Your Jeweler Will See You Now Rogers AR

A SETTING FIT FOR LUXURY CLIENTS: SAMUEL GETZ PRIVATE JEWELERS AND DESIGNERS IN CORAL GABLES, FLORIDA.

Charleston Alexander, a Falls Church, Virginia, jeweler, was doing well in 2002. The leafy suburb was thriving in the D.C. housing market boom, enabling the diamond specialist to maintain a significant inventory, sourced directly in buying trips to Antwerp and Ramat Gan. Along with some 50 brand-name fashion designers, the 2,000-square-foot door was something of a Beltway destination itself, with an increasing share of clients from across the Potomac.

But president John Sabet saw that further growth meant a second door in Washington, D.C. proper, and when a rare corner space opened on Bethesda's main drag of Wisconsin Street, he looked at the demographics and snapped it up. Bethesda wasn't just well-to-do. It was prime bridal territory with 25 to 40-year-old, well-educated Gen-Xers. "The area clearly deserved a jeweler this size," says Sabet. His only question was justifying it. At 16,000 square feet, it was a high-stakes gamble, one Sabet could make only with some added value unique to Bethesda's high-income, high-IQ crowd.

"Before we broke ground, I knew diamonds would be key," he says, giving me a brief tour of the expanse of fashion jewelry display cases before we settle in one of the 10 private offices that comprise the heart of this store. "We're diamond importers. That's our identity. But I also knew Bethesda would have something to do, somehow, with computers."

It's clear as you enter Charleston Alexander that something unique is happening here. Wisconsin Street, like any northwestern D.C. boulevard, hosts a variety of upscale, unusual boutiques, sandwiched between the Blockbusters and CVS stores. But nothing of this magnitude: From the man-trap entry, to the security guard at the front desk, to the wealth of high-ticket pieces carried, you know you've entered a portal of luxury. Like a Fifth Avenue furrier, a four-star restaurant in a Paris suburb, or a Geneva cigar store, it's not the bells and whistles but the quietness that lets you know. Herein you will be afforded the time, space, and gravity suited to a serious laying down of bucks. While open to the public, Charleston Alexander does almost three-fourths of its business by appointment.

Borrowing from a tradition more European than American, private appointments are guiding a select cadre of jewelers as they spawn higher upstream—from Jacob Arabo and Lockes Diamantaires in New York to Samuel Getz Private Jewelers of Coral Gables, Florida, to William Noble in Dallas to Martin Katz in Beverly Hills. Often as not, there's an affiliation with a DTC sightholder in the background. The settings may vary from Fifth Avenue to suburban office parks to lifestyle center malls, but in each case the experience of shutting out the world and tuning in to your inner spender is promoted by quietude.

In Bethesda, the specific gravitas is the 10 private offices. There are no diamonds, Sarin machines, scales, grading reports, or charts of the 4C's. Just a desk, chairs, and on the desktop, an Apple G4, and a box the size of a home printer: the Isee2 machine. On the monitor is the purple-black logo of the multimedia marketing program that the DTC sightholder, Overseas Diamonds of Antwerp, has grown into a U.S. brand in four years.

"I believe in these diamonds themselves," says Sabet, "not only because Davey Lapa of Overseas is a brilliant cutter, but because he clearly believes in them himself. He doesn't say, 'I have a branded diamond, pay me X-plus for my branding.' We don't even sell it as a branded diamond. But Overseas does put an ionizing brand on the skins of their diamonds before they go to the lab, which means he's confident enough in his cutting to own his merchandise. Once it's ionized, it's not going on the generic round brilliant market." The mark is part of a provenance-guaranteeing birth certificate that accompanies every Isee2 stone. In the politically sensitive capitol, conflict-freeness is big in selling diamonds—likely more so after the release of "The Blood Diamond."

"I believe, strongly, in the technology," he continues. A diamond is placed inside the Isee2 machine and made to spin in front of a light source and digital camera. Captured light performance readings are then graded by the software on a 1-to-10 scale for brilliance, scintillation, and symmetry. Sabet also uses the machines to show non-Isee2 diamonds—at times for contrast (the machine can do two diamonds at once), at others simply as a showing and grading tool. "We used one on our inventory when the machines first came, and it was a shock. A fair number of top-graded stones came in as low as 8.4 for symmetry, and even brilliance," Sabet says.

"But what I really believe in is the Isee2 presentation." The first 10 minutes are diamond-free, just simple graphics and a modicum of angles, stats, and percentages as we move from the 4C's to the all-important fourth C. There it becomes a more intensive, still free-flowing presentation, taking a rough crystal through cleaving, bruiting, and blocking to the faceting of a round brilliant, then finally moving to ideal cut and the 56 different ways the hearts and arrows pattern is formed.

"Throughout this presentation, which takes you from square one to the top one percent of the world's diamonds, people are asking about the diamond itself. We never answer," Sabet says. "Not at this point. And as you can see, there're no certs, except the one he came in the store with maybe."

So you're decommoditizing. But what are you actually selling at this point? "We're selling our professionalism. I'm selling the world's top one percent of diamonds, but I have to achieve that echelon not by my gemology, my trips to Antwerp and Israel, or even by this store itself." As he talks, I realize the signature of this door is exactly that professionalism. It's not only quiet, it's clean. Call it "virtual luxury." In the same way the desktop computer has cleaned up desks, Isee2 replaces the commoditizing clutter of diamond selling with a single, silent, elegant tool.

Because the tool's digital, says Sabet, it gives a leg up in fighting the big nemesis. "For the right-brained engineer, with that Internet cert in his hand, you can get as deep as he needs to go with the light reading technology. That's the story he needs, and it's the language he speaks. For someone looking for a beautiful diamond and wanting mostly assurance, it's as simple as she needs it to be."

That simplicity underscores the Isee2's value as a one-stop solution to the central paradox of the bridal diamond: It's a luxury that happens to be a commodity. "The round is kind of cut and dry. I am decommoditizing the sale with this box, but it is almost a staple good. I don't sell it on cert, but I can certainly buy it on one." And as with any commodity, margin is everything.

Prior to signing with Overseas, Sabet looked at the major national brands, and decided too much of that margin would be lost to paying their overhead. With 10 Isee2 machines leased, he lays out $35,000 annually—with no equity gained. "Yes, that is quite a spend. But I also feel the company is giving me so much. Not just logistical support, or regular, reliable sourcing as well as full-caraters. But more than anything, it's the ability to present a diamond the way we do. It's our brand, really."

Like roughly half of Overseas' client base, Charleston Alexander sells Isee2 as a private label "Signature Diamond." The others, typically doors that carry other national brands, sell it as a branded diamond. Of the 1,500 diamonds typically in Alexander's two doors at a given time, roughly 35 percent are signatures—60 percent of all rounds. Priced at and often achieving keystone, they constitute a far greater percentage of Alexander's total dollar sales, now three years into the program.

"Perhaps more important," says Sabet, "they're a substantial fraction of our repeat business, which is huge as our Gen-Xers enter the diamond buying cycle. We're diamond importers, that's our story, and once our clients get it, particularly with the Isee2 machine helping us tell it, they won't even look at generic diamonds. End of story."

PRIVATE—AS IN PERSONAL

For Bruce Owen, growing up as a Des Moines kid fascinated with jewelry, it was all about the story told. "The downtown mom and pop jeweler was a real part of the community picture," he says. "But at the same time, they were its private life as well: the engagements, the anniversaries. All that goes with them, all the stories, and all that can go wrong with them. As any jeweler can tell you, we're like shrinks in that regard."

Owen is president and owner of Amerigem, a private jeweler set in an office park multi-suite in Des Moines' bedroom community of Urbandale, Iowa. He began as a 19-year-old bench jeweler, and design and fabrication remain his passion. "But I also don't know how to stop talking, how to stop telling stories," he says, "and my mouth got me in sales, and I spent my jewelry career in the storefronts, getting really sick of selling catalog jewelry, like Campbell's Soup. You take your can and the next one slides into place."

Deciding to go it on his own, five years ago, his childhood image of the downtown, pillar of the community jeweler guided him, paradoxically, out to the suburbs, and to a private office. "I wanted to find the niche, fill the void. I asked myself, what's missing?" Owen wasn't aware of it at the time, but what he was destined to find were the stories. "And 90 percent of selling, maybe 95 percent, is listening."

Like Charleston Alexander, Amerigem is a quiet place. The 1,000-foot showroom has no counters, just 10 pedestal-style showcases, around which Owen or one of three salespeople stand side-by-side with clients. "There's no opposing them," he says, "or me having to bend over in and treating them to my bald spot. It's not selling, it's talking—more like we're together at a gallery—and while we do carry some ready-made pieces, particularly around Christmas, most of the 100 or so pieces in the cases are models or settings, introducing what we'll be looking at in the private office."

There are two offices at Amerigem, lean, elegant affairs with a desk, chairs, and high-tech. In Urbandale, it's a wall-mounted flat-screened TV bearing GemVision matrix software, which Owen uses to introduce clients to the brave new world of CAD-CAM. The overwhelming bulk of Amerigem's business is design intensive jewelry.

"Half a decade into it, the kids of our clients are now beginning to walk in for the diamond engagement ring. But at the start I knew that wasn't going to be our client. That left one-of-a-kind pieces for the 35 and older crowd, well into the diamond buying cycle. The 10th, 15th, 25th anniversary, and fashion." For 99 percent of American jewelers, that means designers. For Owen, it meant sitting down and listening, then creating a story.

"Today's been fairly typical," he says. An early appointment was Owen's presentation of a ring built on a family heritage stone. "It had been her mom's, a half-carater with a fairly open table, and she'd wanted to incorporate it into a more designed piece." Owen heard her out, presented the idea of a three-stone ring, and the two built one together onscreen. The diamond was sent to S.A. Gems in Chicago for recutting.

"Part of the story told," says Owen, "involved me going on safari shortly after that first meeting where she handed me the half-carater. [Owen has gone on several safaris, part of S.A. Gems' marketing program.] Another part of the story, and one she loved, was of me sourcing the two other stones at the Festdiam factory in Johannesburg, in between the safari and the weekend in Capetown. She'll forget 99 percent of the gemology discussed, but none of that ring coming together. A year from now, she won't be able to tell you if the stones are VS or SI, but she'll be talking safaris the rest of her life."

An early afternoon appointment was typical. "She wanted a smaller diamond, and probably not a ring, because she gardened a lot, and was afraid of losing it. But that's a design issue, and once she learned that, the road was clear to hear more about what she wanted. He was talking color, F and J. So I showed him stones, and how unimportant that could be. How a J could actually be more beautiful than F. How important it is to look at beauty. And correspondingly, at just how dangerous a little knowledge can be."

Tonight's appointment, while also typical, is the one that excites Owen most. "It's an anniversary. The guy told me he had no idea what to get her, but that he wanted her to be a part of it. I loved hearing that. The only thing I asked him, once the appointment was made, was what kind of wine she liked, and what kind of music. Would I like to be home with my family at that hour? Yes. But to be able to be here, after hours, knowing a story's getting told that she'll never, ever forget? Like the credit card ad says: Priceless."

PRIVATE—AS IN SOCIAL

As you move up the price point ladder of private appointment jewelry, the experience becomes less retail and more social. Or sociable. Or even societal. It becomes salon-like.

"That sounds stuffy, but it's not, at least I hope not," says Samuel Getz, whose Private Jewelers and Designers in Coral Gables, Florida, hosts the likes of Usher and Gloria Estefan. "Certainly, the clientele is upscale, but what the privacy affords is the ability for it not to be all about the money, but about the jewelry itself. That goes to the heart of the business side as well." Whether you're selling total-carat weight in the mall or Kanye West in your salon, "You're either going to be selling value, or discount." And if you think celebrities don't look at price, he says, think again.

That focus on the work is both Getz's joy and his consternation. Third generation of the south Florida family behind Mayors Jewelers, Getz grew that chain to 25 doors and $175 million in sales over a 35 year career before selling in 1998. "After some time off," recalls his wife, Jennifer, the salon's co-founding partner, "he started designing pieces and showing them to friends at the dining room table. The salon grew out of that."

And grow it did, from one-of-a-kind quartz necklaces in three figures to multi-carat award-winning sapphire, garnet, and alexandrite pieces fetching tens, even hundreds of thousands. But no diamonds, except as sides, or for what Getz calls "dressing. They're too high investment and too low margin and low turnover. That takes us back to the business side of private jewelry. I can sing the joys and praises of salons all day, but there's a downside in the limited exposure as well, which is the very limited opportunities to present and close."

It makes presentation all the more crucial, and again, it's the quietude at Getz that makes it work. Not so much for Getz to listen to clients but to let what he calls "the noise of preconceptions" fall away. "You know the saying, do unto others? Well, from a salesman's point of view, it's really 'do unto others as you can best glean that they want to be done to.' Unfortunately—and I've had to learn the hard way—people buying do not want to be surprised. They're uncomfortable with the new."

As any who have seen Getz's one-of-a-kind creations, that's a true occupational hazard. "And I tend to make it worse in the appointments," he says. "I get excited and overdo it. Try this, try this, and this one. At the same time though, that's the whole point here. There's no security issue with showing multiple items, and also not as much worry about chasing them away with over-showing. After all, they made an appointment to come here. They've come to buy."

It's the getting them to come that's creating the noise in Getz's life, and in a way he's a bit ashamed of it. "Back at Mayors, the big joke was the finicky, introverted designer. The artist. Well, if you're going to run a salon jewelry operation, the social aspect is huge, and you're going to have to be very, very socially aggressive. I used to be very socially aggressive. Now, thankfully, my wife is up to it, because—and I still can't believe I'm saying this—I'm becoming one of those guys I used to mock."

"The big gem for me right now, for example," he says, "is a tanzanite. A 25 carater, gem-gem quality, and it's all I'm thinking about. I have a selling appointment in an hour, and I'm really wondering: How am I going to switch off the designer part of the brain, and that 25 carat gem-gem stone . . . and sell?"