As Winter approaches and the days get shorter and colder, we’ve noticed a serious increase in the number of scarves we are selling. Though we haven’t updated our scarves and are not stocking any new lines, it seems that the time of year is now right for them to start selling well on the street.

This is a welcome improvement, as it means our decision to stock scarves as well as jewellery has been vindicated, and it means that we are now likely to enhance the selection of scarves we have available next year.

If you haven’t tried our scarves yet, take a look at our wholesale scarves catalogue here.

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.

Manchester has always been the centre of the jewellery wholesale business in the UK. Areas such as Cheetham Hill have long played host to jewellery importers, distributers, and wholesalers, and the upsurge in Internet suppliers hasn’t put a dent in this. In many cases, Internet businesses have an offline presence in Manchester (we do ourselves, though it’s only an office).

But the days of jewellery retailers travelling to Manchester to stock up are long past. Walking through the showrooms of the Manchester wholesalers these days is a different experience to what it was ten years ago. Where once there were crowds of small retailers filling shopping trolleys with stock, nowadays you could be the only customer in a huge warehouse.

The Internet and Internet suppliers have eaten away at Manchester’s position as the jewellery capital of the UK. The suppliers are still there, and probably will remain for many years to come, but the pre-eminence of these warehouse based jewellery wholesalers is gone.

Take a look through the catalogue of most jewellery wholesalers and you will often see the same style of necklace or bracelet in three, five or even seven different colours. Isn’t choice great?

The truth is, choice is not that great and consumers are not as focused on colour as you might think. Our experience has been that it’s far better to stock fifty unique styles in one colour than it is to carry twenty lines in each of three colours.

Your customers – or most of them – are far more interested in the style of jewellery you are selling than they are in the colour. If they don’t have a blouse to match the colour you carry, they are just as likely to buy a new top than they are to buy a different necklace. So take a little friendly advice and pay more attention to the styles your jewellery wholesaler is stocking than the colour.

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

Our last stock update of 2011 is a small one, but what it lacks in numbers of styles it makes up for in quality. Only 14 new styles are available in this update, but every one of them is sure to be a strong seller.

Following on from earlier posts discussing the popularity of heart and flower shaped necklaces and bracelets on the street, this update contains some outstanding flower designs, both necklace and bracelet.

These Wholesale Bracelets are sure to sell well.

As are these Wholesale Necklaces.

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.

Have you been in the jewellery business for ten years or more? Have you dealt with wholesalers and suppliers in the UK for all of those years? If the answer is yes, then you will have noticed huge changes in the entire industry over the past decade.

Old suppliers have disappeared or are on their last legs, and new suppliers have popped up in the wholesale district of Manchester and online.

We’ve been in the jewellery business for about ten years, and what we’ve noticed in that time is that the industry has changed. The Internet and the upsurge in Chinese suppliers have made life extremely difficult for the more traditional family run jewellery wholesale and import businesses. Those that could not adapt to online competition and the huge variety now on offer have either gone out of business or are reduced to selling old styles as cheaply as possible – a sure sign that they are not long for this world.

Only five years ago, The Trader magazine was chock full of ads from a long and well established list of Manchester suppliers. Nowadays, this magazine is a shadow of its former self, running the same type of ads from the remaining fraction of old wholesalers who are still in businesses. The Trader is no longer the first port of call for retailers seeking out new suppliers – Google and other Internet resources have taken its place.

Should we mourn the demise of the old suppliers?

Not if you’re a jewellery retailer. The choice available to retailers today is greater than it has ever been. There are more suppliers selling a wider range of jewellery that ever before. Despite the weak economy, it’s a good time to be a jewellery retailer.