The Front Page

There are three things I thought I would never see in this industry: (a) receiving gemstone parcels in the US Mail from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, (b) dealing with a US$100 million dollar fraud fiasco involving a member of the feldspar group, and (c) writing a business article on fluorite as a revenue stream for jewelers. These are strange times indeed. However, with this edition of our newsletter all three of these have come true. Perhaps the third is not so strange if we think about it. Fluorite comes in a very unique set of rainbow colors that can contain more of the colors of the rainbow within one stone. as you see at left. In spite of its lack of hardness in a range that is normally accepted for a material to qualify as a gemstone, if set properly in pendants or earrings fluorite can become a major revenue stream if a jeweler just knows how to romance it. Indeed, when the concept was first presented to me I responded: Fabulous....FLOURITE??? But yes indeed, Fabulous Fluorite!

In this day of having to get creative to maintain a marketing edge, we need to remember that what we like, our customers usually like also. Sometimes this allows us to get outside of the traditional boundaries of what is proper in a jewelry or gemstone operation and go for what is of interest to your clients rather than what is being represented to you as the "normal" inventory by the traditional industry media. For that reason, today we want to go a bit toward the collectors route of jewelry store inventory and talk about what we have phun in calling those Phantastic Phantoms!