How to Run a Jewelry Store: An Owner's Guide

Seven jobs, one routine

Running a jewelry store means running a retail business, a repair shop, an online store, an inventory operation and a small finance department, usually with the same four or five people. The owners who do it well have turned each of those jobs into a routine.

Seven disciplines

That routine is built from seven disciplines: inventory discipline, and staff accountability, repairs as a profit center, and marketing through clienteling, finance and accounting, loss prevention, and an operating rhythm that holds it all together.

1: inventory discipline

Inventory is where a jewelry store's money lives. Give every finished piece its own stock number, with its cost, vendor, metal, stones and location. Count the cases every morning and night, and the whole floor weekly. A five-minute count gets done; a three-hour count gets skipped in December. And review aging every week, with a rule for anything that crosses twelve months.

2: staff and accountability

Most stores are too small for a manager layer, so accountability has to come from the system. Two associates each sell $40,000 in a month, but one worked 160 hours and the other 100. Per hour, those aren't equal performances. Set permissions so discounts, overrides, returns and voids need a sign-off, and calculate commissions from the tickets.

3 and 4: repairs and clienteling

Repairs are the most reliable source of repeat traffic: a proper intake, a queue the bench can see, a ready notice, and the history at pickup. And clienteling beats advertising: capture every customer at the sale, record the occasion behind each purchase, and work the list every week.

5: the accounting traps generic bookkeeping misses

Jewelry accounting has traps that generic bookkeeping misses: layaway deposits are liabilities, not sales, and memo goods aren't yours, trade-ins and scrap gold need care, and the cost has to follow the specific piece. The fix is to post daily from the point of sale.

6: loss prevention, in layers

Loss prevention comes in layers: RFID counts that flag a missing piece within hours, and a second person's sign-off on the transactions where losses hide, an audit trail on every inventory movement, and cameras on the cases and the bench.

7: the operating rhythm that works

And none of it works as a one-time project. It works as a rhythm: counts, cash and clienteling calls every day; aging, memo, late repairs and associate numbers every week; the P&L and vendor sell-through every month; and a full count, a markup review and the open-to-buy plan every quarter.

Running the store in WJewel

In WJewel, every piece can be serialized, with its own stock number, physical inventory scans count the floor, each user's sign-in decides what they can do, commissions are calculated automatically, every repair has its job bag, customer profiles hold the occasions behind each purchase, and accounting is built in, so you don't need a separate package, though WJewel can also export to QuickBooks.

Contact us

You'll find the full guide on the WJewel blog. WJewel is fully web-based, and runs on PCs, Macs, tablets and phones. To learn more, visit www.wjewel.com, or call us at (646) 578-8300.