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Don't miss our weekend sales reports

It's the Monday before Thanksgiving, and the Christmas tree has shown up in the office lobby. Carols are jingling. I always wonder how many times the security guards can stomach the loop tape without going barmy.

The weather's certainly cooperating. It FEELS like Christmas out there. How fortunate that a single holiday can last longer than a month, especially since it's the big one for us. Only in America.

New York City has a long-standing love affair with everything Christmas. "Miracle on 34th Street" and "Home Alone 2" come to mind. Then there are the window displays. We have Macy's Herald Square, the world's best-known retail store. Christmas officially kicks off with its annual Thanksgiving Day parade. 

At Radio City, the Rockettes are kicking. At Lincoln Center, the ballerinas begin pirouetting tomorrow night to Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker." New York City, the world's commercial center, embraces our most celebratory of commercial holidays in a chubby, plump and right jolly old way.

This year here, as elsewhere I expect, everyone's speculating on how the season will shape up. And I mean everyone. My barber predicts, "It's not going to be normal." He's typically a bit of a pessimist. The coffee guy is keeping his fingers crossed. Cold weather is always a boon to him anyway. And if it's any indicator, the traffic cops continue to write out parking tickets as if the Dow is still at 14,000.

On Monday, we'll begin posting weekend results from jewelers around the country on NationalJeweler.com. We'll continue this reporting every Monday through the holidays. In a challenging year, we know this benchmarking will benefit you. We also hope to prove the barber wrong!

A gallon of gas

I'm not a conspiracy theorist. Nor am I a whiz financier. So it's tough for me to fathom how we could go from paying nearly $5 a gallon for gas a month ago to under two bucks now. 

Our family's like many. Though I drive a put-put with 160k miles on it back and forth to work, my wife schlepps the kids from soccer to karate to school, etc., in an SUV. Fourteen miles a gallon.

Needless to say, like all the other Tony Soprano wannabes in their Suburbans out there, we got to wondering through 2008 where all the money was going. With $80-plus fill-ups, it was going up in fumes.

I just don't get it. Was it a sitting president with familial ties to the oil business helping the fat cats line their wallets? Was it a global rebalancing of energy footprints, with China, India and other developing industrial economies pressuring prices up through broadened demand? Was it owing to wars being fought in oil-producing countries? Was it natural disasters impacting production capacities? 

Who knows? Certainly not me. But what I do know is that $1.85 a gallon this weekend sure put me in much more of a holiday mood. 

And I can't imagine that it won't do so for many others. While you might argue that European motorists historically have paid multiples of what we do for gas, you just can't change a culture overnight. Americans love their cars, and our society is structured around driving. 

But what could be a more visible representation of price inflation than those rolling figures on the gas pump, scrolling ever higher right before your disbelieving eyes? And when the expense began tallying into the hundreds each week, it had to have a dampening effect on consumer confidence and spending.

So the reverse must also be true. For someone who drives 500 miles a week, like I do, gas at $5 per gallon costs $400 a month. Throw in my wife's mileage, and we're talking $500 a month as a conservative estimate. At $1.85, we reduce to $185, or a savings of $315 a month!

Now that's not going to buy me a yacht. But it will buy me some peace of mind. All of a sudden, I stop counting nickels. And when my spending patterns loosen up at the low end of the scale, it carries across into my mindset when I consider making more significant purchases.

OK, that might be some pop-psychology. But I have to feel that I can project my own feelings on this one. And ultimately, what it all means is that it's got to help out for jewelers over the holidays. 

The official holiday selling season begins in four days, right after turkey. It's a lot easier now for you to throw in a tank of gas with every diamond purchased.

Credit Crisis

As jewelers head into the holiday selling season, it's the worst possible time to have to deal with a decline in consumer credit. If you've been struggling against tightened credit among your customers or with bad debt issues or have developed tactics to counter these ugly trends, please e-mail me at wsielaff@nationaljeweler.com and we'll begin a dialogue to address them.

Shake'em outta their routines

Focus grasshopper. We're a week out from the big Thanksgiving weekend, the official kickoff of the holiday retail saga. But the data and reports all tell us shoppers have begun early this year, bargain- and discount-seeking in the quest to stretch their dollars.

Many retailers, including the biggest, have responded, posting specials and discounting as well as already offering incentives such as free shipping on Web purchases. Walmart is heavily advertising its site-to-store policy, where customers buy online and pick up merchandise at their local unit, free of shipping expense.

It's like we're in the earliest days of the annual salmon migration. Although the majority of fish are still in the ocean, staging for the upstream swim, there are some early arrivals already in the stream. And the keen, perceptive and focused fisherman can hook up.

The deal is knowing what bait to use. In your stores, the key is preparing your sales staff, motivating them and ensuring they keep their edge. A great way to do this is to get specific. Choose an item, whether it's a special piece you have, a high-turner or something that generates high margin—your choice. 

Assemble the staff pre-opening and review it. Discuss all of its attributes: the aspects of its components and their particular quality, pricing, how to best sell it, perhaps even past successful sales with similar jewelry. You could even work with the team in devising a constellation of related products that bracket it in price in the event someone might start from the core product and upsell.

What you're doing is getting your sellers focused on the task at hand--moving a real piece of jewelry. Their minds will be focused on jewelry, and that can't be anything but good as they prepare to meet the day's traffic. 

Another trick is to vary this up. If you use the same method repeatedly, it becomes routine, and it won't have the same impact on the staff's mindset. Just remember, for somebody really to notice something, for it to truly stand out, it must differ from the norm.

Keep your sales team focused but challenged, and they'll be best prepared to close. 

I want to feel good

OK. It's a bit before 7:00 a.m. on a cold late-November morning in New York City. Winter's here too darn early this year. I live on top of a small mountain in extreme western New Jersey, and we've already had a freak snowstorm.

It was incredibly contained, just my town and two others to the east and north. But it dumped a foot of wet snow on trees that still had leaves. The result was a disaster. 

It's a rural area with heavy forest. Falling trees knocked out electricity for three days. A large beech in the woods adjacent to our yard split like a toothpick, destroying some of my home-customized picket fencing and taking out two ornamental trees and additional landscaping.

We're looking at more snow this week, with some days barely getting above freezing. And it's only November. 

What's worse, I'm checking the market's results for yesterday. The Dow was down another 225 points. And futures are off 150 leading into this morning. 

I'm sure everyone out there has heard the wise approach to investing of not reacting to market swings. But this cycle really stinks. They used to talk about swings of 10 percent to 20 percent. But the Dow is off over several months from 14,000 to 8,000. That's huge. 

In a world where we all make choices between instant and delayed gratification, many people have got to be questioning all the scrimping and saving. I have to wonder just how many people want to say screw it at this point and spend some money on something to make themselves feel good. 

Cold, poor and despondent is no way to go through life. I've got to believe there are many who are thinking about that warm glow that comes from buying jewelry. It may seem counterintuitive, but there could be some upside to the current misery.

DTC relief is welcome

The Diamond Trading Co. (DTC) is stepping back into its old role, somewhat like the pre-morph De Beers. Its newly announced consumer ad campaign, planned at double the spend of last year, will be one of the best drivers we have available to us this year.

Back in the day, De Beers, as diamond-category marketing cartel, stabilized prices by controlling supply and stimulating demand, following the textbook economic equation. Since officially renouncing its roll as supply governor, however, the company has also made cuts to its demand-driving engine for the U.S. market. 

But this current recession is the first time the global diamond trade has faced a down market without a price-controlled market. It's become obvious that many diamond companies are very uncomfortable in these unknown waters.

Diamantaires are publicly announcing that prices are strong and that our trade has no need to worry. But methinks the lady doth protest too much. In a world where financing is already in crisis mode and diamond companies are judged for the value of their inventories, a pricing devaluation as we're seeing across other commodities could be catastrophic.

De Beers has stepped in on both sides of the equation. It's reportedly cut back on the size of the final two of its annual 10 sights to tighten supply. But even more important for retailers, it's doubled the size of its U.S. holiday ad spend, which, given the state of media and, subsequently, advertising rates, should get the message out often, loud and clear. This will be very beneficial to our trade as we face one of the most challenging holiday seasons on record.

Great event at Jersey jeweler

I had fun and got credit for taking my wife out to boot Saturday night thanks to Roman Jewelers, a Flemington, N.J.-based independent that's one of my favorites.

Roman is a fantastic pro-active marketer. In the past, they've solicited me, among many others, to give private presentations to better customers, and they perennially seem to be staging some such activity to increase appeal and drive traffic.

Saturday's event was a special for "best customers," which included some 300 attendees from around the Hunterdon County region. Roman hired the band Strawberry Fields, which includes former cast members of Beatlemania, who provided a dead-on rendition of the Fab Four. The crowd, which ranged in age from five to too old to have appreciated the Beatles the first time around, ate it up, along with some zesty pasta.

It was a pleasure to see owner Sophie Shor interact with her customers, whom she describes as all being close friends. It sure seems that way and reflects what independent jewelry retailing can be at its best.

Five diamonds to Roman for tapping the pulse creatively to keep business flowing in today's challenging market.

Start looking in the rear view mirror

With the election over (finally), it's time to forecast where our industry is heading.

If we're not in a recession now, we will be shortly. What was learned during the recessions of 1980, 1990, 2001, etc., should test your leadership as well as your management expertise. More than 10 percent of U.S. companies disappear annually, often because of their leaders' denial that consumer needs and distribution channels are always changing. Recessions just speed these downfalls along. 

For example, Henry Ford failed to notice in the late 1920s that consumers wanted more from a car than transportation; they wanted status. His denial gave General Motors a chance to seize market share. In the 1970s, with oil expensive and stagflation rife, the Big Three automakers denied that consumers wanted reliable, affordable transportation—not gas-guzzling status symbols. So the Japanese swept in with precisely what Americans wanted.

To stay ahead of competitors, jewelers need to understand that every product or service has a primary purpose (with jewelry, it's probably appearance) and a secondary purpose (such as enjoyment, status). The line between the two inevitably shifts, depending on what's happening in the economy and society. Detect when it shifts—from high-end to low-end, or from yellow gold to white gold—and you stand a better chance of offering consumers what they want.

We would all like to hear—and learn—what you did to manage your jewelry company during past recessions. We could all benefit from the information.

Jan Brassem is founder of Eclipse Global Consulting LLC, a firm that assists jewelry retailers who are expanding into foreign markets and/or sourcing globally. You can e-mail him at Jan@EclipseGlobalConsulting.com.