Show and Tell

Welcome to our new blog, we hope you enjoy your stay, and visit often! We intend to keep this page new, interesting, and most of all, helpful. And to this end, we would like to enlist your help.

Have you ever wondered how best to display all those stacking rings? What is the most effective way to promote the jewelry? And what, exactly, is this blackened steel? On our FAQ page, we do our best to answer all your questions, but we bet we haven’t covered them all. So, tell us, what have we missed? Please post your questions as a comment to our blogs; you will help us provide the most pertinent information to all of our stores.

And you may even learn something from each other. A lot of my best designs have come from your customer’s ideas, and so I really appreciate the open communication. How about sharing your ideas and experiences with other stores that carry our work?

For example, how have you all been dealing with this Blood Diamond issue? Have your customers been asking about it? Years ago, while taking a college writing course, my husband chose this topic to write on. We researched the subject together, and I brought all my new found knowledge to the Rosen show, sure it would be a hot topic. But I was wrong – no one wanted to talk about it. I realized that you couldn’t very well tout the diamonds in my jewelry as conflict free if you carried other diamonds that weren’t. It needs to be all or nothing (you can't very well say “this jewelry is great because no one was maimed or killed in procuring the diamonds” without casting a heavy shadow on the rest of your inventory.) But here we are, five years later – A major motion picture with big name actors has made the issue impossible to ignore, and the World Diamond Council has spent millions of dollars on public awareness, including this web site http://diamondfacts.org/.

Most importantly, the Kimberly Process is now law, which means that ALL of the diamonds in your store MUST be certified conflict free. But don’t panic – chances are most, if not all, already are. You should contact each of your designers, and ask them to obtain a written guarantee from their suppliers that they are not using blood diamonds. If they can not do so, you should encourage them to find a supplier that can. It really isn’t as bad as it sounds, conflict diamonds now account for less than one percent of all diamonds traded globally, and any reputable supplier is already in compliance.

So go ahead and contact your designers, so that when your customers ask (and if they haven’t already, I assure you, they will soon) you can confidently assure them that none of the diamonds in your store were used to fund conflicts in Africa. I can’t think of a better selling point than that.

Send in your comments, and be sure to read our customer blog on this topic for more information on the issue.