EDITOR’S LETTER
CONTRIBUTORS
Leave us out of it
CONTRIBUTORS
JONATHAN
KENDALL
onathan is the
J
global operations
director for De
Beers’ Forevermark,
and is the president
of the Marketing
and Education
Commission
at CIBJO, The
World Jewellery
Confederation.
JONATHAN
CHIPPINDALE
Jonathan is the CEO
augmented reality
solutions provider
Holition, and has
a background in
luxury retail having
spent 10 years
working for the
De Beers Group as a
Managing Director
JANET FITCH
Janet is a veteran
JF columnist, and
has written for
both magazines
and newspapers
including the Sun
and the Daily Mail,
later owning her
own jewellery
shops
LEONARD ZELL
Leonard has
been training fine
jewellers for 25
years. His monthly
column gives
some top tips on
sales training and
improving your
bottom line
ON THE
COVER
AUGMENTED
REALITY
How can this vaunted
technology be applied
to jewellery marketing?
DEMI-FINE
We explore the rise in popularity of
a jewellery category that combines
the best of fine and costume jewellery
TALKING POINT
CAD/CAM
Catching up with the latest innovations
from CAD/CAM suppliers
Demi-fine jewellery page 28
We ask you how the jewellery
store of the future will look
19
50
LEONARD ZELL JANET FITCH YOUR VIEWS
How to romance jewellery
effectively to your customers Our columnist’s take on the
month’s jewellery trends We talk with Amy Anderson
O’Day of Comfort Station
May 2018 | jewelleryfocus.co.uk
MICHAEL NORTHCOTT
Editor, Jewellery Focus
[email protected]
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May 2018 | www.jewelleryfocus.co.uk
£5.95| ISSN 2046-7265
38
According to a new report this month,
some employers are relabelling low-quality,
low skilled and often low-wage roles as
‘apprenticeships’, according to a new report.
As part of the government’s wider package
of reforms to apprenticeships, groups of
employers have come together to write new
‘apprenticeship standards’ – an attempt to
regulate a market that exploded under David Cameron’s government,
and while some employers have used this opportunity to generate
high-quality standards, others, it is claimed, have not.
I can tell you one industry where this report simply does not apply
– jewellery. In my five years as editor of Jewellery Focus I have had the
good fortune of seeing first-hand how apprenticeships look in this
sector, with some of the most skilled craftspeople in the land passing
on their knowledge to the next generation in time-honoured fashion.
Indeed, jewellers might well have been one of the strongest examples of
an apprenticeship culture that Cameron and his team could have looked
at when they were drawing inspiration for and designing their policy.
In this issue we have two particularly cracking features. The first
is on augmented reality – technology which allows consumers to use
their smartphones to ‘see’ digitally rendered objects super-imposed on
the camera’s view of the real world. The top-end of the retail industry
has woken up fast to the possibilities for selling and marketing with
this kind of technological advancement, but who in the jewellery
world is alive to it? Alessandro Carrara did some digging. The second
is Lewis Catchpole’s piece on the relatively new ‘demi-fine’ category of
jewellery products, bridging fine and costume ranges for the mid-range
consumer with a taste for luxury. But is it a trend that will eventually
fizzle out, or is it a genuinely new product category that we should be
taking seriously?
I hope you enjoy the issue.
Let us update you with
industry news while you
drink your morning coffee
www.jewelleryfocus.co.uk/newswire
JEWELLERY FOCUS
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