Zen Jeweler
Fine jewelry requires a long-term attitude from its purchasers and wearers. This is bad news, and here’s why. Much of what we do today is for the short-term, the quick fix, the disposable society we’ve inherited from watching too many commercials. We’ve developed an addiction for the new, without an appreciation for the exceptional. We’ve begun to buy quantity. And we’ve begun to think of what we do in terms of that quantity. Quantity, frankly, ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. For instance, I once noted that in a store I was working in, 88 percent of the gross profit was coming from 15 percent of the store’s units. That meant that it took the other 85 percent of the stores sales to make up the last 12 percent of the gross profit. Quantity was defeating profitability. The 15 percent of units making up the vast majority of the store’s gross was, in fact, 135 units. Less than one sale a day. Imagine what just two sales a day like that would have done. Instead of one sale of $6,000, imagine two. Let’s continue to work harder, not smarter.
