What’s up guys, it’s an early rise today, which I’m delighted by because my competitors need their beauty rest. So, let’s get right after it. Let’s talk about brand. What do you think would have happened if Phil Knight had just called it Phil Sporting Goods instead of Nike? I don’t think any of us would have really cared a whole lot about Phil’s Sporting Goods.
So, this is something I notice a lot in the jewelry space where people have created what they think is a namesake brand, like Cartier, but really it’s like Dave’s Jewelry or something like that. If that’s the case, you’re really going to need to make an adjustment for where things are headed, where e-commerce is going to take over, and the next generation of buyers—Millennials and Gen Z—want to buy from a brand that has created a world. You’re going to have a moment of reckoning where you have to humble yourself and say, “Hey, do I really have a brand? Have I built a brand at all or have I built Dave’s Jewelry?”
Dave’s Jewelry is not a brand. What you need to do is take a step back and reassess what’s possible for you and what’s possible with the tools and technology of our time to create a world, to create a story, to create leverage in how your products are designed and how you present the brand. All of that is going to be critical.
This is what we know to be true at Jeweler’s Advantage. We can see the wood from the trees, and if you don’t want to be one of the people that goes from the top of the food chain in some of these big groups to out of business in the next two years when the diamond market collapses—and it will—you’re going to want to get very clear on what your brand is. Here’s a couple of ways you can do that.
Using AI, you can develop what we call a brand prism, which is a Fortune 500-level framework that allows you to manage everything from the creative concept of the brand to what the products will be, to what the relationship with the customer is going to be, to what your company culture is, and how people perceive themselves when they interact with your brand. Complex stuff that would have been really, really expensive without AI.
But if you do that, and you get organized on your supplier items for your collection that you want to build, and you get really clear and organized on how you’re going to create content at scale and schedule that content, and then if you’re able to put that all into a system that makes it very easy and step-by-step to build an e-commerce store that is on-brand with unique products from your own collection—hopefully under a brand name that isn’t Dave’s Jewelry, but under the brand that you felt was going to be impossible to make until now.
If you can tie all of those things together, you’re going to be extremely well-positioned for what the future is. And you just might even be able to be somebody that has no experience in the jewelry industry and come in and do this while everyone is scratching their heads, looking at RapNet, and saying, “Well, when are natural diamonds going to come back?” They’re going to come back, right? They’re not coming back.
So, you need to be prepared. Jewelry isn’t going away. It’s just this man-made perception of this commodity of natural diamonds somehow being worth something because De Beers came up with an excellent marketing strategy and convinced everybody that a diamond is forever. That was for the customers; it wasn’t for us. They created an opportunity—De Beers created an opportunity for everyone to make money for a good few decades, and thank God for that.
But there was a lot of negativity created by this as well. People in Africa do not need to be digging in the dirt for diamonds. If the powers that be really cared about the people of Africa, they would be setting up servers and teaching them to use AI, but they don’t. So, the last-ditch effort here is to say, “We got to save the mining industry for these poor countries.” I don’t see anybody that looks like me digging in the dirt. If it’s so important…
Yeah, guess I got the venom in me from the early rise. But tell me one thing I’ve said that’s not true. Anyway, head to JewelersAdvantage.com. We want to help. We’ve got a ton of free stuff there that’s really going to help you in the new phase of the industry.
And that’s it for this time. My name is Jesse Corby, and I’ll see you in the next one.