Private Jewelers NEED a Co-Founder—Or You’ll Work Until the Day You Die
You’ve built a jewelry business from the ground up. You’re a master at your craft. But let’s be honest—if you do everything yourself, from crafting custom pieces to answering emails and managing your books, you’ll never escape the bottleneck.
Every time you sit at the bench, hours disappear. And while those hours may yield stunning rings or bespoke pendants, they also lock you into a business model that can’t scale. If you’re only able to handle 7 to 10 projects per month—20 if you’re a veteran—you’re maxed out. You are your own biggest bottleneck. And that’s a problem.
It’s the problem that keeps you working harder than ever, year after year, without a real exit strategy. You’re the reason your business won’t grow beyond you. Worse, if things don’t change, you could find yourself trapped at that bench until the day you die, with no retirement in sight.
But what if I told you the solution isn’t more hustle? What if I told you the missing piece to your growth isn’t working harder—but working with the right partner?
Meet the Teammate You Never Knew You Needed: The “Sales Jeweler”
I know what you’re thinking. You’ve probably crossed paths with the type—the “Sales Jeweler” who lives for the client meeting and has never held a polishing tool in his life. Annoying, right? But here’s the truth: That kind of jeweler might be exactly what you need.
The biggest opportunity you’re missing is that custom complaints from customers are gold mines. Every frustrated call or email holds the key to improving your operations. The “Sales Jeweler” thrives on those conversations, turning feedback into actions that can revolutionize your workflow.
While you obsess over diamonds and settings, the Sales Jeweler obsesses over customer experience. They know how to make clients feel understood, valued, and happy—even when things go wrong. And happy customers? They come back. They bring friends. And they make your business more profitable.
If you find someone who lives to handle clients, your life gets a whole lot easier. You focus on what you love—creating. They focus on keeping customers happy and fine-tuning operations. Together, you become an unstoppable force.
Enter the Newcomer—A Dark Horse in the Jewelry Game
Here’s another truth bomb: Disruption in the white-collar world is expanding your talent pool. Smart, driven people—former accountants, marketers, and entrepreneurs—are flocking to new industries. These are business-savvy newcomers who aren’t weighed down by the “way things have always been done.”
And here’s the kicker: With AI tools, these newcomers don’t need decades of experience in jewelry to hit the ground running.
They’re lean. They’re adaptable. They think like business owners, not artisans. Give them a talented, experienced jeweler as a co-founder, and they’ll build operational systems you’ve never dreamed of. They’ll use AI-driven insights to streamline production, automate customer service, and expand your reach.
This combination—a veteran with deep manufacturing expertise and a newcomer willing to embrace AI—is a lethal advantage. It’s a partnership that will leave your competitors scrambling to keep up. Together, you’ll scale faster, serve more clients, and build a business you can eventually step away from.
Don’t Just Survive. Scale, Thrive, and Retire—Without the Stress
The days of doing it all yourself are over. Scaling a jewelry business today requires collaboration, operational excellence, and the right technology. You need a co-founder. And if you can’t find one, AI can help you bridge the gap.
That’s where the Free AI CoPilot from Jeweler’s Advantage comes in.
Our AI CoPilot is your first “virtual partner.” It can streamline operations, manage customer communications, and offer data-driven insights to refine your business—without needing coffee breaks or vacation days.
Whether you’re a veteran jeweler looking to free yourself from the bench, a Sales Jeweler ready to improve operations, or a newcomer eager to make waves in the industry, the AI CoPilot will make your life easier and your business smarter.
Don’t wait. Download the Free AI CoPilot today—and finally create a business that works for you, instead of the other way around.
It’s time to stop doing everything yourself. It’s time to scale. Get the AI CoPilot now, and take the first step toward building the jewelry business—and the freedom—you deserve.
What's up guys, this is Jesse, and the topic of today's short talk is the importance of having a co-founder in your jewelry business. So this one is mainly for the private Jewelers, but it's kind of an all-encompassing idea because there's this great quote I like that goes a little something like, "If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together."
And this is very, very real. It's because running a business is very difficult. It can get very complex, and it can be difficult to cover all of the roles that you need to cover when you're trying to scale a business. Now the reason that this is pertinent to a private Jeweler is because these people's skill set—your skill set—has allowed you to pretty much run a business end to end. You can get the customer in, you sell them on a custom project, you have the ability and the skills to take the project back into the workshop, make it yourself, deliver it to the customer, and then you have to do all of the aftercare yourself. That's tough—customer service is tough. So the trick is these businesses bottleneck because of that. Because you have to wear all of the hats, you have to do all of the work, and it's not that it's not impressive that you can do all of these things—because not everybody could do this—but it's also working harder rather than working smarter. And these kinds of businesses will typically bottleneck in the 7 to 10 project range per month.
There are some guys that have been doing this a really long time that'll be looking at me like, "Hey Jesse, I do 20 customs a month as a private Jeweler." And I would say, "Yep, and you're definitely not doing more than 20." You know it. You know that you can bottleneck too, even if you're the very, very best of the private Jewelers. You will bottleneck because you're human. You are still human, and that's perfectly fine. If you're one of the people that can do 20 in a month, that's incredible. That means that you're ready to level up out of that into a scalable jewelry brand.
So how would you do that? Everybody wants to have a collection. A lot of people that are the private Jeweler type, that do a lot of customs, want to know, "Well, how do we get to doing collections? How could you sell on an eCommerce store?" You'd also have to be aware that if you want to get there, you could never do that yourself. Running a full enterprise as one person is not possible. So enter the co-founder.
When you think about having a co-founder, it's the idea that you can spread the work around a little bit and also get different perspectives and different skill sets into the business that are actually going to create the diversity in skill sets that are going to make it capable of growing. So what might come as a surprise to the private Jeweler community and the bench Jeweler community is that your perfect co-founder might be the avatar in the industry that you despise the most—and that would be the sales Jeweler. The person that's pretty much working at the counter of a jewelry store, or maybe they're even an owner of a jewelry business, and they don't even really know how to polish a piece of jewelry, but they call themselves a jeweler. And in the eyes of the customer, they are. So let's keep that in mind. But this person is customer-facing. They can drive revenue. They have an understanding of operations in a jewelry business and the finance of a jewelry business that might slip by the private Jeweler or bench Jeweler. So like, imagine if you have the bench Jeweler that is top-notch and the sales-based Jeweler that has reached a really high level in that approach to the game, and they're working together. Doesn't that sound like a winning combo?
So consider that. But then let me also throw you a curveball because we've been working with a group that we call the Avengers—a kind of test group on a lot of really highly developed AI stuff that we've got going on at Jeweler's Advantage. And then we've had a bunch of private clients that we've tested this stuff out with as well. And there is a unique insight here that is worth knowing. For anybody that is still here, it means I've caught your attention. And that is that the industry newcomer is the dark horse winner in this industry.
We've been noticing that a lot of people that come in as veterans of the game—maybe they've got 10 years of experience in a particular area of the industry, or maybe they're even multi-generational as a private Jeweler—they're the ones that, when they start learning eCommerce and start learning brand development and getting exposed to AI and stuff, it's a little bit of a culture shock because they realize how many gaps there were in their knowledge and in their game, and it gets intimidating. Whereas some of the people who have brought in co-founders that are non-jewelry industry natives, it means that when they come in, they're a blank slate. And they go, "Oh wow, you can use AI to create a jewelry design, you can use AI to write all the product descriptions and help me find supplier items and write all my social media content and do my email chains and help talk to the developers and help talk to the social media people and all this stuff?" They get blown away. There's none of the stigma that's in the traditional industry, where people are kind of afraid of what's new and fighting against it, because the newcomers don't have any of that baggage. There's nothing fighting with their belief system. They just get in the game and start going, and they can make a real difference when paired up with somebody that has actual jewelry industry experience.
It's a really cool combo to see when you see someone that really knows what they're doing in the technical aspects of jewelry manufacturing, and then there's somebody coming in with some new ideas that have some guardrails in place because of AI. And these people are making progress really fast. Really fast. So the point here is, if you are a private Jeweler and you see the writing on the wall of lab diamonds continuing to take over—and that meaning big changes are ahead for the way that you sell your customs, and it might even mean big changes are ahead for if your customs are even profitable—you would need to know that you're going to need to scale into some type of eCommerce environment that can sell in volume in the very near term.
And this might be the time to talk to that friend of yours that just lost their job. They had white-collar work, maybe they're a really smart business person, maybe they're an attorney, maybe they're an engineer. The engineers seem to really take to this. Imagine if you could show them, "Hey, like, you can become a jewelry designer overnight. I've got all this going on. I know how to make this stuff. I've got a workshop. I know how to talk to the customers. And there's no reason why we couldn't get you selling these projects, and we start to build out a brand that we could actually build an exit."
Only a few of you are really going to catch what I just said. But the truth is that it's going to be easier if you have some help. And because of AI, you can bring people in—your talent pool has expanded way beyond what you can imagine. Really, really smart people out there are losing their jobs, and you work in an industry that is anchored to the value of gold. That will be very attractive to smart business people that need something to do.
So if you're a private Jeweler, I would encourage you to think: if you are trying to scale your business, don't try to scale how many custom projects you can do in a month. Think of it as how can I scale these custom projects to a certain number in the month and then reinvest that back into an actual scalable operating model with the right team. So think of who your friends are. Think of who is really smart that may not have been relevant in the jewelry industry before, but now it's a different game. And that could be the ticket that really changes your life and your business. So remember, "If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together."
Go together. I'm happy to go there with you as well. My name is Jesse Korby at Jeweler's Advantage. You can check out our free AI at JewelersAdvantage.com. If you aren't using it as a private jeweler, at least download it and get it to your friend that just lost their job and see if there's some potential there. Have them play with it if you don't want to play with it. It could change your life. It could make you a lot of money in the long run. So this is Jesse at Jeweler's Advantage, and we will see you in the next one.