Hosting a crowded seminar on selling diamonds at this year’s Sydney trade fair, jewellery sales expert Janice Talcott said beads are not necessarily the easy win they have been perceived to be.
Talcott believes that sales patterns can be affected if too much emphasis is placed on beads. “With the bead business the number of sales are probably going up and your average unit sale is probably going down,” she said.
“Are you running faster to sell more for less?” she asked the room full of retailers.
The Retail Edge consultant, who has just moved to Australia from the US, believes the bead boom is beginning to falter – something she said in her seminar was inevitable.
“Many of you are seeing that all good things eventually come to an end... The soon-to-turn fickle female customer is going to be eventually satiated.”
Future success, according to Talcott, lies in getting better at leading customers into making more significant purchases.
To do this, she suggested paying more attention to male shoppers – who she believes provide “significant opportunities” to sell premium jewellery that women wouldn’t necessarily buy for themselves.
She explained, “As women have started buying jewellery for themselves, men have enjoyed a hiatus from buying jewellery… The time is ripe for men to come back in, because the bead business is receding.
“Women can and will buy for themselves, but they still want significance gifted to them. There are significant opportunities to do that.”
Janice Talcott spoke at this year’s International Jewellery Fair in Sydney. Following the fair, she will host a Retail Edge seminar tour around Australia focusing on sales techniques such as clienteling.