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Description
Building a CUSTOM BRAND
BY IVAN SOLOTAROFF, SENIOR EDITOR
CUSTOM-MADE JEWELRY IS THE QUICKEST PATH TO DIFFERENTIATION, THOUGH NOT NECESSARILY THE EASIEST
It's two days after Christmas, and up on 47th Street, 40 miles northeast, the talk is all about the seasonal memo goods coming back, about what the new sightholder list will mean to the industry, and about how bad can Christmas get? Across town at Zale's, Roman Jewelers, and the dozen or so other jewelers here in Flemington, New Jersey, it's about the slow foot-traffic in the outlet centers this town is famous for, of how high diamond prices are, and how low can diamond margins get?
At The Gem Vault, Flemington's custom jeweler, these pressures are nowhere to be found. Entering its second half-century, now at Turntable Junction, the upscale, quaint boutique village across from the outlet center where the Gem Vault was initially located, the sales floor of the stand-alone door has that steady, happy aura of stores that specialize in custom work, precious stones, and crystals rather than designer jewelry, diamonds, and semi-mounts. Owner Bill Brewer has created an oasis of beauty that's made to order each day.
Upstairs, where the bulk of the Gem Vault's goods are created, the day's work carries on at its own steady pace. The talk is of blue-flash moonstones offsetting the red gold of a custom bracelet, and the challenges of setting a lovely little leaf carved from quartz-crystallized orange drusy agate. Of how sphene mined closer to the Afghani border tends toward yellower tones than the browner sphene from Pakistan. And should a customer, who loves everything about a tourmalated quartz pendant--except its pink tourmaline accents--be charged for those accents being removed? Another customer is looking for dendritic opal for a new bracelet--which may have to wait for Tucson--but she may also want to match the Madeira citrine in last year's bracelet, so remember to keep an eye out at Tucson.
At 1:45, a first inkling of the world outside enters the peace of the atelier--the sound of hydraulic brakes as FedEx pulls up--and Jason Baskin and Sharon Curtiss-Gal, two jeweler-designers, utter the daily: "Stuller's here." If there is a real world concern, it's of yesterday's assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the likely effect on gold price. Almost everything at the Gem Vault begins up here with a piece of gold. Whether custom-made for the steady client base or for the cases, changes in gold price don't affect margins, but will affect the cost and price of the piece, and must be factored on a forward-looking basis. That may affect the choice of stones. Ergo, all the talk of sphene, an affordable, highly dispersive and--most important--unusual alternative to yellow diamonds.
"A big part of our identity is the rarity and exoticness of our stones," says Baskin, who, with his father Joel, the store's founder, spends much of his leisure prospecting across the U.S. and locally. Along with the originality of the pieces in the cases downstairs and the painstaking work of the store's designer artists, it's what the Gem Vault is all about. There are no watches or brands (save for Novell wedding bands), very few semi-mounts, engagement products, solitaires, chains, or, indeed, any of the common hallmarks of the U.S. jeweler. The few pieces not made upstairs tend toward local artisans they admire, or incorporate their work. The drusy leaf Baskin is setting is the work of Greg Genovese, a Cape May artist who specializes in agate.
Equally absent is any talk of advertising. The store has put in the odd local ad, and tried once with bridal magazines, but clients come largely from word-of-mouth. That's key to Gem Vault's model. Even in this affluent, highly trafficked part of Jersey, walk-ins are not counted on. "Our base," says Baskin, "is wide. We're as... |
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