Next Year’s Hot New Products?
First, let me say I don’t have a clue. Do you? Does anyone really? The jewelry industry is part of the larger fashion and design industry and how many of you would really buy and wear the designs you saw on the Paris or New York fashion ramps recently?
I say all that as an preface to what some of our distributors from India told us at the Denver Gem show last month. They told us the hottest new thing from Jaipur for next years Tucson show are going to be faceted gemstone teardrop donut beads like the Amethyst ones included in our last post and the Spinel Faceted Teardrop Donuts pictured below. We have to admit we like these items and the potential they offer. What do you think? We’ll see how these sell in the next couple of months. If you like them, we’ll pick up a whole bunch more in Tucson in February.
We were lamenting over lunch about some of the “hot trends” we’ve seen in our short time in this business. We started with Turquoise that became so overpriced we just wouldn’t buy it anymore and were amazed that anyone would pay those prices. Then, we moved to “Cherry Quartz”, which was really glass passed off as the hot new gemstone. Then, we had a massive Swarovski graze and lots of CZ’s coming out of China to compete with the real deal, (in theory of course). The last couple of years, we had the “big silver chain” craze. I think the current price of silver will end that trend if it hasn’t ended already. Earlier this year, we read about “boho” jewelry that was 50% hippie jewelry and 50% high fashion design.
All in all, its not what the “industry mavens say”, its really about what people who wear jewelry can afford and looks good on them with the clothing they are buying. We know that you are much closer to what that is than we are. So, please tell us what you think you’ll be need to meet your customer’s expectations!
OK, done with my rant. Here are some really nice spinel faceted donuts. We hope you can visualize them in some earrings or necklaces that your customers would like to wear. Send us pics when you are done! Really!
