-£8. Yes, your profit per item will be considerably less, but you’ll be selling far more. Which is better: two items earning £12 profit each, or fifteen items earning £5 profit each? And once you start pricing your jewellery well, the same people will return to buy from you next time, and chances are they’ll bring some friends along too.

Over pricing is a fatal and all too common mistake. When your early parties are attended by family and friends who feel obligated to buy something from you, it’s easy to miss.

2. Sourcing Only Cheap Jewellery

Our necklaces range in price from as little as £1.50 to over £7. Every now and then, a new customer comes along and places an order for 30-40 items, all priced around the £1.50 mark. The number of items purchased is just enough to pass our £45 minimum order size, and they only buy one of each item. We know we’ll never hear from this person again.

It’s not that our cheap items don’t sell, they certainly do - our bracelets are amongst our best sellers, and the same customers regularly come back for more. It’s that your customers want to see quality, expensive items mixed in with the cheap and cheerful lines. By all means, buy the cheap items and sell them for a fiver each, but you need to mix up your display with different styles at different prices.

The above necklace sells for £5.35, looks completely different to our cheaper lines, and could easily be sold on for £15+.

3. Not Changing Stock Often Enough

Sterling Silver Jewellery is timeless. Whether it’s a ring, a pendant, or a pair of earrings, last years fashions will look just as good this year. The same cannot be said for Costume Jewellery. We estimate that costume jewellery has an in-fashion life span of about 4-6 months, which is why we bring in new lines so frequently and never restock sold out items. What was popular last year, simply will not sell this year. What sells well in the summer will not sell in the winter.

You need to change and update your stock frequently. Just because a particular range sold well the last time you gave a party in Guildford, does not mean they will sell well this time. If you try to sell the same items to the same people again and again, your party attendances will get smaller and smaller.

Time after time we hear from customers who bought items from us months ago, asking us when we will be getting more of a necklace or bracelet. The answer is, we won’t, and neither should you. As a jewellery party organiser, you should be telling your customers what’s fashionable, not expecting them to tell you. You should be setting the trends, not hawking last years fashions.

There is nothing wrong with the jewellery party industry - it’s still going strong, despite all the doom and gloom we hear about the economy. If your party attendances are dwindling; if your customers are simply not buying, or are only buying the cheapest items; if your hostesses from months ago are not inviting you back; chances are it’s your fault.

Look to your pricing, and look to your stock. Are you over priced? Are you buying only cheap items? Are you bringing in fresh designs and colours?

Other useful links:

How to make that party a success
How to get the most from your Jewellery displays
Sourcing that Jewellery Party Stock

For the past month our stock of Fashion Bracelets has been very low. It seems that no matter how many we buy, we always run out before our new stock comes in. This time around, we hope to rectify that. We’ve invested in larger volumes of each of our new lines, and expect to maintain these high stock levels leading up to Christmas

We’re currently listing over 60 individual lines, and we’re expecting a much larger delivery (all new lines) in a few weeks.

Unlike many jewellery wholesalers, our catalogue is divided almost equally between Sterling Silver Jewellery and Costume Jewellery. We already have a dedicated section devoted exclusively to the different types of costume jewellery (necklaces, bracelets, fashion rings, etc.), but up now our silver was scattered around the website, in various locations.

This works fine for customers who buy a little of everything, but not so well for those customers who are only shopping for sterling silver.

With that in mind, we’ve added a new category to our catalogue today - Wholesale Sterling Silver. All of our silver jewellery belongs in this category, and can be found via this page, regardless of whether the item is a ring, pendant, earring, bracelet, or chain. Links to these sub-categories can be found at the top of the new page, allowing you to easily ‘drill down‘ and browse through the type of silver jewellery that appeals to you.

We hope that this will make life just a little easier for our silver buyers.

Anyone who tried to browse the website or place orders on Saturday will have noticed that the site was down for much of the day. This was caused by some maintenance work carried out overnight that led to problems on our server. The site remained inaccessible throughout the day, until 7:30 in the evening.

A side effect of these problems was that many emails sent to us over this time went astray. If you did try to contact us on Saturday, and haven’t heard back from us yet, please get in touch again.

Our regular customers will know that we often make changes and improvements to our site. It was only a month ago that we added a Popular Jewellery Items Page, and it’s proven to be one of the most visited pages on the site. We do listen to feedback from customers, and many of the changes we make are in response to that feedback.

With that in mind, we’ve added some new navigation links to make browsing the Catalogue a little easier. Where before, the only way to see our stock was to use the Next and Previous links on each page, now it is possible to jump pages more quickly, and to easily move to the end of the catalogue.

The new links make it easy to see how many pages of stock we have, and provide a simple mechanism to jump to the oldest items. The image above shows that we have 27 pages of Costume Necklaces. As we always display our stock in reverse order, with the newest items at the front and the oldest at the back, these new links allow customers to quickly look at our oldest items in stock - the most likely to be almost sold out.

We’ve added a new page to the website listing links to jewellery and business related organisations that we feel might be useful to our customers. These links include official organisations such as the Birmingham and Sheffield Assay Offices, along with less well known organisations such as The Silver Society, The London Metal Exchange, and The British Jewellers Association.

Many of these sites are worth more than just a casual glance, as they do contain a wealth of information.

Sheffield Assay Office

Birmingham Assay Office

More About Hallmarking

The Silver Society

The Hallmarking Convention

The Jewellery Distributors’ Association

British Jewellers Association

London Metal Exchange

UK Business Forum

OFT: Distance Selling Regulations

Jewellery on Wikipedia

Jewellery Cleaning - an overview

How to Clean Silver

How to Repair Silver Jewellery

Jewellery on Hub Pages - Random bits and pieces.

Jewellery on eBay

Jewellery Packaging - Bags, boxes, etc.

If anyone can recommend other sites that might be of interest to those in the Jewellery trade, we’d love to hear from you.

Our latest collection of Body Jewellery is now available. Added to the few remaining lines from our previous range, we now have a total of 24 unique designs, starting at £2.46. There are plenty of wholesale companies out there selling body jewellery, but the quality tends to be weak, and the possible markup low.

Though we rarely suggest retail prices, as it will vary depending on the market, we anticipate these items selling for £10-£15, depending on the number of stones. As usual, each item comes with a 316L Surgical Steel Bar.

Stocks of CZ Rings and heavy Sterling Silver Bracelets are now back up to decent levels.

Our large silver bracelets have always proven popular and we had been almost out of stock for a number of weeks. As usual, each bracelet is listed showing its dimensions and weight in grams. With the recent increases in the price of silver, it’s very important that you check the actual weight of items before purchase. A good photographer can easily give the impression that a light weight piece of jewellery is bigger, and heftier than it really is.

About 40 new lines of CZ (cubic zirconia) rings are now available. Unlike Costume Jewellery, popular lines of silver do not go out of fashion, but we still like to mix it up a little with new designs.

We’re expecting our latest range of body jewellery to be available within the next few days, so watch this space.

It’s never easy to know what to buy. The public are fickle creatures at best, who want one thing one day, and something else the next. What was popular three or four months ago, is old fashioned today.

So how do you decide which items to order, and which have passed their sell by date? Our shelf life for Fashion and Costume Jewellery is not that long. We tend to order just enough of each line to last about four months, and many of the more popular lines sell out within two months, so you’re unlikely to find last years fashions on our site.

But that doesn’t help you decide what is right for your customers today. Necklaces that sell well in Edinburgh may not sell so well in Cardiff or London. And what sells in Ireland… well, let’s just say that the Irish are in a class all their own when it comes to fashion jewellery.

You could buy one of each item. But then you might find yourself left with many single, unsold items. You could use your experience to choose what you think will sell, and buy heavily in just those lines. But then you might be wrong, and be left with dozens of similar items that your local customers do not want.

To help you decide, we’ve put together a new Popular Items Page. This page is updated many times a day, and shows you which items fellow retailers across the UK are buying. The page lists the last 60 items purchased in reverse order, and in doing so allows you to draw upon the experience of jewellery retailers across the country when you make your decision (jewellery, accessory, and gift shop owners, party planners, market traders, eBay sellers and jewellery websites).

Should you buy lots of cheap items for a pound or two, or invest in some of the more expensive sterling silver bracelets and rings? By keeping an eye on this page, daily or weekly, you should gain a broader insight into what’s selling up and down the land, and make these sorts of questions easier to answer.

We’d appreciate any feedback you might have on this new page. Does it help you when deciding what to order? Could we extend it in any way?

Click here for the Popular Jewellery Items Page

If you’ve been selling jewellery for any length of time, you will have noticed increases in silver prices across the board. This increase will have affected any jewellery with a sterling silver component: rings, pendants, chains, as well as bracelets. Changing suppliers or finding new wholesalers or importers will make little difference. Unlike Costume Jewellery, silver has a fixed price on world markets, so bargains are next to impossible to find.

Silver prices have increased 106% in the past two and a half years, and more significantly, a whopping 33% since mid December. The driving force behind these increases is not an upsurge in silver jewellery sales, but rather the alternate uses for silver such as in electrical conductors, photographic film and disinfectants. The emerging markets of China, India, Russia and Eastern Europe are key players in these industries, which show no signs of slowing down.

What does this mean for Sterling Silver Jewellery?

Unfortunately, it means that prices are rising, and that they will continue to rise. Manufacturers are paying more for the silver they use, and those costs are passed along the chain to importers, wholesalers, retailers, and the end customer.

We always list the weight in grams of each Sterling Silver item we sell, and try to price each item as reasonably as possible. Despite the recent price increases, we’re still very competitively priced, and are fully confident you won’t find our lines at such low prices elsewhere.

Going forward, we will endeavour to keep our sterling silver prices as low as possible.