While our company was able to make the switch to home office quickly, many jewelry companies weren't so lucky.

I'm putting myself in their shoes and I'm trying to figure out what the future holds for jewelry companies when they restart their operations.

One of the issues will probably be that they will have to work with a smaller staff while the amount of work will be almost the same. So they will have to work more efficiently than before.

Coronavirus will undoubtedly shake the jewelry industry, at least as much as it did in most other global industries. We can envision the possible future if we follow what happened in China - as reported, the Chinese luxury industry experienced 70% or even 80% fall in traffic after the coronavirus outbreak there.

We know exactly that this is a difficult time for all jewelry companies - therefore we would like to help them survive the current crisis – while also improving and growing as a business.

Read more if you would like to know more about our PIRO Covid-19 promotional package.

In the last few decades, the competition between jewelry casting companies has intensified. The more inventive ones have purchased the latest technologies, the best machinery and the latest 3D printers. But are these the only things that differentiate a reputable casting company from the others?

Optimizing processes and organizing order management are two elements that can secure a competitive advantage in this market. By automating processes and different repetitive tasks, companies can serve their clients faster and more reliably.

We’ve been preparing full steam for the New York Spring JA 2020 show when it suddenly got canceled due to the coronavirus threat. Actually, the other two shows, the MJSA and the Gem Fair were also canceled at the same time.

So there was a definite impact for us, both on morale and possibly, financially – we were all looking forward to the show to finally introduce our new Gelior platform, which is a marketplace that connects all players of the jewelry industry, from suppliers to manufacturers to retailers to consumers.

But what kind of impact will the jewelry industry face as a whole? How will everyone working in this global industry be affected? Several articles are discussing all this – they all concluding that there will be a drastic reduction in activity across the jewelry sector. After all, virtually all major trade shows in Asia have been suspended, Baselworld in Europe has been postponed, and shows across the US have been canceled – and more to follow, for sure.

Have you ever met the problem where you couldn’t tell what raw materials or products you have in your inventory? Ever been in the situation whereby the time you collected all these information, they would be outdated because in the meantime other inventory movements would occur? Is it difficult to calculate the total value of your actual inventory? Or is it difficult to calculate how much raw material you will be needing for the production of your jewelry orders?

You can see from the previous questions that tracking your jewelry inventory is a complex problem. This gets particularly high importance in the jewelry industry because we’re talking about high-value items and materials. Whatever type of business may it be – manufacturer, retailer, wholesaler -, tracking your inventory is crucial.

Smaller jewelry businesses usually use different manual tools for tracking their processes: excel sheets, Google sheets, various documents, sometimes even pen and paper. As long as there is not a large amount of data that needs to be copied across these sheets and kept updated, this is fine and is (for the most part) convenient and cost-effective.

The problem arises when there are many people involved in the process or the complexity of the process increases.

Our CEO, Zsolt Torok has started a video blog – called Next Level Jewelry – in which he will be talking about topics that can help jewelry business owners to get familiar with technology solutions for their business.

In this very first video blog he is talking about why small jewelry businesses should invest in technology and automate repetitive tasks.

Tradeshows and other live events are great for B2B activities. However, due to the nature of our business we've found a better way of building relationships with our customers. PIRO Summit - organized for the first time in March, 2018 - is a dedicated live B2B event where we dedicate our time to jewelry companies looking for different IT solutions. Let me introduce PIRO Summit to all blog readers.

The US has been historically leading in creating and adapting new technologies – the jewelry retail sector is not much different in this aspect. In the early 2000s, when the first jewelry point-of-sale (POS) systems were launched, technically-minded jewelry retail stores started to use these computerized POS systems instead of paper sheets to track their sales and inventory.

The IT segment has kept an eye on the growing demand for jewelry specific POS systems and today there is a fierce competition: retailers can choose from a dozens of systems.

But not all of them are scalable enough to keep up with the recent changes in the retail sector. In this article I would like to highlight some trends that I envision for the next few years. Whether you agree or not, share your thoughts with us in the comment section – I look forward to reading them and starting a conversation.

"I just don't get it"

While two decades ago an ERP system was mainly available for bigger enterprises, but today an increasing number of smaller companies are using ERPs. In fact, there is a wide variety of viable options for different industries: for manufacturing, for distribution, for food and beverages, etc., so ERP is just an umbrella term.

Despite the expansion of ERP systems in many different industries, the jewelry industry had a much narrower choice of selection in the recent past. It’s more than obvious for us that the jewelry industry is still looking to understand how a jewelry software can improve their business. As one of our MJSA Expo visitors said:

"I just don’t get it how a jewelry management software can help my business, and why we should invest money in such as system."