In Venice, Jewelers Try to Revive Their Businesses

In Venice, Jewelers Try to Revive Their Businesses

Venice has endured war, plague and conquest in its 1,200 years as Queen of the Adriatic, but after the last two years, many of its jewelers are struggling to stay open.

On Nov. 12, 2019, more than 85 percent of the 120 islands that make up the city were inundated with as much as six feet of water, a result of high tides and a storm surge driven by strong winds.

Leslie Ann Genninger, a glass jewelry artisan whose studio is in the Dorsoduro neighborhood, said her display tables were submerged. “The glass was broken so I had to redo about 80 or 90 percent of the pieces,” which took eight months, she said. Water was knee-deep in St. Mark’s Square, forcing the Nardi jewelry shop there to close for two months.

On March 9, 2020, the city’s first coronavirus lockdown was ordered. Since then the Veneto region, of which Venice is the capital, has been Italy’s second hardest hit region in the pandemic (following Lombardy), with more than 439,800 cases reported as of early this month.

Signet Jewelers CEO sees a ‘rising tide’ of engagements amid COVID

Signet Jewelers (SIG) CEO Gina Drosos says there’s a “rising tide” of wedding engagements on the horizon.

Signet, the world’s largest seller of diamond jewelry, conducted its bespoke consumer insights research that indicates that 15% of committed couples, or approximately 2.3 million couples, plan to get engaged in the current calendar year, an increase of high single digits compared to a typical year before the pandemic, according to Drosos.

“People are really spending more on people they are closest to now. I think in part it’s because they’ve had to narrow their focus during COVID and they spent more time with their loved ones, and the good news is that that has deepened relationships,” Drosos told Yahoo Finance in a telephone interview on Thursday.

Signet’s research found that over 90% of couples say their relationship is the same or better since the pandemic began.

“So that’s definitely, I think, a heartwarming statistic about love,” Drosos added.

The CEO pointed out that October “is always a big month” for shopping for engagement rings ahead of the holiday season.

According to Drosos, the company’s consumer insights and data analytics capability implemented three years ago is “really paying off because we’re getting out in front of consumer trends faster.”

“It’s also the cornerstone of how we differentiated our banners, which allows us to cast our net wide or bring in more new customers and grow our market share,” Drosos added.

Signet is the parent company of well-known brands such as Kay Jewelers, Zales, and Jared: The Galleria of Jewelry, to name a few.

Statesville, NC, USA-June 19, 2019: A Kay Jewelers retail store building, a brand of Signet Jewelers, based in the U.K.

As consumers plan to shop before they pop the question, Signet has already added more fancy shapes like pear and marquise diamonds and high-quality metals like 14-karat white and yellow gold to its offerings. Drosos noted that Jared recently added platinum because of the customer requests.

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The company is also seeing more customers consider lab-created diamonds to get more “bling for the buck” and a bigger center stone than they might from a natural diamond, the CEO explained.

“That’s not for everybody, but it’s something that we make available to our customers so that they always have a broad choice,” Drosos added.

Signet reported better-than-expected second-quarter earnings results on Thursday, sending its stock as high as $88.50.

For the second quarter, Signet reported adjusted earnings per share of $3.57, handily beating analysts' estimates of $1.69. Revenue also topped forecasts, coming in at $1.79 billion, up more than $900 million compared to a year ago.

The closely followed same-store sales grew 97.4% during the quarter. On a two-year comparison, the quarter represented same-store sales growth of 38.1%.

Signet’s focus on differentiating its banners for a specific consumer segment is already paying off. According to Drosos, Zales' new customers in the first half of the year are up 400 basis points as the so-called “bold expressionist” makes more self purchases for style and fashion. At Kay, new customers, categorized as the “generous sentimentalist,” are up 700 basis points. Drosos also pointed out that Jared’s average transaction value (ATV) during the quarter was more than 80% higher than Kay’s, a statistic that was a little over 30% higher two years ago.

“So you can see we’re really now differentiating Jared and Kay based on moving Jared toward more accessible luxury. And all of this, I mean, it’s driving our business now, but it’s also critically important to our future because we want to be a $9 billion company, not a $6.5 billion company. So, you know, we’ve got to be able to cast our net wider and appeal to a broader group of customers,” Drosos said.

Signet raised its fiscal 2022 guidance and now expects revenue in a range of $6.8 billion to $6.95 billion, up from the prior outlook of $6.5 billion to $6.65 billion.

Julia La Roche is a Correspondent at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter.

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Greenwich St. Jewelers Remembers: “9/11 Was the Catalyst for So Much Change”

Like many who lived through the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, jeweler Jennifer Gandia remembers the day and subsequent weeks with a series of words: Shock. Confusion. Trauma.

Perhaps the worst word of all, Gandia says, is silence. Her parents, Carlos and Milly, had celebrated 25 years in their Greenwich Street store right before planes hit the World Trade Center towers and the world changed forever. Their jewelry business was about a block and a half away “in the shadow of the Trade Center,” Gandia says. Everyone inside the store survived. But the building sustained structural damage, and they had to move.

The word Gandia uses for that time in her family’s lives is harrowing, which means “acutely painful or distressing.” It is an apt word for that moment in her parents’ lives, Gandia says. “It gave them a long time to think about what they were going to do. Should they regroup? Do they close? They felt too young to retire. This was the only neighborhood they had known.”

In the 10 months after the attacks, before a friend helped the Gandia family find a new store location, New York and the life Gandia knew was quiet. Too quiet, she recalls. Not only was there a literal hole in the earth where beautiful buildings once stood, but more than 3,000 lives—husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, and emergency personnel—were gone.

Gandia says she used that time to think, to travel, to reconsider her life’s work. Her parents set up shop at nearby Trinity Place. They had scrambled during the closure, going to people’s homes or businesses to share their love of jewelry and her father’s custom work. Neither Gandia nor her sister, Christina Gambale, were part of the business—but that was about to change.

Gandia recalls walking around Europe during those recovery months, poking into jewelers and studying how they worked. It was a comfort, she reflects now, to see their displays, to watch how they created special moments. Gandia decided to work with her parents “for one or two years, tops,” she says.

“For me, it was a ‘come to Jesus’ moment. What am I doing with my life? I realized I was doing what I went to school for, what I thought I wanted to do. But I didn’t feel fulfilled,” Gandia says. “In Barcelona, I was constantly stopping at jewelry stores, seeing how they were displaying things. It was so different from the States.… I had a marketing background, and I knew my parents would need the help. They were opening in a neighborhood that had no foot traffic.”

Gandia also knew she someday wanted a store of her own, so she joined her parents in 2003. “I wanted to help them survive. It felt like starting over in a sense,” she says. She helped launch a website and start online marketing, and she convinced her parents to open on the weekends, to pull new customers into the area. The jewelry store got online reviews, lauding its work and customer service. Things started to grow.

“It was like internal excavation,” Gandia says of setting up the business that now resides at 64 Trinity Place—named Greenwich St. Jewelers in honor of the original location. “When you have to survive, you’re willing to try anything. When you have nothing to lose, everyone gets on board and works together.”

Christina joined the family business in 2007. A vibrant bridal component was added to the store. Businesses around it started to reopen. New York was recovering, and things weren’t so quiet anymore.

“It was like a new era was starting,” Gandia says. “It was about the same time as the neighborhood started to feel like it was working toward something as opposed to recovering.”

Her parents retired, and the sisters took over the business in 2009. Her father passed away in 2018. Now, Gandia says, the family is approaching the store’s 45th anniversary with feelings of gratitude. With the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks nearing, Gandia says she is still feeling “tender around it,” but she will honor the day and the people.

“The truth is, Christina and I—neither one of us had a plan to join the business,” she says. “Our parents never once asked us. They were always supportive, but they wanted us to have our own experiences. They knew how hard everyone would have to work. I remember having to convince them that this would work.

“With our anniversary coming up, we feel really blessed and excited to be at this stage—to have made it,” Gandia says. “We’ve been through financial crises, Hurricane Sandy, coronavirus. And we’re still standing. That feels really important for us to acknowledge.… It’s bittersweet to honor the fact that 9/11 was the catalyst for so much change that occurred in the business. But it wasn’t the end of the story. It was the start of a new time for our family, for our store.”

Top: Owners Jennifer Gandia (left) and Christina Gambale (all photos courtesy of Greenwich St. Jewelers)