2024.10.24_Education FAILED You_Dinosaur
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Jeweler's Advantage

Education FAILED You

Education FAILED You: The Truth Every Jeweler Needs to Hear
“Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”
— Albert Einstein

How Traditional Education Set You Up to Fail

If you feel like education failed you as a jeweler, you’re not imagining it. It probably happened not once, but at least two or three times. Public schools, jeweler programs, and even prestigious institutions like the GIA all have serious flaws when it comes to preparing you for real-world business success. Here’s how it happened—and why it’s not your fault.

Public Schools Were Never Meant to Prepare You for Business

The U.S. education system was designed during the Industrial Revolution to train future factory workers—people who would follow orders and punch a clock, not independent thinkers or business owners. Getting an A or B from a non-expert might feel good, but it’s meaningless in the real world. Worse, the entire system conditions you to depend on someone else for validation and direction.

But as a business owner? That mindset will sink you. You can’t wait around for someone else to tell you what to do. You’re responsible for your outcomes—and only results matter.

Jeweler School Taught You Skills that Aren’t Profitable Anymore

You may have spent thousands of dollars to attend jeweler school, only to realize the skills you learned are now outsourced to low-cost labor markets overseas. Even if you mastered your craft, competing with off-shore manufacturers—while paying U.S. living expenses—puts you at an impossible disadvantage.

This outdated training leaves jewelers stuck, chasing shrinking margins and wondering why their businesses struggle.

The GIA Diploma COULD Be A Relic of the De Beers Era…

A GIA Diploma might look good on the wall, but in today’s market, it doesn’t carry the weight it once did. It’s a relic from the era when De Beers controlled the narrative with “A Diamond is Forever.” That world has shifted. Now, lab-grown diamonds have taken a massive share of the market, and the rules are changing. Certificates and diplomas no longer guarantee success.

It’s Not Your Fault—But Now It’s Time to Pivot

You were set up to fail by an education system that didn’t equip you with the skills you need to thrive in today’s jewelry industry. But the good news? The game is changing—and you can pivot.

Today’s winning jewelers don’t rely on outdated skills or degrees. They use AI tools to fill in knowledge gaps, create compelling social media strategies, and build eCommerce stores that attract loyal customers. This is the education you really need—practical, data-driven insights that help you sell more, scale faster, and thrive in a competitive market.

Take Control: Get Started with Jeweler’s Advantage AI.

The AI CoPilot from Jeweler’s Advantage can give you the tools and strategies you need to take control of your business. From product development to social media marketing, this AI is your new advantage—helping you build your own path to success without relying on outdated systems.

Get started today by downloading our Free AI CoPilot and see how it transforms your business strategy.

P.S. Find us in our Private Facebook Community to set up a free consultation. Join a group of jewelers who are already on the winning side—and see how you can be one of them.

What's up guys this is Jesse and in this video we are going to talk about education and how it probably failed you because here in the jewelry industry you got hit with a double whammy. Especially if you're in the United States, you would have been, of course, indoctrinated into the American education system which is not designed to help you prosper. It was designed to train factory employees, and it was never updated beyond this. It's a relic of the Industrial Revolution that was basically designed to make sure that we had people in America that were ready to be good little boys and girls and do what they are told.

We know this because the system is basically just built around rote memorization, no critical thinking, and then you get a meaningless token at the end from somebody that is probably not even an expert in their field giving you an A, a B (good little boys and girls), or a C ("You could do better, you're not going to get that raise with C's"). They train you from an early age.

That was bad enough—that's enough brainwashing that you have to deprogram yourself from if you're in any other field and you're going to become a leader. But then in the jewelry industry, you got hit with a second one.

You may have gone to jewelry school to spend a lot of money to learn how to be a minimum wage employee. You learned all the bench skills—it's a lot of trivia, and it's not trivial work to learn. It's hard work to learn to be a bench jeweler; there's a lot to know. But what they don't tell you is that your role can be outsourced overseas into a factory in Surat, Thailand, or Vietnam, and you're competing with that as well.

By going to bench jeweler school, you got the opportunity to just be able to do all of that labor in-house, and they teach you none of the business. Or there was another opportunity that you had that seemed to be some type of opportunity before with a GIA diploma, where it was baked into "A Diamond is Forever," which again—you guys hear me talk about the De Beers campaign—the most successful marketing campaign ever that basically created a retail market for diamonds.

Lots of things have been built on the back of that, the GIA diploma being one of them. For a while, that was something that could legitimize you in the eyes of the public and help you make sales, maybe, if you're good at sales, if you're good at the business skills.

Going to bench school, jewelry school, or getting your GIA diploma is no guarantee that you are actually commercially viable in the jewelry industry. So you probably got hit with a double whammy: one, just being trained like a house pet to do what you're told and get your A or your B up until the time you were 18, then maybe you did that in college again—which is the exact same thing, just more expensive.

Then maybe after college, you decided, "I'm getting into the jewelry industry, and I need a diploma for this or I need to know how to polish a piece of jewelry and set stones, and I'm going to spend thousands and thousands of dollars for this." When's the payoff? When's the big payoff?

If we've got lab diamonds clearly taking over the market, what is the value of a GIA diploma? Of course, they're going to have to evolve, but that doesn't help you right now because educational institutions are very, very slow in how they roll out curriculum. And then when they do roll out curriculum, the big organized prestigious school, by the time they've put together their pricey curriculum and productized how they're going to teach you, the information is obsolete—it's years old.

If you're a jeweler, education is a tricky thing because nobody has ever told you, especially in the age of AI, that you can simplify this way, way down. It is already possible for you to be like a jewelry industry Tony Stark with your own Jarvis for your brand—your own AI for your brand that knows everything that your brand is supposed to be doing: the way that your product should be designed, the way that your voice should sound in the market, the way that your marketing should be presented, and how you could lead a whole team.

That's already done and dusted on our side—that's built and tested, and it's unbelievable. From there, they don't teach you the simple things, like how you are going to organize a month's worth of social media content. Are they going to tell you that, hey, your customer finds you on social media?

At these schools, they might talk about it a little bit, but they're not going to talk about it as if your career lives and dies by that idea—which is the truth. So you get incomplete information there. They don't tell you how to organize all of your supplier information and make it so that you’ve got an actual organized single point of truth. If you want to develop a collection, it's not just about throwing images up on a Shopify store—you have to be really organized.

If you're not organized, you're going to have a lot of problems with an e-commerce developer, which a lot of you have. Almost everybody that tries to do an e-commerce jewelry store is looking at a year of fumbling through it if you don't have a plan of any kind. We know how to make sure that you can turn that down, turn it over in 30 to 60 days.

So there's that. They don't tell you that now you could have an AI for your jewelry brand to organize all of your social media content, organize all of your products, and have an actual plan in place for how you're going to engage with a developer and get a Shopify store out the door.

That's one of the biggest problems in the whole industry—how am I going to talk to somebody that builds websites and helps me get this online store and collection? And how am I going to promote it? How am I going to make sure the whole team knows what they're doing?

AI really, really helps with that and enables you to actually get the project out the door without the e-commerce developer giving you the runaround. That's what they should be teaching you in jewelry school, because that's the only thing that's actually a commercial outcome. Everything else is just window dressing.

Everything else is just ego. Everything else is just going to make people feel better and make people feel like they've done something when they haven't done something. They've learned a bunch of trivia. They sold you on learning a bunch of trivia, and it's not your fault.

It's very, very compelling when the old heads of the industry—let's be real, everybody calls them dinosaurs (no disrespect, I'm just repeating what is said)—are stuck in their ways.

If you feel like you land in that camp: adapt or die, I guess. But if you're in the younger persuasion of the industry, you're going to need to understand that you've got a lot of runway here and a lot of time to make an adjustment.

If you could go back into a certain time in history, who would be asking the dinosaurs how to survive? Sounds a little silly, right? So how can you ask the older generation how they're going to survive in the new industry? You can't—they're going to be out of it in the next two years.

You're going to see a bloodbath of people going out of business over the next two years because they are going to be leaning on old paradigms and old ways of thinking that worked for them when "a diamond was forever" and a GIA diploma was propped up by that.

It made sense then—you could get that diploma, go to jewelry school, and run a family jewelry store. But now, with brick-and-mortar stores that don't have e-commerce stores selling into communities from thousands of miles away, things have changed.

If you're not playing defense against that, what if you own it? What if you're playing offense with that? What if you have your Jarvis-style AI for your jewelry brand helping you develop an e-commerce store, organize the products, and make sure that there's a compelling narrative and story around the brand?

Very unique, cool products designed with AI—of course, we all see that. But there's levels to this thing when it comes to AI images, and we are the absolute best in the world at this when it comes to making a strategy out of that.

So this is Jesse at Jeweler's Advantage. If you like the idea of selling gold and diamonds—whether they're lab diamonds or natural diamonds—while there's runway or other alternative gemstones, we are anchored by the value of gold in this industry.

This is not doom and gloom—the jewelry industry is going to thrive, and there's going to be some amazing things happening when people are using AI agents. These are rolling out now. The technology is starting to land, and it's incredible to have AI agent employees running a Shopify store that sells gold and diamond jewelry.

Depending on where you're seeing this video, I recommend that you head to JewelersAdvantage.com and pick up our AI co-pilot, whether you're an industry native for jewelry or new to this game. People new to the game don't have bad habits and are actually taking to this pretty quickly.

So don't feel like you're left out—it's anyone's ball game now. If you want to speak to me personally, I'm on Facebook. We’ve got a great private community. Look up Jeweler's Advantage, and you'll be able to find me and my co-founder Richard McCarthy.

We post this content, and if you comment on it in our private community saying, "Hey, I'm interested in learning more," we do free consultations all the time to help people get their footing.

We know that this is an industry-wide disruption that is going to knock a lot of people out of business, and we want to be on the side of the winners—and we're making damn sure we're on the side of the winners.

So feel free to come check me out on Facebook. My name is Jesse Korby, and Jeweler's Advantage is the company. It's a great private community where we share a lot of information, and of course, we have a free AI tool that you can use.

Other than that, the world is your oyster. It's not your fault that the powers that be and the previous generation did not educate you properly—they did their best.

But the good news is, there are real, functional, and easy-to-understand strategies underpinned by very powerful things that are going to make you successful.

So this is Jesse Korby at Jeweler's Advantage. Head to JewelersAdvantage.com, find us on Facebook, and we will see you in the next one.

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