what's up guys this is Jesse at Jewelers advantage and in this video we are going to go over a secret that is only known by a select few multi-million doll jewelry Ecom stores up until now so there are two types of Jewelers out there and odds are you are one of these two odds are you're the first one of these two and that is the Jeweler that is wearing too many hats you pretty much are all of the department in your business and you have to continually switch gears and decide what you're going to do at any given time in order to conduct the activities of how you do business for jewelry the other type of Jeweler is a little bit more Elusive and rare out in the wild and this is the Jeweler that knows how to conduct the orchestra we say that the Jeweler that knows how to conduct the orchestra is somebody that knows how to think into terms of departments not people and this is the big secret that will unlock scale in your business so today we are here to talk about jewelry business departments and roles this is what unlocks scale this is what makes your life easier this is what makes the business run like a well-oiled machine you want your business to be a machine this is the key to getting to a point where you could be sitting sitting on a beach somewhere running your Ecom jewelry business from a phone one day in the future when all of your dreams have come true but before we get into how you do this we need to take a step back and understand why we are doing this so let me ask you what is a brand really you probably think of your favorite Brands and think of the creative concept that communicates the brand to you and all of the things that are very visual but a brand is a lot more than that a brand is a reputation and the sum total of all of your business activities is your reputation so therefore a brand really must be the sum total of all of the activities completed within the business that then delivers value to the customer so on the screen here you can see the brand from a high level view we talk about the brand prism in most of our content because it's so important and then there's the treasure map a lot of you have heard my story of how I devised a model to be able to do operations from a distance using only my phone but I needed to be able to visualize what a large operation of a jewelry business would look like so I discovered and devised and engineered a way to be able to see a mature jewelry business and all of the ACT activities that have to be conducted within this business so today we're going to go over all of the activities that are conducted in your business at a high level and how they function within departments and this is so important because your brand is your reputation as I said before and everything from your product quality to the message in your marketing to how your salespeople talk to customers to how fast that product gets done and at what quality level and how profitable you are in order to be able to enhance these activities over time is going to be what builds your reputation so you can think of the brand prism as the wrapper on the candy bar and everything that is communicated to the customer and everything that is going to Define what your brand will be and then you can think of the treasure map as the system for making the candy bar and delivering it we've got the wrapper of the candy bar and how the candy bar is made so keep this in mind in the context of everything you're about to see because we're about to show you the team that you need to build within departments that can carry this out and give you the jewelry business that you and your family deserve so let's get into departments now as we get into departments consider that we're here to build a machine and the analogy that we use in our onet to ones is that it's a lot like building a car if you can imagine in your mind a beautiful sports car there would be the exterior of the car and the interior of the car as well as all of the underlying mechanics that make it so that is a real car that you can drive the brand prism is a lot like the outer visuals of that car that would communicate who this car is for and what it looks like how it sounds the experience of driving that car you get into the interior you put your hands on the nice leather seats you put your hands on the steering wheel but something is going to have to make that steering wheel go so the things that you can't see are things like the engine and the engine block the transmission the drivetrain the wheelbase the axles the brakes the wheels all of those things are what go into building a car that works well and you should think of this as how you're building a machine to deliver value through your business so the Departments that are going to carry that out are very specific for this new age of an e-commerce jewelry brand and we're also going to want to be aware that all of these departments that you need regardless of what happens with technology will be able to integrate with AI and give you the jewelry business of the future so those departments and roles are e-commerce product design Marketing sales customer service verification production inventory QC and shipping finance and operations regardless of if you're a team of five that sometimes people have to wear multiple hats or you're a team of 10 that is carrying out these activities plus operations or you're a team of 50 that has multiple team members in each of these departments these are are the Departments you will have we don't need to reinvent the wheel here this is the framework that you are going to be using that we have seen with our own eyes result in multiple million doll sales months over and over again this is the team you want now in the context of all of these departments you want to be aware that we are going to maximize our Revenue opportunity through sales by offering three different production methods behind the scenes that then manifest on our eccom store in the form of products those three production methods are going to be your custom projects because 80% of jewelry sales have a custom labor requirement we have to have Customs we have to have supplier inventory in order to meet the demand at scale and reduce the labor requirement down to as low as it can possibly be and move units and then we have our made to order items at number three those we do over time Time by having successful custom projects and then seeding the intellectual property that will be required for those made to orders that appear on your site by doing Customs over and over again and curating down to made to orders or you can always just design your Dream Collection with AI and find efficient ways of bringing that to Market through made to order on your Ecom store so every Department that we go over is going to integrate with these three production methods so be aware of them they're not going away they are very much your friend and this is very much the Playbook you want to be running if you intend to scale an e-commerce jewelry business so it should come at no surprise to anyone that the number one department on our list for an e-commerce jewelry business would be Ecommerce and web now you're going to want to think of this as your digital storefront we're taking the experience of buying jewelry in a store like this and simp putting it on the internet and the benefit of this is that we are going to have ai help us with our Ecom store so in the various other departments we're going to get into the the specific functions of what AI can do for right now just think mentally we want to take this physical jewelry store that you have or don't have if you're starting from scratch and make that experience virtual for the customer your e-commerce store is a jewelry store the back end of that e-commerce store is like the back office where you hold inventory and everything of that nature you can think of everything in a physical store having its own parallel that is represented in your e-commerce store now if you're just starting out Shopify will be a great place to start and you can probably go the entirety of the length of the business and lifetime of the business using Shopify and as far as the roles for this department upwork is going to be your very very good friend now a stumbling block for a lot of Ecom developers and what has made it really difficult in the past for people to have success online with jewel is that Ecom developers know how to sell t-shirts they know how to sell water bottles they know how to sell Electronics but they don't necessarily understand the Nuance requirements of operations for a jewelry business which is why you have to be very careful when choosing a developer to make sure that they know what they're doing in terms of e-commerce with things like your products and inventory and marketing now the Jewelers Advantage AI co-pilot can be a very very good friend here because it can be the training wheels for operations and helping somebody understand how to write copy for an Ecom store and how to strategically develop one so use the AI if you're working with an outside developer and you don't have this experience but that is there to also support people that might be offshore in India or the Philippines which are very much the role that you should be looking for for somebody to develop your store because it's cost effective to do this and there are a lot of experts in these countries that are very good at Shopify so Shopify for your Ecom store just be aware that they should be enabled with AI from Jeweler's Advantage When developing Ecom because there are some key sticking points that have prevented people from doing this the right way next up we've got product design and my favorite story from jewelry history in how people people approach product design is cardier and how they developed what they called the cardier way and what they were really describing was design philosophy they knew that they needed their pieces to have a signature look and it was supposed to be aligned with the values of what cardier was setting out to do to be a fine globally recognized house for jewelry and we can take that attitude and underpin that with AI so when you know the brand prism for your brand by using Jeweler's Advantage you can develop a brand identity that will then automatically create products within that brand identity which is great this is allowing people that haven't been in the industry before to become worldclass jewelry designers overnight and enter the business so you're going to want to be aware that there are three key parts of the process here in the new way of jewelry design of course that's going to start with AI image generation you can use Jeweler's Advantage for that and then you're going to want to be aware that there are continuations of this process with 3D CAD and 3D printing so this is like a Holy Trinity combining the most advanced technology of our time for manufacturing to make jewelry so that's AI for design for the initial image 3D CAD 3D printing from there you can send it on to production and you can make pieces that you would have never thought were possible before so this is very much the new way of design and you want to marry that up with the old way and the old philosophy of having a design philosophy that is the your brand way when designing your products and you're going to want somebody on your team that is really good at this once you've got your product we need to know how we're going to market the product so you can see here that this is a collaborative effort for your marketing department of your jewelry brand because jewelry is unique in that there are so many dependencies on what's going to happen in your operations based on the messages that you're putting out there in the market for example it's similar to the automotive industry in that in automotive the marketing department will come up with a list of features that they know are selling points that the buying public wants to have in their car and then they will go to the engineering team and communicate these features and say hey we need ABCDE e f G features in this car go design that go build that to the engineering team we do something similar here so your marketing department needs to be in communication with sales and know what customers are saying so that you can get feedback know what's working what's not working that way you can double down on the type of products that are selling you'll also want to be aware of how marketing could connect with your product design team that we just talked about you would want to know what is trending out in the world and get that in the hands of the people that are designing your product and then finally we have to know how to make this real much like the engineers for a car manufacturer and whatever is working in that same way we want the people that are designing the product to be able to communicate to the production team to know what is actually feasible from an engineering perspective of the product especially when working with these AI images so a lot of the time people will Outsource to a digital agency which in the old world of the industry was a big reason that Ecom did not work and it's because generally an effective luxury brand is going to be able to communicate their ethos and their message internally and project that out in the world and that gets thinned out when you go to a digital agency that just gets onboarded and they just want to make their monthly nut on your project and they're more going to go for a completion grade so you have to to be aware that this is a risk when you Outsource your digital marketing but you can ask ja for that so the good news is now by using Jeweler's Advantage you can Define your brand prism and if you can put that brand prism in the hands of a digital agency you're enabling them they're no longer coming to you and you don't have to pay them for Consulting to figure out your marketing you will have figured out your marketing already and you can standardize the look with a lookbook and the types of mess Mees that you want to put out in the world and you'll be much more standardized so you would just want to be aware that from a marketing perspective for jewelry being the consumer product of choice here is that there are three lead generation methods and that's going to be organic traffic paid traffic and influencers as long as you have your brand prism defined and you know that these are the main traffic methods you're going to really really be able to enable whoever is in charge for marketing with your business business which is often times an intern right out of college or a digital agency so you are now super super effective make sure you're using Jeweler's Advantage for your marketing because it allows you to standardize and maintain continuity across your marketing efforts now after we've marketed the jewelry brand it's time to make some sales so sales is going to be a key Department obviously in your business and this can be an area that is really hard to scale for most Jewelers because a lot of people are good at sales but most people aren't good at teaching sales so we have a really really great video for this called the three voices of jewelry sales and that comes into play in this situation that you see here notice that our salesperson is on the phone that's deliberate in the age of Ecom you're going to need to be able to get your customers from social media on your Ecom store and talking to a real human on the phone then you can really unlock the secret sauce of those three voices of jewelry sales notice how our salesperson is on her phone and has a visual aid of sorts in the middle this kiosk that's just representing your Ecom store you can use that as a visual closing tool so when I was saying that you need to get the experience of being in a jewelry store and make it virtual in the physical store the customer has jewelry over the counter you're talking about it you're telling stories about it you're both looking at the same thing so in a live jewelry sale on the phone you need to make sure that you're both looking at the same thing so You' use your e-com store for that you'll notice that this lady also has a robot assistant here so in the age of AI e-commerce is going to be able to track the heat map and ie movement of your customer because eyes follow where the mouse goes you're going to be able to know what products they've looked at and deduce that perhap perhaps they want three different items and you would know that already and you can start steering the customer towards a buying decision using e-commerce as a visual during the live call this is the only way you're going to close items over $11,000 because people need to talk to a human and that's a benefit of being in this industry so for your sales department just know that jewelry sales will be resistant to AI because typically Fine Jewelry is a high ticket sale and we're safe here in the human element because we are tied to the value of gold for one this is a product that is purchased for an emotional reason so human emotion living within the customer that's why they want to buy and then it's a high ticket price point and most people are going to be more comfortable talking to a human and in the age of Ecom they could be a thousand miles away but they can call in get on the line with one of your salespeople and get closed on an Ecom High ticket purchase for fine jewelry now let's assume that your salesperson closed this sale then what there's going to be a requirement for customer service most likely because this customer will call back or there might be some situations where they are very much back in your world regarding their order and those reasons might be repairs returns refunds or exchanges they're a reality of any retail business and at scale you're going to have to think about how you're going to deal with multiple people coming back at once that have some type of service requirement that is aligned with your warranty and so on this is a very real thing that you need to be prepared for when it comes to e-commerce because ecommer taught customers that these things are in place for all other purchases now in AI there's going to be a huge opportunity to automate most of this so there will be a live chat on your website that is an industry standard that you need to be prepared for and in the image here we can see that the Shopper is getting a starting point with customer service the beauty of this is that through automation you're going to be able to elevate up the actual important inquiries and then talk to the customers that really need to be talked to while weeding out more of the tire kickers that waste your time and make you inefficient so five star reviews are going to be something that you really really need and enabling your customer service team with the right technology and the right training is going to be key to maintaining a good average for those reviews on Google and Yelp and anywhere else on the internet where customers are researching you the final Point here on customer service is that this is actually the key to understanding problems in operations so you want to have whoever is in charge of developing operations at the business to have good clear communication with this department and whoever is doing this work because complaints leave Clues we'll get into that later on that's very very important but customer service is not just about serving the customer it's about making the business better next up we've got verification which is a huge sticking point for you if you ever want to scale an e-commerce jewelry brand because fraud is such a problem so we need to have an anti-f frud measure in place to verify the customer purchase before we intake the funds and complete the order and ship it out be aware that a single1 to $20,000 chargeback can end your business overnight so as you start getting away from doing onetoone Customs as every one of your sales and you start having any kind of volume of transactions come into the business you need to be able to screen these transactions using AI that can determine things like the IP address that matches the physical address of the banking information of the customer that's what these products do but you also need to know that you need the human element in there so that way you can determine if you can accept the funds and if you have to talk a customer through the process of verifying their identity there will be some empathy there that won't sound so cold When approaching a very necessary step with anti fraud so this comes down down to getting to a point where you can afford to invest in a tool like signified or I for fraud but just be aware that this is going to be critical and you can't overlook this you have to know that you have some type of chargeback protection on the business that acts as insurance that is running in tandem with all of your AI powered anti-fraud measures assuming the order was verified and you can proceed and it's green lit to go ahead and make the project next we have production so in the future robotics is going to be huge in the manufacturer of jewelry which is going to enable solo Founders to scale their business you're going to see multi-million doll jewelry businesses with a team of less than five if they can Master how they are going to conduct the orchestra across all of their departments within the business and also manage production and there are two ways that you can do this you can either ask yourself are we here to manage a supply chain or are we here to manage inhouse regardless of what you're going to do and what type of business you want to own there are going to be three production methods here again we've got custom projects we've got supplier inventory we've got made to order items all of these types of production seamlessly fit into what we call the treasure map and you are going to need to know how you can be efficient with these processes because they all have a different playbook for how you execute getting the product from wherever it is into the hands of your customer so if you're managing the supply chain that's going to have to do with talking to suppliers maybe creating some type of Drop Shipping esque environment where you're buying minimum quantities and advertising and then not holding too much inventory or if you're doing made to orders and you really want to scale at some point you're going to own some of your operation in that regard and you'd be managing in house so just know that the key to unlocking your biggest Revenue opportunity is going to be in custom projects supplier inventory and made to order and the treasure map is very much your friend for being able to put eyes on the process and manage it no matter where you are in the world now as you scale and especially if you're scaling with supplier inventory you're going to need to have some system of managing that inventory even if you have Customs come back that enters into inventory if you have a made to order that for some reason didn't go out and now you're holding on to it you have to manage that inventory so in the beginning you're going to be doing this manually probably with your Shopify store and then eventually you're going to want to be aware that you are going to scale into an Enterprise level CRM SLP solution that can track the customer relationship as well as what products are in inventory along with what suppliers they come from how many units you have what is the total dollar value of all the inventory you have in house so that you can know that you have $100,000 that you're sitting on in inventory and so on this starts out as a manual process and then becomes something that you'll really be able to automate with AI in the future so just be aware that that's a road map to scale is having an entire department for managing inventory now there is a sound bite going out in the industry of don't get inventory only do made to order that is advice that is coming from people that failed to scale their business so just be aware that if you want to have a smaller more Boutique environment that's perfectly fine you should build the business that you want to own but if you're telling yourself also that you want to be a bigger brand on e-commerce and that you have aspirations of making millions of dollars know that supplementing that Demand with supplier inventory and being able to track that inventory is going to be a mandatory requirement after the piece is finished we've got to put it in your customer's hands and in the age of e-commerce jewelry that's going to come down to QC and shipping so you want to be doing your final QC just before packaging in order to limit that time window of when something could go wrong this is why you would want to be able to have repair inhouse as a service because then you can also make final polishes or any other final little tweak to the piece right before it goes out if you have to so that's just a side note and then this would also be the department where you're factoring in things like the warranty maybe you do appraisals inhouse after QC and then the final point that you would want to do this is a little bit of game for everybody is weigh the piece and have that logged in to the history with the customer and everything in your CRM it's very difficult to fake that tenth of a gram after the piece is finished so if you have a warranty if you have anything that is a service requirement that is going to be coming back through your shipping Department you're going to want to be able to have that logged into your system so that way you can say this piece came from us or this piece didn't come from us it's not under warranty it is under warranty again you're going to want to have a robust system for QC that happens at the right time right before it goes out you'll want to be able to make adjustments if you're scaling with a final polish if it needs to happen warranty and Appraisal goes with the piece and then you finally get the gram weight logged into your system that is the best practice in a nutshell for your QC and shipping right at the time of shipping you're also going to want to be able to do unit accounting of that piece because gold price changes there might have been a weird labor requirement and you were going to want to know if that piece was profitable and that would be logged into the system as well so that's a little bit a game for unit economics and that of course factors into the bigger picture with Finance in your jewelry business CPAs are going to know how to do the accounting for a business in general but there are also unique requirements that come into play for jewelry maybe the accountant isn't trained on things like manufacturing or commodity markets things of that that nature and you're going to want them to be aware and that is another place that we have factored that in to the co-pilot so that way if somebody is a trained accountant and they just need a little bit of extra help getting there on knowing what really should be happening in this business they can use the Jewelers Advantage Ai and make sure that you not only know your numbers but they're acting as a CFO for the business and directing the financial decision making that will enable you to unlock scale and keep more more money in house it's not all about Topline and what you can make it really is about what you can keep that's going to make you profitable and allow you to grow the business and build it into something that you want to own once again and finally we have operations this is the designing of the machine that the business will be and a lot of people that are great at operations have a previous experience with engineering or building anything so this can often times be the CEO if it's more of an engineering minded CEO they should probably be in charge of operations and dialing everything in across departments and then you can also fold in things like HR into this department if you're if you're getting to scale so operations really is just about engineering the machine that we talked about before and then putting a wrapper around it with your brand and know that the key again to understanding operations is going to be found in your customer service department complaints leave Clues so if we look at the treasure map here if there was a problem in production like a diamond falling out you'll hear about that from your customer they'll just be upset that a diamond fell out at that point you can diagnose that there's something going on in production or in the design of the piece in product design that may have not been optimal and you need to communicate with whoever you need to communicate with in order to determine what went wrong and then you can make the adjustment so operations is about being a detective and being an engineer getting feedback from the customers finding out what they don't like and then determining how you can address that complaint in a permanent way in the machine that you have built now this sounds complex but this is a worthy Endeavor because if you solve this and at this point you've already solved which depart departments you're going to have there's no more of a guessing game so that's your departments let's recap we've got e-commerce and web making your storefront digital we've got product design who's going to be designing the jewelry that you're going to make we've got marketing who is communicating the message of your brand out to the public we've got sales who is actually talking to the customers getting them to part with their cash and making a deal for some jewelry we've got customer service how are you going to support the customer customer after that sale has been made and make sure that you get to keep that sale we've got verification because anti frud is a real real requirement out in a industry that sells gold and diamonds on the internet we've got production because we need to know how we are going to actually make this piece or acquire this piece and get it in the hands of the customer we have inventory in case we need to actually track our scaled business and the order volume that is going to come in and the products that we need to have to be able to fulfill those orders then we've got QC and shipping because your products need to be good and they got to get to your customer somehow then we've got Finance because this is a business and we're here to make money and then finally operations because systems and processes make businesses this sounds complicated but your reward for solving this in this Frame is is going to be that you unlock scale nobody wants to be a bottleneck in their business because it's stressful it's exhausting you lose sleep over it it makes you not want to be in this industry so everyone knows they need to scale they don't necessarily know how to scale and if you've made it to the end of this video you will know the basic broad Strokes of what it will take to scale what is the team going to look like this is it this is the team this is the team that makes millions of dollars per month so if that's what you want this is what you got to do so remember to conduct the orchestra it's not going to happen overnight but now that you know where you're going where you're aiming you can get there and our AI co-pilot will help you with that you probably don't have training in this it is difficult to learn so we made sure that we took some bumper lanes and put them in place and put the training wheels on so that if you're learning to do this for the first time our AI knows the three means of production and knows the Departments and knows how they're supposed to work together so if you're trying to start adopting this habit and even if you're a solo founder you need to start thinking in terms of these departments because then you'll know who to hire once you start making money you'll be able to put the right people in the right seats on the bus and in order to do that what you can do with our AI is you can simply ask who is respons responsible for a given activity in a production method one of those production methods is going to either be custom projects supplier inventory or made to order so if you're adopting one of these processes for the first time absolutely use the AI and ask who is responsible for doing whatever you're working on whatever you're trying to do within the context of one of these three production methods and you're essentially going to get bespoke directions on what you need to do right now to do that the right way this has never been possible before and we are about to see jewelry Brands develop from teams of 1 to five or 10 and create multi-million doll businesses that would have never been possible without Ai and certainly would have never been possible without Jeweler's Advantage so if you want to get that co-pilot head to Jewelers advantage.com you can download it for free my name is Jesse Korby here at jewelers advantage and we will see you at the next one