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“It’s not about jewelry for the masses.
It’s about one person, one couple, one ring, one situation, one
timeline, one budget,” said Craig Warburton of Austin & Warburton
Jewelers in Ann Arbor.
Owners Craig and Brenda Warburton say they give their full attention to
each customer and project. The couple divides the business into their
distinct areas of expertise—Brenda is the jeweler and Craig is the
businessman. They trust each other in their respective areas without much
interference and, together, the team is successful.
 The
store is unique because Brenda designs and makes nearly 100 percent of
the pieces. It was Brenda’s talent as a jeweler that led to the
couple’s getting into retail.
Brenda began as a bench jeweler, doing wholesale work for a variety of
retailers—sizing rings, making repairs and doing some custom design
and manufacturing. For about 10 years she worked with many stores of all
sizes and saw every level of quality.
“I learned so much about how to make—and how not
to make—quality jewelry from seeing the work of others—from
rings manufactured in China to expertly crafted pieces from New York,”
explained Brenda.
Over time, she and Craig realized that she was spending the bulk of her
time on repairs and sizings, which were much less profitable and did not
satisfy her artistically.
“I would sometimes have to redo an inexpensive ring repair five
times because of the poor workmanship of the original ring,” said
Brenda.
Craig had been a manager of a plating company and was also ready for a
new challenge. When the two of them made the leap to go into their own
business by buying out Austin Diamond Company upon Jack Austin’s
retirement, it was a revelation, said Craig.
“You would have needed a baseball bat to knock the smiles off our
faces that first year,” he said. “First was the relief of
not having to do work that was more tedious than rewarding, then there
was the excitement of figuring out our own way.”
They opened their first store on Washington Street in Ann Arbor, with
little experience in retail and no former owner or family tradition to
build their systems on.
“That was the beautiful part, actually—no baggage about how
things should be done,” said Craig. “We figured it out from
scratch—how to lay out the showroom, how to price pieces based on
what they cost to make—without worrying about doing it how it had
always been done.”
Because the previous owner’s business had been by appointment only,
it was associated with unavailability. “For the first week we were
open, no one came in!” he remembered.
The business has moved twice since that first store—first to Liberty
Street in the heart of downtown, where parking nightmares began to hurt
sales, and then to its current location on Main Street. Close to the heart
of downtown, it has a small parking lot right out front—a necessity
when customers might make several visits before walking out with a custom-designed
and produced piece.
Inside, the showroom is Craig’s territory, with the help of store
manager Stacy VanWasshnova. Brenda’s territory is the back half
of the building, where she moves between three work areas—a jeweler’s
bench, a casting room and her office.
In Brenda’s office is the investment that has allowed the biggest
advancements in their business: a CAD/CAM system called the Gemvision
Matrix, on which Brenda now designs and creates most of her original pieces.
Computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacture (CAM) have
vastly aided Brenda’s process.
“Using the CAD software, I can design pieces and let customers see
possible options—different metals or different stones, for example—before
the piece is made,” she explained.
Many jewelry designers now have CAD software, but fewer also purchase
the expensive milling machine that takes that design and creates an exact
wax model of the piece, which is used to cast it. Having it in the store
speeds the process tremendously.
“It’s quicker than picking out a stone and a mounting at the
mall and having them send it out to be set and shipped back,” Brenda
said. One of Craig’s challenges is convincing the consumer that
it doesn’t take longer.
The Warburtons were very early adopters of the expensive system, illustrating
Craig’s business motto: “If you don’t have your foot
on the accelerator, you might as well hit the brakes and get out of the
car.”
The saying summarizes Craig’s view of the pace of change in business,
no matter what the area, and the need to be ahead of the curve. “Today’s
business owners are not just managing stores, we’re managing change,”
said Craig.
For all the high-tech skills and equipment, Brenda’s artistic talent
is equally evident in her 10 jewelry design awards. They include four
from the Michigan Jewelers Association design competition and three Spectrum
Awards, given by the American Gem Trade Association and considered one
of the most respected and prestigious creative awards in the industry.
Craig’s skills complement Brenda’s. He focuses on the business
itself, especially the marketing of the store and the products, both online
and off.
He is particularly focused now on increasing traffic to the store’s
websites. The business operates two distinct websites: one for the store
and another one dedicated to a line that he believes will sell well on
the Internet, featuring a popular parent-child pendant that can be customized
with birthstones (www.theparentandchild.com).
The store website is primarily informational, with a video that introduces
Craig, Brenda and Stacey and gives visitors a taste of the store’s
unique approach to jewelry design. It includes thousands of photos of
Brenda’s designs and much other useful information.
For the Parent and Child website, Craig is using Google’s AdWords
program, which offers pay-per-click advertising and site-targeted online
advertising. To get the ad campaign up and running more effectively, Craig
opted to use Google’s Jumpstart program, in which a Google AdWords
expert consults with you, sets up the campaign with your input and checks
in with you for weekly adjustments.
The program just recently became profitable after a few months of optimizing,
and Craig believes it was worth the effort and expense.
Craig describes Google AdWords as the “science” of advertising,
but says it takes the art or “magic” of advertising to turn
those clicks, or store visits, into sales. He credits an advertising course
offered by Roy H. Williams, a.k.a. “The Wizard of Ads,” with
giving him the skills he has used to build the business.
After attending Williams’s Wizard Academy in Austin, Texas, Craig
took the store’s radio advertising budget from $500 a month to $6,000,
and the business grew immediately.
“Learning to really understand advertising was probably the single
most important factor in increasing our sales,” said Craig.
This article was written by Amy Buttery, Michigan Retailer staff writer.
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