You will soon realize that this is my first blog. Not to worry, I promise I will get better. Or not. Either way, I expect this will be an educational experience for me, and I hope it will be an entertaining one for you.
If you haven’t guessed already, my name is Steve, and I am at least partly responsible for the web store at http://store.gemsevermore.com. Credit for the store’s layout goes first to Yahoo! for providing the rather restrictive store template used. I can claim credit for setting up categories and listing the items for sale. My wife, Sue, has done a wonderful job choosing colors, designing graphics, and Doing Something About That Boring First Page! Let’s all give Sue a hand, I don’t pay her enough.
We started out with the usual fascination with gemstones and fine jewelry. We bought a lot of it at neighborhood jewelry stores. Then we noticed that both quality and price at those jewelry stores varied by quite a bit, but price seemed to be more related to the poshness of the digs than the quality of the wares. We started buying more at discount jewelry malls, until we found a jeweler whose work we really liked. Then we bought exclusively from him.
We took the news of his retirement last year with very mixed emotions. Happiness, because he is finally getting a well-earned rest. Sadness, because he will no longer be available to make beautiful custom jewelry for us. Finally, betrayal, because we just can’t get the same rapport with the kid who took over his store. Oh, well, we will find another jeweler some day.
One of the things we liked about our jeweler friend was that he was honest and informative. I once spent over an hour just discussing the merits and marketing of Australian diamonds with him. I learned a very great deal from him, and bought more jewelry than I could really afford from him.
For better or worse, this relationship somehow instilled in me the confidence to go forth and seek to buy loose gemstones. We bought some really nice gems, and we bought some pigs, and we bought some parcels with a little of both in them. We quickly learned to tell the good from the bad, but since both our budget and our taste run to the relatively small, we ended up with a lot of stones at or below 1 carat each. This may be fine for a personal jewelry collection, but it is not the best thing for an internet gem seller, but more on that later.
Then, we got an ebay account, and discovered that there was money to be made, if not a lot, in selling melee diamonds there. We were able to acquire quite a few carats of 1-5 point diamonds, and we proceeded to parcel them up and offer them for bid on ebay. That worked out pretty well until ebay changed its price structure and we hit a dry spell at the same time.
We took a long hard look at what we were doing, and decided we didn’t want to peddle tiny diamonds forever. So, we closed up the ebay shop, gathered our collection of colored stones, and opened up a website that we called Gems Evermore.
And so it begins.
