An offer no reasonable man could refuse.

I’d gotten to that Red-Star table by positioning myself early and ugly in that regard. As a Master Gemologist Appraiser—one of 41 in the U.S.—I understood the physics and optics of gemstones as well as any in the South Hampton Roads Area, and what constituted value in a gemstone. I’d apprehended early what true added value was, and, more important still, how to achieve it. As a marketer, I saw and deeply felt how important a personality-driven brand could be at the local level, and how that brand could be affirmed, reaffirmed, and then reaffirmed again not only in my showcases and displays but outside the stores as well, by my position in my community. My concept of of the “personality-driven local brand” rested on my worldview that a business must not only make a profit for the stakeholders, but be a blessing to the community, much as what financial guru Jim Collins has written, filling the unfillable hole in a market, which he referenced in his book, Good to Great (one I highly recommend.)

Diamonds, one of the jeweler’s two great income-streams (timepieces are the other), had always been sold as a commodity. Now these chips of crystallized carbon were undergoing a branding themselves, with premiums going to jewelers, cutters, and manufacturers able to differentiate their stones not only from the guy down the road but from the WalMart out by the interstate: Believe it or not, WalMart has been the world’s No. 1 diamond merchant for almost two decades: At the height of our expansion, for example, December 2005, our regional market share had reached seven percent. WalMart, which had already begun to lose share to online merchants such as Blue Nile, was down to eight percent of diamond sales, nationally. That sales volume of WalMart and the other Big Boxes by itself crippled many an independent jeweler throughout the late-20^th Century downturns.

Their market share owed as much to their reach as buyers as to their omnipresence in the American mall. A jeweler’s trade is as dependent upon his relationship with his suppliers as his relationship with his customers. There was no competing with them on price, volume, or credit-terms. More crucially, however, we couldn’t compete for the supply of diamonds typically sold. Ninety percent of the vendors I would fight to get a parcel of one-carat diamonds from would have spent five, ten years simply to get in the door at a Vendors Day in Bentonville, AR.

The only solution was to sell different and demonstrably better stones, and to use my expertise in branding, and my personal local brand to outrun the big guys. It was a slippery slope: As a client of two of the first national diamond branders, Boston, MA’s Hearts on Fire and northern California’s Eight-Star, I understood the benefits but also the inevitable shortcomings of a retailer’s relationship with such companies, and had begun my own “private-label” diamond and diamond-jewelry lines. Those private-label brands—and I soon added David Nygaard timepieces as well—could at times be a logistical nightmare, but they helped guide a path to the most visible, accountable, and margin-enhancing sweet spots of the supply chain. It was a path that would take me from being yet another buyer of goods from national manufacturers, yet another guy walking the aisles at trade-shows, to being a local private-labeler, and, inevitably, an overseas manufacturer, and top notch jewelry designer  myself.