Is the GemLightbox right for you?

Are You a Jewelry Retailer?

Then the GemLightbox jewelry photography lightbox solution may be the right solution for you.

At Picup Media, we understand jewelry retailers very well. We’ve worked with over 2000 jewelers worldwide to provide jewelry photography and e-commerce services.

What we’ve found as a common issue with the majority of jewelry retailers was that they struggled to adapt to a rapidly changing retail environment. There are three main factors driving the rapidly changing retail environment being:

1. The emergence of the Millennials
2. The emergence of 100% online “e-tailers”
3. Poorer economic conditions

With these three driving forces, it’s no surprise that in 2016, over 1,500 jewelry business closed down. We’ll go through how your jewelry retail business can survive and prosper during these times of change using the GemLightbox.

The Emergence of the Millennials

Jewelry was originally marketed to veterans returning home from World War II, with the trend continuing with the Baby Boomer generation. Unfortunately, the jewelry buying trend ended at the generation of the millennials. Millennials exhibit different behaviors. They would much rather spend their money on technology and travelling. And this is a big problem as Millennials consist of 30% of the American population, with many of them entering their prime spending years. It’s estimated that by 2020, the Millennials’ spending power will be at $1.4 trillion. Therefore its increasingly important that jewelry retailers are engaging and connecting with Millennials.

But how?

Well, first of all, Millennials love social media! Here are some stats as found on Wordstream’s Marketing to Millenials guide:

In other words, you must have a social media strategy in order to survive and engage with the largest emerging consumer group. You can read our guide on how to sell on Instagram here, as well as read our free e-book on attracting and converting followers on Instagram here!

Using the GemLightbox, it is so easy and simple to create content that can easily be shared on social media where the millennials hang out the most. The GemLightbox is the world’s first smartphone jewelry lightbox. It will allow you to capture studio-quality images using just your smartphone. Simply turn on the power, place your jewelry inside, and capture!

Similarly, creating social media content to engage with the millennials is as simple as adding your own backdrop and branding. In this video, we demonstrate a variety of backgrounds that could be used with ring photography.

Other creative ideas to build our social media presence include:

Hand Photography

There’s no better way to show the real-life scale of your rings if it’s on a hand. The GemLightbox has a large opening in the front which allows you to place your hand inside. Then, removing the top diamond piece to reveal the top shooting angle, you can place your smartphone on the top to shoot images and videos. The added “Sparkle” light effect adds extra bling and life to your diamonds without distorting the colors or blinding the facets of your gemstones.

360-Degree Jewelry Product Videos

Uploading a 360-degree jewelry product video to your social media channel is an easy way to give you products exposure to a wider audience. If recorded correctly, 360-degree jewelry product videos can influence the buying decision for 88% of online shoppers. Using the GemLightbox Turntable, you can record a perfect 360-degree product video of your jewelry and directly upload it to your social media account with a few taps on your screen. Watch the video below to see how simple it is

The emergence of e-tailers

The rise of 100% jewelry online “e-tailers” such as James Allen over the last decade has increased competition and pricing pressures on existing jewelry retailers. Rather than seeing as internet e-tailers as competition, take the opportunity to ride the wave of online and mobile shopping by establishing an omnichannel presence. An omnichannel strategy involves combines multiple channel strategies to provide a seamless approach to the consumer experience.

A omnichannel presence is required as the statistics are that 69% of polled jewelry shoppers do research on a particular product online before making a purchase in store. What that means is that if you’re not educating your customers about your products, someone else will, whether it be an online e-tailer such as James Allen or the competition next door. One of the first steps of course in harmonizing the online and offline storefronts is by proper inventory control through documentation and jewelry photography. Moving your inventory online may be a long and arduous task especially if you have thousands of SKUs with the requirement to take multiple images, however, there are many methods to speed up the process and reduce the cost. This includes having a standardized process of placing jewelry inside your lighting environment and speed shooting. The video below demonstrates how simple it is to capture your whole inventory in a matter of hours with an average shot taking about 5 seconds

The images can be uploaded to Picup Media for jewelry retouching where images will be retouched within 72 hours, ready to go onto your website. This process is a much more efficient method as it normally would take 5-10 minutes to photograph a piece of jewelry plus half an hour of retouching by a graphic designer if you were to do the photography in-house. It could take weeks for a whole inventory to be uploaded to your website. Alternatively, paying for an external photographer would be very expensive as well, charging up to $25 an image. You could have an initial outlay of tens of thousands of dollars with no immediate results under this method.

Poorer economic conditions

Successful businesses thrive, even through poor economic conditions. The truth is, only 4-5% of online sales make up the total of jewelry sales, and the trend is that this number will continue to rise. A combination of social media engagement and omnichannel presence can only secure the future of your jewelry business.

If you have any questions about how GemLightbox can help your business, feel free to contact us here.