what's up guys my name is Jesse Korby and I'm the creative director and co-founder here at Jewelers advantage and there have been many requests to share where Jeweler's Advantage came from and in this video I'm going to share the wild roller coaster ride that brought us into existence so the title of this video is impressario one man's Journey from recording studio to the Diamond District to AI powered creative director this is largely my story in how the twists and turns of Life led to me joining the ranks of the jewelry industry and then the amazing people that I've met along the way and how this ultimately culminated into creating an AI solution for the jewelry industry now it would be impossible for me to tell this story without mentioning somebody that really elevated me along the way here that was Max agajan at trackx NC we'll get more into what I learned from Max and how I collaborated with Max and how I ended up in a video talking about $275,000 APS with Max as well as how Max at trackx andyc became the first Jeweler to sell an AI jewelry piece back in 2020 3 years before the AI Revolution officially kicked off so we're going to get there but we have to start at the beginning in order to get there so where did everything begin for me I went to school at Florida State University where I studied classical jazz World music and music therapy while minoring in Psychology so I am an artist just like you all I just started out in music first while I was in school I began a daily practice in Transcendental Meditation and it really kicked off a lot of inter in things in my life I'm a firm believer in the Law of Attraction you're going to see throughout this story how amazing things just kind of found their way into my life because of that and that started with my journey in music so I was in a band you can see here that I I used to be kind of a wild guy and not wear a lot of clothes but essentially right out of school I moved to Nashville and I had rock radio play on mainstream radio by the time I was 25 years old so this got the attention of some people and I ended up meeting some amazing mentors so the three guys that probably shaped me the most in my 20s were Martin frona Brett Manning and Malcolm Springer Martin is a great entertainment attorney in the music industry I can't tell you who he represents because that's kind of a liability thing but the frona entertainment law firm in Jackson Mississippi has represented major Grammy winners professional athletes people in television and film it's an amazing law firm and I of course learned a ton from Marty he was very very patient with me I was kind of a young enthusiastic guy but he actually really knew how the business worked and from a legal perspective really knew how it worked so I can't thank Marty enough I learned a ton from him during that time I also met Brett Manning who's a master vocal coach in Nashville he's essentially the vocal coach to the stars and uh great practitioner of jiujitsu as you can tell from his photo you don't want to mess with Brett he'll he'll break your arm but uh Brett taught people like Taylor Swift Miley Cyrus Keith Urban Leona Lewis and if you ask Brett during the time that I was training with him he'll tell you that I was among the top five male students that he had at that time and he was also a great mentor to me just on a personal level so I learned a ton about of course the creative side of singing in the music business and then also just how to kind of conduct myself with some decorum so can't thank Brett enough for that and then Malcolm Springer I'll get more into Malcolm later because he played a even bigger role in a later chapter but Malcolm is kind of a Mad genius music producer songwriter engineer and he's kind of a savant and a very interesting guy and I'll get more into what I learned from Malcolm but these guys really shaped me during my experience in the music business eventually the band broke up as bands are known to do but it led to me transitioning into Studio work so here I am at House of Blues Studios I learned audio engineering and music production at a top five studio in Nashville which is called House of Blues it was later acquired by Universal music group so I don't believe it's called House of Blues anymore but this was actually my first good AI image back in 2016 I had started did experimenting with photo editing solutions for AI so this was interesting because I thought I was there to learn music production but the seed for jeweler's Advantage AI was actually planted back at House of Blues back in 2016 I started turning photos into AI oil paintings first so you can see here that I had kind of a blurry phone photo for the technology of the time and I was trying to make the content look better and I would use AI to do that so during my time at House of Blues Malcolm Springer was actually my studio partner we we shared a small Studio on the campus and I learned a ton about sound and electrical engineering from malcol so that's the guy on the right here in front of that board a lot of what I later came to understand through digital technology like online Solutions and Ai and even the way Departments of a business could work together are largely informed by the way the different pieces of equipment connect together to create a signal path in a studio everything has to connect as part of a system so I would Shadow Malcolm every day and watch him do stuff like this so if you've ever heard the song Hero from Spiderman that was one of his credits he's got the Platinum plaque on the wall for that one also Shine Down by Collective Soul and a bunch of Matchbox 20 Isaac Hayes and a whole bunch of country artists pop artists you name it Malcolm has done it in terms of genre at one point he toured with Kid Rock and played Woodstock 99 and he even had an engineering credit with Michael Jackson as well as a crazy Willie Nelson story that I can't tell but yeah Malcolm was a producer and engineer version of a rock star lots of famous artists came through the studio at the time because it was a big studio in Nashville which was great experience later on for jewelry because it made me more comfortable around around the very top level of VIP that you can imagine and it also taught me that famous people are just like regular people except weirder so some of the people that came through at this time Miley Cyrus came through the studio aichi before he passed away came through and a bunch of artists that were signed to Shady aftermath that's M&M's label I got to meet a couple of those guys bear in mind I was more of a sit there be quiet get the coffee kind of guy but I got to just learn how to conduct myself and how things work in this environment now the most important recording client that came through for me in terms of my own transformation was a guy named Dane Maxwell This is a guy that was a tech entrepreneur and he just wanted to try something new and he always had a dream of getting into music and then Brett Manning introduced me to him at his Studio one day it was just kind of like a serendipitous Crossing of paths that day and Dane and I went and got tacos and started talking about music and I ended up recording him and I I didn't even really know what he had done but he just kept saying really smart things so Dane was really a gift from God because he really really open my eyes to the potential of what an online business can create in your life and almost everything he said at that time was like a hidden lesson for me and I really really listened to to Dane as we worked on music as you can see in this image we're at House of Blues doing some recording so one of the best pointers Dane gave me was that the customer decides what your product is and he also stressed that I needed to learn to truly appreciate sales which at that point I had never really done but I really really got into sales later so he referred me to one of his students danne actually taught a famous entrepreneur in his own right this guy named Sam ens who has an entry-level program for aspiring entrepreneurs at consulting.com so Dane basically has taught some of the best entrepreneur rurs in the world and I got to learn from him without even realizing who I was learning from at the time so if you're curious and you want to be able to get inside danne's mind a little bit danne's got an awesome book called start from zero that really really made an impact on me and my own approach as an entrepreneur years down the line when the book came out can't recommend this book enough it's incredible so needless to say Nashville Studio life was from start to finish it was complet completely transformative in my life I didn't realize it at the time but by 2017 Ai and Consulting were already forming foundations in my mind to pave the way for what I'd be working on today with Jeweler's Advantage so at this point some crazy transitions happened in my life but you can see on the left that was my first day at the studio playing guitar both of these photos are actually with Malcolm because that drone in the left hand photo is Malcolm flying a drone we like to drones at the studio and it was kind of this combination of technology and music and Consciousness at the studio there we are on my last day on the right you can see how worn out I was I was actually showering with a hose in the backyard of the studio and sleeping on the floor and eating peanut butter sandwiches in order to go get this experience so it was super super humbling but the biggest thing I took away is that it's an art and a science to record music and to produce artists so Malcolm was a master at getting performances out of people like he could dictate their emotions and their psychology using his language in a particular way that would pull magical performances out of his artists and it was incredible to watch and that was something that was probably the biggest takeaway that I learned from Malcolm that would play a big big role for me later on when I started training salespeople I treated it like I was producing a record so at this point though some crazy transitions did cause some upheaval in my life and transplanted me out of the music business in Nashville and created a blank slate for me in New York and the way that that started to come about was that I had an opportunity to go to China to talk about the music business because of my affiliation at the time with House of Blues Studios so House of Blues led to an opportunity for me to speak on panels and China about the development of products and experiences related to entertainment and essentially I was flown out by their government put up in five-star hotels and I'd put on my suit and make presentations to Chinese billionaires so you can see me here in this kind of Village thing that they brought us to to see I got to meet the pandas and then on the right here I have some prominent filmmaker or some type of entertainment figure in Chang duu we're enjoying some whiskey so there was a language barrier but me and this gentleman connected over some whiskey and then in the back right I just wanted to give some credit to Charles Lee who put these trips together Charles was another great mentor of mine and opened the door for me to have some absolutely amazing experiences in China getting to get exposure to their culture and be able to speak at a really high level to people that make decisions of how cities are built in China now there were actually two trips to China and I'm trying to simplify it down because it was really really complicated how this all happened but my second trip to China was basically my own version of a Catch Me If You Can film if you've seen Catch Me If You Can I had $50 in my pocket in these pictures so here I am at some kind of event we're making big presentations the gentleman on my left is some type of executive and entertainment in China I have $50 so I apologize for the hair I was cutting my own hair and and that's what I looked like that day but if you look to the right I always love this picture because it's an incredible part of the story on the left we have the music supervisor for The Little Mermaid that's a Disney executive on the right with the gentleman with the gray suit that's a a guy named Bob who created the Budweiser frogs with his Ad Agency and then the guy to my left is my friend Jonathan dear who's a producer on Broadway and during this trip he was telling us about this show they were putting together and how it was going to incorporate Greek mythology and it was a love story of some kind and it was a harrowing tale and then we're all sitting there going oh wow that sounds so interesting and cool and then it turned out to be Hades town and W A Tony so my friend Jonathan there I got to meet him before this happened and go on this great trip with him and then congratulations to Jonathan he's a Tony winner at that time I was still growing and I still made great presentations at this thing talking about Studio work and how they could potentially develop this part of their economy but at the same time I had $50 in my pocket and no one knew and luckily I got back um if something had gone wrong none of you would have ever seen me again but luckily I stayed focused and behaved myself so Upon returning to New York needless to say I had to make money fast and I remembered what danne had said about sales while walking past a car dealership in the Bronx so I really had to make some money so first I sold most of my music equipment to make rent and I walked into this dealership in the Bronx where I met a guy named Freddy who was Notorious in New York's Car Sales scene they called him the Butcher of Bay Ridge and he took me under his wing it was uh it was not lost on me that this was very much like Gangs of New York but with a car lot and he was the Butcher and Fred is still the best closer that I've ever seen in my life to date and with all due respect to Fred he told me this this is a guy that didn't finish high school but what I observed was that he would literally hypnotize prospects into giving them their credit card and driver's license so that he would have collateral to run their credit and close same day on a car that they had no intention of buying and he would just stare into their eyes and they would give him money it was nuts and this is why they called him the butcher he would just hard close people and it was amazing to watch I had to respect it I personally didn't resonate with that type of sale but I had to respect it because it made the dealership owners very successful and New York Car Sales is not a place where you stay soft Fred had to be like that so there were a lot of other colorful characters I met during this time Beyond Freddy a lot of the guys in the industry overall in New York as far as Automotive goes had either done time in the prison system or had some type of career criminal experience but I don't recall hearing or saying anything of Interest so don't ask me I'm just telling you that these are the kinds of guys that at the surface level you'd probably be pretty intimidated by if you met him but I also learned that people are really complex so it was a lesson in the dark and Light Side of sales because basically the hardest guys that you can imagine took me under their wing and toughened me up a little bit and made sure I knew how everything worked and then they also wanted me to be successful they wanted me to have a good life and in order to do that I was going to have to get the steps of an automotive sale down because if there's anything that a car dealership has systemized it's a solid sales process and it was really tough but I remember like it was yesterday that one day everything just clicked and I realized what I was there to learn so I looked out the window one time I was sitting at my desk and I looked out the window at the intersection that you can see in the back behind the Rubicon and all of the cars were driving in slow motion that's the only way I can describe it and all I could see was a bunch of credit scores down payments and monthly pay payments and then I looked around and I realized that I was a part of a machine the entire dealership was a system designed to assess the customer's personal information and put cars on the road and I all of a sudden in 30 seconds downloaded this and and got it I just got car sales all of a sudden that's the only way I can describe it so soon after this a transformation occurred and I became number two in sales and it was within 90 days days of me even being at that dealership and I was behind only a guy that had been selling cars for 25 years and he was so stressed that month but the trial by fire aspect of the job got me up to speed on sales really really quick and then the universe kind of just pulled me out of that dealership there were two big things that happened that made me realized it was my end of my journey at the car dealership in the Bronx the first thing that happened was one of the managers tried to get me to deliver a car with a flat tire to a priest I didn't do that and another manager that literally had Mr closer as his license plate demanded that I close a young guy who straight up told us that he was going to be living out of the car and I dug in my heels on the priest but I ended up closing the kid on a deposit for the car he couldn't actually afford and I did it in under 15 minutes and I I really had to take a look at myself after that because it made me realize that that wasn't really who I wanted to be and I quit the next day the kid's credit was eventually declined anyway so he got his money back he didn't live out of the car in case anyone is wondering so Fred was super bummed that I quit because he only found out after these were other managers that those situations happened with but I did hold on to the hypnosis thing for later on and it actually made a huge difference for jewelry phone sales down the line I just adapted it to make it align with the customer's true desire a bit more because you have no other choice in jewelry but we'll get to that so do you see how this is coming together everything along the way has kind of built Jeweler's Advantage without me realizing that this was happening so by now it's 2018 and I start doing digital marketing gigs because I was an idiot who just quit my job or not an idiot because my soul is still alive live but I digress I had learned enough from the resources that Dane had shared with me and had been studying in my free time away from the dealership because I knew I'd have to leave eventually so I really did find that the way everything connected in an online business was very similar to the way that the studio equipment worked in regards to websites domains software and stuff like that this chapter was really not glamorous and it was pretty lonely hence why I'm just like quiet I'm working most of the time it was just me and a computer or a WhatsApp called the India but it was a necessary stretch of learning how to project my mind up into the internet and solve problems I also joined a bunch of entrepreneur communities at this time and everybody was saying to Niche down because I wasn't focused enough to build a real service so my clients at this point they were a real range it could have been a junk removal service or a nonprofit organization or a street wear fashion brand or an indie record label or family jewelry stores in forom or the Bronx or a bakery or something like that and it was really small Time stuff I I was really learning and just trying to get off the ground but it was enough to get by and work harder than any normal person just in order to break even at the end of the month and at this point my entrepreneur friends online were all getting into growth systems growth systems this went beyond just being a digital marketing expert and Incorporated all the Departments including value creation Marketing sales value delivery and finance and making it a holistic Consulting engagement and this is what my friends were getting into and I was learning about so I knew I was going to need to move in this direction because my reference point was that car dealerships were systems and someone must have helped them to establish these systems for the first time so I knew that this was the future of what I wanted to work on and I was just going to have to get there so by early 2019 I got a break that would help me accomplish this and answer a lot of the questions of where my future was headed before I continue the story I'm going to jump right into giving props to Max aajan who founded trackx NYC as an eBay store back in 2006 or so and he grew it into a multi-million dollar operation on 47th Street in New York and basically bootstrapped it so here I am in a video with Max I'm going to leave the audio off but he's one of the very first people to sell Fine Jewelry online successfully and unlike other celebrity Jewelers in the hipop niche he built up his Fame first through a successful business in the back end rather than trying to do that after aligning with celebrities which doesn't work so he made Moves that resulted in an actual business which the majority of celebrity Jewelers don't have in any style segment especially hip-hop and I've seen a few at this point so max is a polarizing guy in our industry but my experience with him is that he he really elevated me and he gave me a lot of opportunities to experiment with new ideas so I just wanted to take a second to give credit to the guy because he does have a particular way of getting attention in the market which is polarizing but I can tell you for sure that this dude cares about his staff and his customers and building a great business so he's a good-hearted dude and if you want to see an awesome movie that captures the essence of New York's Diamond District Faithfully I recommend the Colt classic uncut gems where you can see Max he has a cameo roll um that's really pretty cool so anyway here's how I ended up in that video talking about $275,000 Diamond APS with Max in the Diamond District so the way I ended up in the tracks office was a saga in itself but the short of it is I ended up on the phone with the general manager at the time and basically I made a deal with the GM to see what kind of difference I could make with their sales and service team so I essentially told him Point Blank hey I've got a business and I run off in LLC I'm not going to be like a normal employee this was kind of a gamble in my head but here's how I think I can help you with sales and service and remember I'm thinking growth system at this point so the relationship I wanted to have began to take shape from day one but I would have to phase into it because Trax makes you earn it so Traxx had kind of a Wolf of Wall Street vibe in the office on the left here this is me holding a Jesus Piece within the first hour of me being in there and this was really interesting it was kind of a cosmic experience because I'm was sitting there getting my bearings on what was even happening around me the phones were ringing off the hook and and a Jewish kid hands me a diamond Jesus piece and tells me this is what we sell here and I felt like there was just something kind of Celestine about that experience and bear in mind I have to give you a little of my background I've read the Bible I've read the Quran I've studied the cabala I've read the babag I've read the da of Ching various Buddhist scriptures I'm a student of all religion and of course we Champion that and all belief systems at Jeweler's Advantage so from my reference point it was just okay something profound just landed in my hand that that's kind of how I took that so in any case phones were ringing off the hook and at that point I knew enough about Ecom jewelry that this was extremely rare especially for like a non major major brand so I saw a huge opportunity to take the systems I had already identified from working in car sales and online business and then be able to adapt them somehow into what I was seeing so the company was running a substantial ad budget which obviously didn't hurt and they also had built up a great social media presence and traffic and a well-developed front and back end of their e-commerce store and live chat and phone support So it was obvious to me that I was going to make some kind of industry shaping Discovery if I could just get exposure to something this unique and it wasn't going to just be handed to me though I was going to have to put in the work so overall like I said tracks really makes you earn it so I dialed back all of my other agency work and I was thinking I'll give this 6 months and I came in with the understanding with the GM that I'd be expecting a senior management position if I could perform that was just kind of what was said so why would I do this though why would I take a step back from my own business and risk getting sucked into a normal employee role if I didn't progress and I wasn't successful well the reason for that was Traxx was essentially a unicorn BN in the middle of a once in the history of the company type growth phase they were transforming from a boutique to prominent brand in hipop that could potentially go on and become a legitimate Global brand not everyone could do that but it was looking like that was going to happen so if you look at the image in my right hand these were links from a rapper named tekashi 69 that there was a bit of controversy between tekashi 69 and pretty much everybody at that point including the Traxx NYC brand and this was something that was bringing in a lot of traffic and eyeballs to the business so it was creating growing paint it was creating operational bottlenecks because there was all kinds of new attention from this this bubbling over of a celebrity kind of event that was bringing in a lot of attention and getting eyes on the brand that had already sold to VH1 stars on Love & Hip Hop they had sold to Safari they had sold the cardi B and then because of kind of the nature of human beings to gravitate towards something polarizing it created this like perfect storm that the company just started to explode so there were a lot of problems to solve in the business meanwhile I'm sitting on a developing system of sorts it was nowhere near anything that was useful for jewelry at that time but I had already had the management materials from the Bronx car dealership that I thought I could adapt into an Ecom jewelry model if I had the right lab to experiment in what this led to was what we later recognized in Jeweler's Advantage as my test phase for sales so after about a month of learning the unique nature of tracks myc I began training new sales hires to test a script that I had already started adapting from Automotive to teach myself jewelry phone sales on an accelerated timetable I needed to kind of train myself first so there were some books on jewelry sales but the tracks customers were also kind of aggressive at times and I needed to create something new for this environment that I was in so I combined principles of n LP which is neurolinguistic programming I'll get into that later hypnosis and hostage negotiation but with a Wolf of Wall Street esque straight line type of sale inspired by Jordan Belfort's material so go check out Jordan bfor if you want to know what the straight line stuff is all about I kind of mutated it with NLP hypnosis and hostage negotiation for jewelry and it had to work within the limitations of phone sales and avoid hard closing and remain jewelry specific for the complex needs of jewelry while remaining easy enough for somebody with no industry experience to learn so this took a long time to put together but in short I worked it out face to face with new hires and then I'd remember everything that went on that day and then go home and make sure it was documented into a master sales script that I could hold on to iterate learn from and so on so in relatively short order I dialed in that process so that I could ramp new sales reps to a 40K to 60k month inside of their first month and I was also really dialed into how to reverse onear reviews into a five-star review and save orders from refund that's actually where a lot of money can be made in a business at this scale so over thousands and thousands and thousands of calls I came to appreciate that every jewelry sale is essentially the same but all of them had some type of little micro nuance that made them unique there was a Black Swan in almost every customer interaction so over time I got more access to Max because he's pretty quick to spot who provides value in his business I had to work up to this and that's what led to me appearing in this video with almost half a million views I performed and I'm not the only one he's done this with if you tune into their social media he's always enabling his staff and promoting his staff but I I think what made me unique in this situation why I have the thought bubble here is that I'm probably the only one who was thinking about systems while selling the jewelry just because that's how I'm wired I'm I'm a systems thinker and that's just kind of how I roll so this really created a shift in energy for me you can even see the transformation it's kind of wild so I eventually had the same slow motion 30 second download experience that I had at the car dealership and just started showing up to the tracks off off a completely different person and the GM must have felt the shift because he made good on our earlier agreement and I was given a Senior Management role that was structured so that I'd basically be a business within the walls of tracks and I was so proud of my accomplishment that I kept the checks as vision board material to always remember what I could do that was like a a real level up and elevation for me in any case I didn't get to stay proud of this accomplishment for long this was q1 of 2020 and we started hearing about people getting sick in China we all know what happened so I just wanted to give credit once more that from a leadership perspective Max aced Co and he had the company taking precautions for about 30 days leading up to the first reported case in New York so all the senior managers we all had our head in the game and the company ended up making truckloads of cash during the pandemic because of a well-coordinated team effort and my part in that success would end up requiring me to Plum the depths of my memories at both the recording studio and the car dealership to make sure that I could hold on to this opportunity and and keep contributing and keep being a part of the experience so preco much of the sales success for a company like Trax or others in the Diamond District depended on landline phones in the office so there were legitimate conversations being had at the top about a worst case scenario that is the company going bankrupt because if we couldn't figure out the phones how was anybody supposed to work remote so I had my own little solo adventure story to help tracks in this regard it was March 15th it was a Sunday that the city legally mandated the shutdown which we all saw coming but we didn't know for sure when would land and all of a sudden we just got the notification so the company phones were pretty much entirely my responsibility at this point so on Monday I had to put on my Breaking Bad gear as I call it in any case I had to come in from Myrtle to Times Square make my way to the Diamond District and then just stare at that phone in the middle for hours trying to just figure out how do we make that go to cell phones and by Tuesday we were beaming the company phone lines out to service employees smartphones who were now learning remote work for the very first time remember that and by Wednesday we had a Google form up as some kind of mcgyver solution to have some line of communication between the company and customers it wasn't perfect but it basically made it so that we could keep a direct line of communication with the people that were spending money so the system was far from perfect but for all intents and purposes audio engineering had allowed me to figure out how to help track to transplant its sales system from an Ecom store into a remote environment for the first time and that was my contribution but keeping the company afloat after that took literally everybody and it was like the ultimate team effort so I'm like really proud of everybody that I got to meet and work with at that time there was a real Bond created because it was like we were doing impossible things every day and and that was my impossible thing but like everybody was doing impossible things during Co at this company so you know hats off to everybody that they they know they know what they were a part of so at this point Max would literally drive from burrow to burrow putting people in hazmat suits in order to get around the shutdown order and cover production and shipping to keep everything afloat and then from a staff standpoint the leadership had to keep everyone sane because they're locked in their little apartments and then feel like they were going to be safe and be able to cover their bills so at this point this was like me learning how do I even approach this how do I even think about remote work with a jewelry business the the remote work aspect really was a challenge and I had to create some visual aids just to make it so that I could make sense what was going on because you couldn't see the office you couldn't see the people you were just getting text messages and you'd have to visualize what would be happening operationally if it was in a physical space right so at this point I developed what I would go on to call my treasure map and the staff would be asking like how are you staying organized like how are you doing this and I'd say don't worry I have my treasure map to jewelry Nirvana and they'd be like okay Jesse's just goofing around being weird but I was serious like this is what I was looking at and I'd meditate and create something like this to help me visualize what was coming about and what was going to be necessary just for me doing my daily work it was really starting out as a method of solving my own problem we'll get more into what this treasure map really means later on but it was basically an operating model for a mature jewelry business everybody's running this model is what I later discovered but moving on I can't tell the next part of the story without a shout out to babay the jeweler I know him as Ivan who you can find regularly walking 47th Street and on the district which is a YouTube show that Traxx uses to teach people about the industry so Ivan is in charge of all the project management for their Customs department and during this time I got pretty pretty much cart blanch with trax's customs in order to solve any urgent customer service issue basically the rule was don't lose money and make the customer happy and make product because a lot of the international suppliers were getting knocked sideways and the supply chain was basically ruined for months in the Diamond District anybody who is in New York knows that it was a major major headache so I got to collaborate a lot with Ivan on these things really just to try to solve problems and product in people's hands and it ended up teaching me something that I didn't expect to learn it ended up being a surprise product development training and I got to help design Fine Jewelry by taking customer feedback so these were pieces that customers were going to get from suppliers but I would need to ask them what they liked about the piece and get an idea of why they were buying it so that we could understand the needs of the project since now it was being produced in house so the process that we would do at that point is we would have to replace the supplier item but you would would never be able to get the exact same specs anyway so we would have to sell the customer on kind of an upgrade in order to make it feel like a good idea feel like a win for them and then we would produce the piece and get it in their hands and then still get a five-star review on orders that were six or eight weeks behind and we would get the customer to be happy about that so it shouldn't have been possible but it was pretty much like the master level in custom jewelry and of course I got to learn a lot from in at that point and here's a project that I did this was a full custom this was something that was a nightmare project that nearly killed me it was a rose gold octagon sapphire ring that eventually became a a top seller for the tracks NYC websit it's just a cool piece wanted to highlight it here and and I learned a lot on it it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows though we had to at times find a way to turn like a code red BBB complaint into a five-star review some how by nailing the design the quality control and the service aspects of the order and put out the fire and put it in the customers's hands but the silver lining of that is once we would come out on the other side of course you'd get a five-star review and you'd have a great product and you would know that you had a product that customers really truly wanted to buy so that's where the term product Market fit comes in it's if they're willing to pay money for the product and there's a clear demand for the product so I learned a very comprehensive view of product development at this point there are a lot of Custom Jewelers who are more advanced than me in making crazy expensive one-offs but I will say this I do consider myself at this point to be top 1% in the industry for factory product development and this experience really did plant the seed for that so much like my previous experience with trying to dial in a digital agency this chapter was a blur it was a lot of chop dropping wood and carrying water day in and day out but before the wind would blow my life in a New Direction I'd had kind of a climax moment of realizing how AI was going to eventually make a big big impact on this industry so one day we had a lemonade order that needed to be saved for our custom client it was an $1,000 photo pendant that had somehow fallen through the cracks which sounds crazy but at a store of that volume it can happen and we had to make it better somehow we had to solve the problem so the client had provided a photo of some tiger she wanted on the photo pendant but the image wasn't really good enough that's the image on the left here so what I did was I used what I learned about AI photo editing that was something I'd been doing since back in 2016 at House of Blue Studios but I had never made any money or even generated any kind of like real commercial value with this skill it was just like a fun little hobby at that point but the piece ended up looking so so good that Max did a feature on Instagram of the item and the company went on to make a lot of money off of photo pendants as an entrylevel semic custom type product so again this is 2020 3 years before the AI Revolution would begin showing up in any meaningful way in any industry let alone the jewelry industry and trackx NYC is most likely the first Jeweler to ever use AI to produce a project let alone one that sold for that much so I know that soldja boy likes to be the first rapper in hip-hop to ever do something but I think Max might have beat you to the punch soldja boy I'm just having some fun here I don't want any beef with soldja boy but that was kind of funny to me that Max basically made history with this at trackx NYC and then the customer Brenda probably has a collector's item now and I just thought that was interesting because Max generally speaks about the situ situations where jewelry can become an investment because it's not always an investment but there are certain stars that can align and if you can find a way to get the piece to jump the Gap into the collector item asset class it can be an investment so I would say that Brenda you know who you are you have this piece and you probably have a collector's item now so congrats now if we take a step back and think about this purely from like a business mechanics and operations perspective this made me realize something pretty profound because I was looking at my treasure map and I was trying to figure out what is actually really happening here there's something special about this but I don't know what it is yet I had used a system diagram to coordinate the efforts of multiple departments from hundreds of miles away from New York at this point I had gotten away from Brooklyn I was in a home office in DC and I was somehow able to coordinate the production of a piece of jewelry incorporating artificial intelligence I knew that was part of the equation and I was watching the piece be promoted on video by a celebrity jeweler it was very strange to be in the driver's seat for me at that point so I knew there was something here and I took some inventory of what had come together and I now saw the connection between audio recording and how the different software tools of an e-commerce store work together and I had used the management Frameworks from the car dealership to recreate things like sales scripts that would help me learn the jewelry industry and teach it to others and I have my treasure map and a few other diagrams that help me visualize the operations of a large scale jewelry business and manage different departments from hundreds of miles away somehow and I had done my time in the trenches with literal thousands of jewelry orders and learned all the micro nuances needed for different style segments and price points and customer personality types and so on so everything that I had heard about growth system systems from my entrepreneur friends had just manifested over time and was sitting in my lap my head had been down for so long that once I actually looked up I realized life itself had brought the product I had dreamed of creating to fruition in a very raw form it was just like the blueprint was like sitting in my lap by now it's summer of 2020 and my social life like many of you who were trapped behind closed doors was all online and my social life had become the entrepreneur communities that I joined back during my early learnings in online business and one of my friends in one of these groups was Richard McCarthy Rich had an interesting story because he had gotten his start working in it in Dubai back when Dubai was still a very early social and financial experiment in the Middle East but this guy had really been around the block and done some amazing thing so he had legitimate Fortune 500 management consulting experience at the very top level of the corporate world and had worked with companies like BMC Software Bank of America Airbus Volvo and Novartis and Rich also wasn't only a corporate guy it also helped a drone based platform that helped construction companies basically he helped them form strategic Partnerships and then eventually exit to a very very well-known Tech conglomerate so long story short Richard and I were just talking casually on a phone call one day and I showed him some of my systems to demonstrate how he could approach solving a problem with one of his Consulting clients he was just I forget even what it was but it was like something that I thought was a systematic issue and thus began what I call Consulting cross training he was pretty quick to suggest that we partner up on some Consulting work and that led to me wrapping up my engagement with tra and I stepped away from jewelry alt together for like the next few months we worked on clients and pharmaceuticals digital marketing Dentistry food manufacturing software development and corporate leadership these engagements were like another test phase because we were working with open AI technology as early as 2020 gpt3 was used in a lot of our copyrighting tools and AI was already running at Full Tilt for a lot of the data management tools so basically we saw AI coming from years away and we knew something was going to happen with AI and jewelry we just didn't know what it was exactly yet I had a bunch of secret sauce for a system that I knew could be organized somehow and Richard had all of his management consulting Frameworks that were legitimate systems in his own right so it was clear that he and I both had the raw materials needed to pull our resources and create something this industry had never seen before we knew we were going to do something absolutely revolutionary that was clear from like day one but we just didn't know what it was yet but there was a vision so the initial vision for jeweler's Advantage was to provide Boutique growth Consulting and brand development for a jewelry business transitioning to the digital age we knew that the first few years would be like a test phase again in its own right so the original done with you Consulting was that myself and Richard would act as an executive team entering the business to establish a strategy and system to develop the brand across five key areas so in the beginning we did Manual Outreach into DMS on Instagram to build relationships and see who needed our help it was like Guerilla Warfare it was really Hands-On it was kind of tough so we knew that onetoone Consulting wasn't the long-term plan it was just way too much labor but it was necessary to really dig into the problems face Toof face that jewelry businesses have because you all are so different despite having the same basic goal of selling jewelry to customers so some clients needed a funnel to sell their first engagement rings as a private Jeweler that's very popular this was a large chunk of our project pie chart so we really got a lot of exposure to calendar funnels for Customs a good amount just wanted a foundation strategy to figure out how to make their brand more unique stand out from other Jewelers so that's more like creative director type work with brand and product strategy some engagements were as simple as give me training materials to salespeople and we would sell them that some were help us make organized social media content you saw one of the assets I used for that sometimes a key team member like an accountant would quit and we'd need to develop a way to get a normal accountant up to speed for jewelry some clients needed a Shopify store that's a whole production some clients needed to get clear on what tool stack they were going to use to go digital because many Jewelers don't really get into technology some just wanted help with Facebook and Google ads and a handful have been super ambitious and wanted to do a full end to end brand launch across all departments so we've even partnered with a few stores on an equity position in some pretty Niche style segments that have a low return rate that have kind of quietly been building a portfolio in the background for us so all of these Nuance situations were spread across 168 engagements and it made it so that we got a really wide reference point and we learned to solve basically every problem that a jewelry business can potentially face because we got so many looks at different people different businesses and so on and that more or less built our framework so if you made it this far you're going to want to really pay attention because this is going to be like a rapid fire master class that should help you immediately start getting Clarity on the obstacles that you may need to overcome in your own business either now or in the future so we're going to talk about addressing your challenges and I'm going to make this pretty comprehensive and I will also say that you are 100% guaranteed to have some of these problems but don't worry we do have the solutions they are programmed into the AI that is is probably the reason that you're here so if anything is triggering don't worry there is a solution for that so let's get into them so in product design and creation these are the top problems that people face you might have a lack of innovation and originality so that's difficulty in creating unique Innovative designs that stand out in a competitive market you can think of this as being commoditized like you're just the one competing with five other people to sell a Cuban chain hence why I've used that image you may have inefficient production processes so you could struggle with outdated processes that lead to higher costs or longer production times you might have material sourcing challenges maybe if you're new you don't have a ton of vendors you might have trouble adapting to market trends so industry Trends are always huge in jck and stuff like that you might have difficulty actually making that actionable and responding to the changing customer taste they decide what happens in the market and then finally incorporating technology you may have challenges in incorporating things like 3D printing or even software or anything like that that tends to be a common struggle for many people in the jewelry space in marketing you might have trouble with brand differentiation so I bring up a common joke of somebody that is a completely commoditized business might also commoditize their marketing in addition to the product and that's like Dave's diamond Depot of Dallas where there's no magic in the brand it's just complete utility I've got the diamonds you want I'm going to sell them to you for the cheapest I can that's not a great strategy so you might have difficulty finding an alternative to this and establishing a unique brand identity that resonates with a specific audience you may have inefficient online presence you may have poor customer acquisition and retention so that basically just means you have a lack of a funnel you may be poorly utilizing data analytics so the numbers aren't telling a story for how you're making marketing decisions and you might just have a limited budget and resources so there's constraints in money and that's making it tough for you to Market and that's a legitimate problem on the sales and service side maybe the guy yelling on the phone in the image is your customer maybe it's your salesperson either way that would be a problem so customer experience management basically just shaping a world for your customer to live in and actionably close sales and get product in their hands that can be a challenge for a lot of people we want effective sales training sometimes adapting to anti- fraud can be tough especially when the fraud bad actor knows how to get around the system through manipulating human behavior inventory management is another data sided thing that can affect your sales process and then post purchase service and support what happens after you close you're not actually closed in your sale until the customer likes the product and says they're keeping it with production and operations if you want to know if you've got a problem in your operations all you need to have happen is have a small piece like this with a pave set Diamond lose a stone that will expose some kind of problem in your operations somewhere so that's an ocean but you need to be able to identify and diagnose operational in efficiencies in the business and if you don't solve that you won't scale and then finally we got Finance if this image is triggering you probably need help with Finance cuz money shouldn't make you scared but some people have trouble with cash flow management some people have trouble with their pricing strategy for their product and how that affects cost some people might have trouble accessing funding and using debt an effective way if they want to go there that comes down to Financial planning and Analysis of the business which can be another problem and then of course just the regular nuts and bolts of tax and Regulatory Compliance can be confusing to people and you need an answer there so again I will say that out of everything I just said you are 100% guaranteed to have some problem in one of those areas like any business you probably have a mix of strengths and weaknesses in all of these areas the biggest problem of all is if you try to solve any one of these problems without a system if you do that you're 100% guaranteed to start playing whack-a-mole you'll think you've solved a problem in one area but you will have created another problem that you can't see yet in a different area and this is the number one reason why jewelry businesses have trouble growing period it's not just about getting traffic it's not just about throwing people and staff at the problem it's not about getting some kind of major press or a celebrity endorsement things are cool but they're not going to help you scale and solve the problem in and of themselves you have to solve your business problems holistically otherwise you will run around in circles for 10 years before you finally get something to work that isn't even fully optimized yet so that's all well and good to say all this but the question is how do we solve these problems now everything I'm about to show you is how we solve these problems at Jeweler's advant vage and some of it might seem overwhelming but this is your free Consulting today that if you stick around this is going to change your business and the beauty of this is even if it seems overwhelming at first all of the following is included in our AI co-pilot so you can have a consultant in your pocket helping you with this process and getting up to speed so let's get into what that would look like again we got to talk about your business from a high level so every jewelry business has five key pillars that's product marketing sales and service operations and finance all of these are connected when building a brand because a brand isn't a logo it's the way that you make people feel and the way that you make people feel is going to be dictated by how well you are doing in these five key pillars period full stop so what we did is we've developed a system and the processes to combine an Ecom store with a physical store if you have one digital agencies and so-called brand experts can't help you here because they don't know the key sticking points for jewelry which is super nuanced and complicated as you know so we streamlined everything into a systemized and elegant model that is much like the idea of what made McDonald successful behind the counter but applied to luxury and jewelry with both physical and digital retail that's aligned with the best practices of the luxury industry at large so without this you don't have a business but our AI will help you stay organized here a lot of people ask us how they can avoid racing to the bottom on price or how you can maintain High pricing to have some type of margin and profitability in the business well this is your single point of Truth to solve that problem so if you don't don't want to be at the bottom of the market screenshot this right now so your customer is going to behave differently depending on what Market segment you are in so that's low-end Middle Market and high-end customers and they pay different prices but want different things for example a low-end customer wants speed but a high-end customer wants it done right right so you have to understand how to communicate with a perfect customer I'm I'm going to emphasize communicate in every sense of the word Within These segments if you want to avoid racing to the bottom on price now the market segments are split up into pricing tiers so every one of those little cells at lowend there's three little cells at Middle Market there's three and highend there's three there are clear delineations Within These segments for 0 to 1,000 1,000 to 7500 and and 7500 and up and essentially you must structure your collections so that you can get customers in on a trial purchase at tier one pricing below 1,000 and then this customer may very well go dark for 6 12 or 24 months but then come back and jump right into tier 2 or even tier three pricing and spend a ton of money out of nowhere so you have to understand that pric and tiers are very important and how they connect to your customer relationships and the human behavior that connects to these because somebody buying a piece at $500 is going to behave differently and it's going to feel differently than somebody paying $2500 or $10,000 it feels different the energy is different and the human behavior and psychology is different so the point is playing the long game is your only option if you want to build momentum in your clientele list and get people buying your more expensive items unless you have real defined pricing strategy that aligns with all other aspects of the business you will fall to the bottom of the market naturally it'll be a natural process that you fall if you don't have a plan here then we can move along the top for the six style segment so your jewelry is falling into one of these six categories and maybe a blend of some of them so we've got fine designer or High jewelry they're all precious metals and Stones they're all basically the same thing but dictated by pricing for how you would say they fall into that segment or how they're branded if it's designer jewelry like cardier Bridal jewelry is also Fine Jewelry but engagement rings are kind of their own category because of why people buy them and how you sell them so it's a totally unique process and deserving of a world of its own hip hop is basically pop culture jewelry and we'll probably see a new emerge in the coming years as record labels deprioritize promoting these artists that's a whole industry Trend outside of jewelry that will affect jewelry in the next 20 years but you can basically think of hipop as the wild west where Innovation usually happens first these guys are always trying to one up each other on design and even though the pieces get a little crazy the techniques of jewelry making for Fine Jewelry still apply to hip-hop then we've got craft jewelry so that's beaded jewelry which usually occupies the lower end of the market but there are some ways to push this style segment up into the higher price points and then we've got cultural jewelry so you could think Indian wedding jewelry or indigenous American silver and turquoise or New Age power crystals all of those have kind of a cultural element and then usually at the higher end of the market we've got art jewelry because of its relationship with the auction world so the these are the six style segments that we've really put through the paces almost everything will fall into one of these and we've also grade out some of the areas to help you out if you're a private Jeweler getting off the ground if you're selling a collection you could do lowend to high-end for anything so you could disregard the dark ray but if you are doing Customs you probably want to avoid the dark ray areas in order to have the margin that you could actually make it worth it doing the project so if you're a private Jeweler getting off the ground screenshot this if you've got a full collection and you've employed Customs into your process you'll still want to adhere to this for your pricing strategy on that side the point is here that unique Brands find a way to combine multiple style segments within a specific Market segment to build their perception while remaining profitable a good example of this would be like Jacob and Co which is at the highend combining fine designer and high-end jewelry it's certainly a designer brand they do amazing Bridal pieces and then Jacob even does hip-hop pieces with people like farel and a lot of big celebrities and stuff like that so you could think of Jacob as kind of occupying this world and for your own purposes and building your brand you can mix and match these areas and think what communicates your story so that's just a really good example whether you are new or you're a scaled business that does incorporate Customs one of the things that we EMP size is having one perfect Customs process so I'll keep this simple just because it's namely a few goals that you want to hit you want to make sure that you're maintaining a high margin on the sales you want to make sure that you're thinking in terms of product development how can I use this custom to create Factory IP later on you want to be thinking product Market fit am I creating products with this process that people would want to buy that there is demand for and then ultimately you want to close out your customs with five star reviews because when you're trying to sell collections of your own items or supplier pieces people are going to go to your Google page see what your reviews are like and if you've got a ton of five stars from your Customs they might go do a no touch sale on a supplier item that you can sell over and over again so in that regard Customs connects into other parts of the business now some business owners aren't even as comfortable with the creation of new designs or brand in or they can't get their team to be consistent you can think about what they said about the cardier way how can all of the pieces be designed in a way that would speak to the brand the beauty of this is through the power of AI our model is able to consider things like your brand prism the materials that connect to your pricing and your brand perception and then a creative idea just for this piece the unique little special thing that's going to make this piece a statement these things can all be combined mind this is the key to making AI imaginative when you the human can combine ideas and get the AI to interpret those ideas through the power of three this was something that was very important to philosophers like Pythagoras or sunu through the power of three through the three primary colors an infinite amount of Hues can be created so you should consider this quite a bit when you're thinking about your customer and your product and how you're going to create something special for the world so once you've identified these three elements it's much easier to design products that your perfect customer will actually pay for while making sure you maintain a margin that is needed for a functional business case so again this is what they mean by the cardier way when a piece from their design team hits the mark they mean that the product is aligned with the cardier design philosophy then we've got the three tiers of production another special aspect of the treasure map is that it accounts for being able to do custom projects supplier inventory and a made to order Factory collection under the same model using an Ecom store and a physical store all of that is coded into this image so the reason that this is important is because it plays a huge role in the finances of the business and how the business is going to be able to scale so with custom projects being at the top you need to be able to get cash into the business with enough margin to scale that does a lot for you having any kind of cash flow to be able to do anything then from there you can move on to supplier inventory so you would want to reinvest custom margins into flipping readymade inventory that you don't have to spend money on labor for so you use these margins to invest into advertising to sell supplier inventory in volume and then you can start to snowball from there all the while the right custom projects have seeded the IP for made to order Factory items if a custom is on brand you can make it a factory item and this is important to note because according to polygon 80% of retail jewelry purchases are customized in some way so like that's your first point of sale to build a relationship with the customer to be able to sell supplier inventory or your vision of a collection so that means you must be effective here with Customs but then be prepared for scaling so that you don't get burnt out because you're human so supplier inventory is mixed in to look like it belongs within the context of the brand made to order items push the limits of your design philosophy to give you real identity and also a unique selling proposition that stands out to customers so it's kind of a yin and a Yang unless you want to be competing for scraps against all of the commoditized Jewelers I mentioned before selling regular merchandise you must know these three tiers and use them if you do that and have a repeatable sales process you're extremely dangerous in this industry so the key principle here is if you can do the same thing every time and get good at it you can just play the numbers game and know that if you lost a sale you did your best and it's just on to the next one you do the same thing every time so I mentioned before that I had a lot of exposure to high volume of sales and distilled this down into a unique method combining neurolinguistic programming hostage negotiation and hypnosis using plain language in a jewelry sales script that a 22-year-old kid that didn't go to college could understand and put into practice so I will tell you right now this is is the best jewelry sale script on the market and there's something unique and interesting about this in regards to NLP neurolinguistic programming a man named Alfred corsky who was a colleague of Albert Einstein he was revolutionary in the field of linguistics and he was similar to like a Sigman Freud or a Carl Young in Psychology but just not as famous but he went on to influence people such as Tony Robbins or even Jordan Bel for from The Wolf of Wall Street because he discovered that there was a connection between language and the nervous system and that's where the word neurolinguistic was coined from he created it and I'm his relative Corby is just an Americanized version of corsky so this is kind of the family trade and I've been learning about this since I was very young and it's distilled into our sales script and it's available for you on the co-pilot and it's a secret weapon for closing sales then we've got the technology stack I will tell you you can move mountains with this Cloud setup a lot of you are not very fond of technology which is why you got into making jewelry or getting involved with the jewelry industry in some way but to keep it simple we get a lot more advanced than this if somebody's really mature but if you're just getting off the ground I would suggest that you go get a free Gmail account with Google Drive and Google Voice that's your entire Cloud environment you can set up your folders like this to start getting really organized just screenshot the image with folders 1 through eight here on the screen and then from there if you're using the cloud environment from Google and then you combine that with the Jeweler Advantage AI a Shopify store which can handle both your Ecom and your email needs slack for internal communication and then polygon for your B2B relationships for suppliers like I said you can move mountains if you just start there and then finally tying this all together like I said all all of the activities of a brand are what make the brand but there's also a framework that you're going to have to know and that is the brand prism so I won't get into the history of the brand prism because I've done a a long lengthy video on what this is all about but physique is basically the visual representation of the brand the personality boils down to your brand voice culture is how your internal energy of your staff treating one another and treating the customers affects the brand reputation self-image is who does the customer get to become reflection is who's your perfect customer and how can you reflect their values back to them and then your relationship is the handshake with the customer how is that relationship defined you have to know this this is all boiled into the AI and it's one of our conversation starters to get you started if you're just using us for the very first time start with brand prism in the conversation starter aspect of the tool and you will immediately level up your business overnight so everything I've just described with brand prism and all of the Frameworks above are already happening in your business whether you realize it or not and that might feel overwhelming it's fair to feel overwhelmed but let me ask you this what would be possible if your team was up to speed on the full depth of these Frameworks and others in other words what if you could cut out the learning curve and have someone in your business with this level of expertise today remember this is the new jewelry industry and anything is possible for you now what if you could have an expert consultant trained on all of the above everything you've just seen available to help you 24 hours a day 7 days a week all of these areas require years of expertise in learning because they all have distinct micr nuances so until now you would have literally had an impossible Endeavor ahead of you if you were going to expect any of that from someone on your team but that's where our free AI co-pilot comes in our AI is available on both desktop and mobile through the red buttons on our site to help you start immediately making a difference in all of these areas is you can get access to our AI today which has been trained on these Frameworks to help you immediately start making Leaps and Bounds in your business just be aware that you will need a chat GPT Plus account which is extremely affordable for the power you're getting access to it's basically like a rocket ship for the price of two burritos at Chipotle so it's a no-brainer and again we don't get paid off of that the AI co-pilot from Jeweler's Advantage is free and we have have two others that come to you when you sign up as well for bench Jewelers and fullscale luxury brand development also if you want to expand into other product categories which is amazing so that brings me to our overall mission and my personal challenge to you artificial intelligence has already completely changed the rules of this and every other industry whether you see it yet or not so we wanted to give everyone a fair chance and give people with the right mindset for the future a chance to start with the tool our entire system is already baked into the AI and you can win across all five pillars with even our free AI co-pilot people are already making money with this tool so our mission is to Champion the success of ethical sustainable and forward-thinking jewelry brands that shape the future of the jewelry and luxury Industries so with that in mind we're keeping an eye out for winners I'll tell you that right now we're seeing who's going in putting this into practice using it and winning so if you use our AI tools available at the red button on our site we want to know when it clicks in your mind and when you get a win and on our side we have access to strategic Partnerships not only in the jewelry industry but as you can see entertainment yes the celebrities the influencers yes and finance think back there was some mention of some pretty big companies so if you can build an awesome business with our AI we can help you get the visibility and the resources to take it to the next level so with that I say thank you for watching I know this was a longer video but I wanted to get it all in one place a lot of people ask where I've come from and I had to just get it down because this makes it way way easier for everybody but here's the thing don't take my word for it you've now seen my crazy story and all of the twists and turns that were required to create a knowledge base built on experience that no one else on planet Earth has had access to nobody has seen what I've seen and now there's a great team behind us helping everything out and it it's amazing so if you have any of the problems I mentioned you can start solving them right now with your risk minimized down to practically nothing there's like no risk there is no risk for you to do this our Frameworks are already waiting in the AI co-pilot that can help you right now so again don't take my word for it hit the red button on our site that will allow you to start your journey with Jeweler's Advantage my name is Jesse Korby and I welcome you to Jeweler's advantage and I thank you for watching I invite you now to go to Jewelers advantage.com if you're not already there and click the red button that looks like this get your hands on our AI co-pilot and we will see you in the community this is the new jewelry industry