I Was Wrong About Jewelers With No Website

For about eight years I believed that a jeweler without a website was a jeweler on the way out.

Then I met one who wasn’t.

Bench in the back, loupe on a cord, and no email address he could recite without checking a card in his wallet. A two week wait for repairs. Three generations of the same families buying engagement rings off him, which is a thing I have never once managed to arrange for anyone, at any budget, in my entire career.

Meanwhile some of the emptiest shops I have ever walked into had lovely websites.

Scottsdale is where the pitch I had been using for years finally fell over, two shops in the same trade, both with a website, and only one of them busy.

So I stopped treating the website as the tell, and started asking a duller question instead. What do the ones doing well have in common that the rest of them don’t?

I used to keep a rebuttal ready for every excuse an owner gives for not having a website. The man with the loupe needed none of them.

The check this trade sits near the bottom of

74.3% of the jewelers I sampled list a website at all, which puts them 43rd of the 47 trades I checked, against 83% of small businesses.

I counted generously, as well. A listing that pointed at a Facebook page went down as a website, and so did a listing pointing at an address that never answered when I knocked on it.

So the distance between having a website and having something a stranger can actually use is a good deal wider than that number makes it look.

Salons sit lower still, last of the 47 trades on having one at all, and the owner I sat with there had thought it through more carefully than I had.

Which is why the number stopped holding my attention fairly quickly, and the habits underneath it never have.

Four of them keep turning up together. I didn’t arrive at the four by sitting and thinking about jewelry, either. I got to them by opening a great many websites in a row and noticing what the good ones kept bothering to do.

None of the four is design work, and I should warn you now how boring they are.

1) They write down the dull things

Not the story of the family. Not the paragraph about craftsmanship your web guy wrote in 2018.

The hours, including the awkward ones. Closed Mondays. Late on Thursday.

And whatever you do in that strange week between Christmas and New Year, which in your trade is the week that pays for February.

A woman deciding at six on a Thursday whether it’s worth driving over is not going to phone you and ask. She’ll go to whichever shop already told her.

I’ve stood outside enough of these places on a wet evening to know how many of them look closed when they aren’t.

Parking counts too, and so does the entrance, if yours is the door beside the bank rather than the obvious one on the corner.

How many people a year turn around because the shop looked shut from the street?

2) They answer the repair question in writing

Do you resize? Do you restring pearls? Will you look at a watch you didn’t sell in the first place? What does it cost to have someone examine a piece before anybody commits to anything?

Every one of those is a question you already answer out loud, several times a week, for nothing, to people standing in front of you who are already yours.

I’ve asked a lot of jewelers what the first sentence through the door usually is, and almost every one of them gave me some version of can you fix this.

Written down once, it goes on working while the shop is dark.

The better ones put a number against it, or a range, or at the very least an honest explanation of why a number is impossible until someone has the piece in front of them.

Vague costs you the nervous customer, and the nervous customer is the one carrying the expensive sentimental repair.

3) They keep a way in that isn’t the telephone

Take the form off a page and every question that turns up after five has to survive the night inside someone’s head, or land in a voicemail you’ll get to on Tuesday with a loupe still in your eye.

36.8% of these homepages have one, comfortably ahead of the 28% I find across small business homepages in general, and it’s one of the few places where this trade is ahead rather than behind.

People will type a question at eleven at night that they would never say to your face at eleven in the morning. Money is one of them. Sentiment is another.

A woman asking whether you can rebuild her mother’s ring is not ready to have that conversation out loud with a stranger, and a form lets her start it sideways.

The best result I have ever seen from one arrived at a shop that had had the thing installed for eleven days, and nobody there had thought to mention it to me.

Has anybody in your shop ever counted what arrives that way in a month?

4) They point at wherever this week’s work is

74.4% of these sites link out to a social profile, and the shops I’d call good link to an account that had something new on it this month.

A homepage can’t date itself. A feed does it automatically, whether you want it to or not.

Nobody is opening your Instagram to admire the layout. They’re opening it to check you’re still there, still working, still the kind of shop that finished something on Tuesday.

The link exists to prove exactly that, and adding it takes four minutes.

The stars are already doing their bit

93.9% of the jewelers I audited hold at least one Google review, so being found isn’t what this trade is struggling with.

The stars carry a stranger as far as your door. The four habits above decide whether the door opens for her or not.

Add my ten checks up and jewelers land on 73 out of 100, a fair middling place to sit, and it tells you nothing at all about whether your own shop answers anybody.

If you want a look at what the tidy ones do, the thing you’ll notice is how ordinary they are. Nobody wins this on typography.

When I build a jeweler a website, three of those four habits are one afternoon of typing. The fourth is a photograph you already took on Tuesday and never showed anyone.

Not sure which one you’re missing? Send me your address and I’ll go through all four and tell you.

Who I didn’t write this for

Not the man with the bench and the two week wait. He has a habit list of his own, built over forty years, and it works better than anything I could sell him. If that’s you, close the tab and get back to work.

Not the shop that already does all four, either. You’re finished here. Go and set a stone.

I wrote it for the shop in the middle. A site built in 2018 by a nephew who has since moved away, opening hours that were true once, a telephone that rings while both your hands are busy, and a quiet feeling every February that something is going wrong without anyone being able to name it.

You know which one you are.