WHEN SAGAN WOODBURY bought his family store, Woodbury Jewelers, in Park City, UT, from his parents in 2020, he knew he’d face challenges.
The POS system was outdated, the store had little online presence, and it was surrounded by competitors and dependent on walk-in tourist traffic.
“My parents did a great job and ran a great business,” Woodbury says. But lack of e-commerce was a problem in a business at least partially dependent on tourists and part-time residents. “We tend to think if a person is not in the store, it doesn’t really matter,” he says. “I don’t think that is at all true.”
A new concentration on the social front helps define the business as a destination on a block teeming with competitors. “If they are in the store even once and they like it, then they receive a little reminder through social media, a newsletter, or a decent online presence, they will buy multiple times,” he says. “I’ve had so many customers from that who otherwise would have been a one-time thing.”
Five competitors on his block specialize in everything from custom to Native American jewelry, Rolex, gemstones, and silver; one has a celebrity name attached to it. “My parents thought there was enough money on the street for everyone, but as a smaller shop, I must be on my game 100% to gain and garner any type of business. I want to be the top dog, and to do that, I have to be the best, the place everyone in town goes to and says, ‘That’s who I can trust.’”
Today, Woodbury Jewelers specializes in appraisals, repairs, and unique jewelry handcrafted in a second location, a workshop 10 miles from the store. About 60% of current business is tourist-related. One strategy to appeal more to locals is to focus on repair and custom. “If they come in for a simple repair and it’s easy, they wind up coming back over and over again,” Woodbury says. “Small stuff ends up being the big stuff over time.”
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To compete, the fundamentals are important: The store must be warm and inviting, the sales team bright and happy, and the lighting just right. Beyond that, Woodbury says, it’s important to become a unique destination. “We have tried to focus on making unique things with unique stones,” he says. “We’re seeing a lot of success from changing our business model, specifically to custom.”
Playing up their strengths — a creative design crew and capable jewelers — helps clients imagine possibilities. “If someone can see you know how to set an extremely expensive emerald, they are going to trust you with their jewelry,” he says. “Or if you have unique designs, they may decide they want something cool and different for their engagement ring.”
Woodbury also noted that POS and inventory management challenges had created a workflow bottleneck. “When you’re doing a lot of things on paper or with an older system, things get lost, things get moved, and it becomes a nightmare, especially with two locations,” he says. “Everyone just assumed, ‘Oh, if I can’t find it, it’s at the other place.’”
To make matters worse, the old POS system repeatedly crashed. Other jewelers with whom Woodbury consulted recommended Jewel360, which brings sales, marketing, and inventory together in a single cloud-based platform, allowing essential information to be updated in real-time across every database and system. That technology enabled the store to not only increase its efficiency but also to coordinate how it manages inventory, repairs, customer information, and online sales through a streamlined database and website integration. “Now, since the POS is cloud-based, I can check our inventory on days off, which drives my wife nuts,” Woodbury says. “But the fact that anybody can hop on, and we don’t have to try to do it all on one computer, is a huge difference.”
E-commerce is important because tourists often make follow-up purchases. “For the longest time, our website did not communicate with live inventory at all,” he says. “People would order items that had been out of stock for years. With Jewel360, I can tell someone if it’s in stock,” he says.
Improved organization has sped up repairs. “It’s a different level of professionalism, to be able to immediately know where it is and how long until it’s ready.
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“There’s always an old way of looking at things, especially in the jewelry business,” he says. “There is value in that, but there’s also value in trying to do new things.”
