David Bellman of Bellman Jewelers isn’t afraid to innovate, and says video is the future.
Manchester, N.H.--In 50 Jewelers/50 States, National Jeweler interviews one retailer in each of the 50 U.S. states to find out how they are meeting the challenges of the changing retail environment.
While there’s a lot of talk about jewelers being afraid to embrace new ideas, it’s not a conversation that applies to David Bellman of Bellman Jewelers in Manchester, New Hampshire. Bellman is so fond of pushing the envelope that he recently built a small television studio next to his store where his team can produce videos for the store’s YouTube channel.
Bellman opened his store in 1981 with business partner and cousin Douglas Sharek in what might be the most small-business-centric state in the country.
Bellman chatted with National Jeweler about his strategies for maintaining relevance over the decades, the parts of his business he outsources and what he keeps strictly in-house.
Cousins David Bellman and Douglas Sharek founded Bellman Jewelers in 1981. Today, the store is about 6,000 square feet and employs 12 people.
National Jeweler: What’s the biggest challenge your store is facing?
David Bellman: The biggest challenge I would say is what they call margin compression.
A big part of our business is bridal. With the advent of the internet, people are doing a lot more shopping around and becoming more educated about what they’re buying, so the landscape for diamonds in particular has become very tight in terms of the margins. People are very competitive with their margins.
One way to offset that is to try to do better with the margins on mountings. Fortunately, most people are looking for mountings that have more than just one or two diamonds or just a plain Tiffany style setting; they’d like a designer-type mounting with lots of diamonds and intricacy to it. So that’s helped us offset the compression that we’re experiencing on the loose diamonds.
It’s not the end of the world, just something you have to be aware of and factor into your business to make sure your overall margins are good.
NJ: What’s the top-selling category and brand at your store?
DB: Bridal is the top-selling category.
Gabriel & Co. is a good brand for us for a couple of different reasons.
They’re really aggressive on the internet--they have a really nice website presentation, they show a lot of different styles, a lot of selection in their mountings.
them on the computer. You’ll see photographs that are very clear and they also have a 360-degree view so you can spin the ring around for a video effect. People get a very good look at the ring even before they come into the store.
Quality for quality, the pricing is amazing. Gabriel & Co. is very affordable and a very well-made, high- quality line. It’s got the best of everything for us.
NJ: Describe the Bellman customer for me.
DB: We’re in New Hampshire and if you go 30 or40 miles south to Massachusetts, it’s a whole different world. It really is a whole different experience.
Things are still relatively mom-and-pop here--our state in general doesn’t have any really big corporations. It’s a state full of small, entrepreneurial businesses. A lot of people who live in New Hampshire are here for the lifestyle. Many live here and commute to Massachusetts where the salaries are considerably higher.
For the most part, our customers are people who are grounded, a little less fashion-forward than a bigger city type of customer. As a result of that, we don’t see a lot of huge purchase items like some of the bigger cities see, like in Boston.
We do see is a lot of the good core business of engagement rings, wedding bands, watches, fashion jewelry, all of that, just not on quite as big of a scale as you would see in Massachusetts. Branded lines like David Yurman are huge in there. The call for that same kind of jewelry here in New Hampshire is limited. It’s maybe a tenth of what it would be just a short distance away.
NJ: What’s the most popular style of engagement ring with your clientele now?
DB: The halo is very popular, though I get the sense that that’s starting to wind down a little bit.
What is interesting is that a lot of people--I think this is a millennial thing--they want to do something that’s just a little bit different than what everybody else has. So our custom business has increased significantly as a result of that.
Brands like Gabriel & Co. sell well but a lot of people are coming in and asking us to combine elements of different rings. We’ve found that to be a big help and something that people are looking for.
There aren’t a lot of people who can do that these days and do it well. I’ve seen a lot of pieces come in from other places and the custom work is not good. So I think that’s why our Google reviews are so high. The last time I checked we had over 50 reviews and I think our average is 4.7 or 4.8 out of 5 stars. It’s very strong and a lot of that is due to the custom work we do.
For our custom work, rather than have one or two bench jewelers who try to do everything, I sub-contract a lot of the work out to individuals who are good in very specific areas. For example, I have just one setter who sets my emeralds and opals and softer stones, and another setter I use for diamonds. I have another setter who just does the pave work for me because he’s so good at it. I have very specific people whom I sub-contract to who are experts in unique, niche areas.
When I finish a piece of custom work, instead of it being in the hands of one or two in-house people, it may go through six or seven different hands in a sub-contracted way and it gives you a much better product when it’s all said and done.
Owner David Bellman is currently taking helicopter flying lessons and is in the process of obtaining his private pilot license.
NJ: Do you have these sources in New Hampshire or do you have to look elsewhere?
DB: There’s a fair amount in Boston that we use and some in New York; it depends on the item we’re working on. There are a couple we use in New Hampshire but the more intricate work is done by people outside of the state who have basically been doing it their whole lives and, for the most part, are from overseas and have come to the U.S. and have been doing it since they were fresh out of the sixth grade.
It’s true; one of my best repair jewelers, who is from Lebanon, told me that after he completed the sixth grade he was told he had to learn a trade. So craftspeople like him come here to the U.S. and they think they’ve died and gone to heaven because now they can do what they love to do or what they’ve been trained to do and they get paid very well for it.
There are guys coming in all the time in the same situation--it’s great.
NJ: Which social media accounts are important to your business?
DB: All of them.
In the last few years my son Alex has come into the business. He’s 24 so he’s fresh out of college and a social media expert compared to us guys. He has us on Facebook and we’re doing a lot on Instagram, Pinterest, and staying on top of Google and keeping our information up to date there.
We have one gentleman in-house full-time who does all of our photography, videography and our website for us so it’s a real advantage. We can put fresh new content out very quickly at a very high quality. It’s a huge asset to the business.
We created his position two years ago. Prior to that, I would work very closely with advertising firms we worked with. It got to the point where they weren’t responding very quickly to what I needed done but I was spending a lot of money. When I added it up, I realized I could bring someone on full-time. Instead of putting in a work order to change something on my website, now I can do in 10 minutes what I would have waited two weeks for before.
Jewelry photography is very difficult. We brought the proper equipment for that and learned the techniques. Video is even more difficult. Whenever we create a really great custom piece, we photograph it and take a video and push that out on social media.
If you go out and try to sub-contact this kind of work, for photography you’ll easily pay $50 to $100 per ring and for video you could be paying $250 to $500 per ring.
I read somewhere that over 30 percent of people who do searches on the internet don’t go to a search engine, they go straight to YouTube and search the site to watch a video. It’s definitely where the future is headed.
We’ve come a long way. We’re doing things that a lot of jewelry stores aren’t even thinking about doing.
I’ve kind of caught the bug of the whole video aspect of social media, like Facebook Live and the idea of putting out video content as opposed to putting out just photographs and tweets.
I built a small television studio in some extra space that we have in our building. It’s really state of the art. I did a lot of research on it.
My YouTube channel is called Gems of Knowledge. The Gems of Knowledge series isn’t driven specifically to promote Bellman Jewelers but it aims to educate people about the jewelry industry. People locally recognize where that content is coming from.
We’ve produced maybe 10 episodes so far since starting two or three months ago. We’re not trying to create a new cable channel but we think the information we’re giving is valuable.
Pictured is the Bellman Jewelers’ state-of-the-art television and photography studio where the Bellman’s team creates social media content and video content for their YouTube channel, Gems of Knowledge.
NJ: Do you have e-commerce?
DB: We’re just starting. We’re going to switch our website over to Shopify.
Shopify is interesting because you build your website in Shopify and when you do that, everything on your site becomes saleable. We’re converting and we’re probably about a month away from being finished. It’s a big project.
NJ: What’s the best piece of advice you’d offer to other independent jewelry stores?
DB: The Google reviews seem to drive more people into my store than anything else.
At the end of the day, let’s say people hear about Bellman Jewelers … at some point they will always look at the Google reviews and compare those reviews to other stores.
When I’m shopping on Amazon, I put a lot of faith into products that have lots of good reviews. That makes me feel a whole lot more comfortable pulling the trigger on something I don’t know much about or a product I’ve never really heard of before. I’ve got to tell you, 99 percent of the time every product I’ve bought using reviews as the final determinate ended up being a good move.
When we have people come into the store, we ask them how they heard about us and they’ll mention that someone gave them our name but they’ll say, “It was really your Google reviews that made me come into the store.”
The thing that pushes them over the top and brings them in--or maybe doesn’t bring them in--are the Google reviews. They’re worth their weight in gold.
NJ: What’s a fun fact about you we can share with our readers?
DB: I’m taking helicopter lessons.
I needed something stimulating so I decided to take helicopter flying lessons and get my private pilot license. I take my lessons out of Portsmouth, New Hampshire on the coast and it’s just beautiful there.
Every time I take a lesson, I’m up 1,000 or 2,000 feet near the ocean, it’s just beautiful, it’s really a lot of fun.
Ashley Davisis the senior editor, fashion at National Jeweler, covering all things related to design, style and trends.
