Creating an Effective Pearl Display
Nov 7 2018
Samuel Jones Pearls on the Road
As a core tenet of our business, the Samuel Jones Pearls sales team has the great privilege of calling on shops up and down the UK. Between them, with over 100 years combined experience of selling jewellery to the UK trade, they have seen an eclectic mix of pearl jewellery displays, from the sublime to the ridiculous. While there remains no fool-proof way of guaranteeing sales from immaculate displays, there are some recurring themes in our successful pearl stockists. In this short piece, we explore how intelligent product selection, layout and display can translate to a more attractive pearl offering.
Choose Your Colour
The colour onto which pearls are displayed is critically important to their appearance. While dark colours, blacks and navies, provide great contrast with white pearls, they also have a highly undesirable tendency to sap pearls of their lustre and radiance. With a few exceptions – golden South Sea pearls and simple stud stands, at Samuel Jones Pearls, we try to avoid black pearl display material.
Our own branded point of sale units are grey, which we have found to be best. We have experimented with different shades, and generally use two tone, with the darker shade of Pantone 423C. This shows pearls beautifully while remaining dark enough to resist marking.
White, cream, pink and light blue display material, can also work well – our stud stands for example are very effective and have off-white pads. The drawback to these lighter colours is their propensity to marking, and cream particularly can look antique or fade unequally.
Power to The People
In the days of infinite choice and immediate delivery, a good pearl selection is paramount to a successful display. Customers want choice. Choice invests them into the buying process and with pearls specifically allows comparison between two natural and therefore unique products. Having a solitary necklace, bracelet, earrings or a pendant will hamper your efforts no matter how elegant the display.
We offer rows on display ‘cakes’ or our own three and five row units. This gives ‘at a glance’ comparison and implies a good stock (although only if kept full!). Displaying multiple rows on a single bust can also have a great effect, although care must be taken to avoid confusion with the implication of a multi-row necklace.
With earrings and pendants, grouping similar designs such as studs, simple gold surrounds or white/yellow gold pieces on single stands or towers is very effective. Always graduate sizes, and beware that grouping dissimilar jewellery and mixing sizes can appear jumbled and be detrimental to a display, try not to mix pearl drops and studs.
Samuel Jones Pearls Three and Five Row Necklace Displays
Strength in Sets
As a pearl jewellery manufacturer , we strive to offer matching earring and pendant sets – we always display them as such. Displaying jewellery which compliments each other is the basis of ‘Collections’ – the hope being that customers are guided visually through a range of similar jewellery rather than a scatter-gun approach which can appear disjointed and confused. Displaying sets can also lead to an additional sale, or set up a future purchase for another gift/occasion.
Power in Diversity
People are bombarded with information via advertising, the internet and social media. While education can only ever be a good thing, as a retailer, you never want to be being caught out. An effective display encompassing a variety of pearl types, Akoya, Freshwater, Tahitian and South Sea pearls, as well as different colour shades, allows you to demonstrate and discuss the characteristics of these pearls. While it’s certain you won’t have every piece of pearl jewellery you’ll ever need in stock, clearly displaying ‘something for everyone’ will stand you in good stead. We regularly see fantastic displays of plain white rows, and while it’s true our sales of white pearls eclipses those of coloured pearls, an all-white display can lack the character that a baroque, coloured or ‘show stopper’ pearl piece brings.