The Noviye Izvestiya daily reminds of major trends in jewelry design in the current season.
Flowers turned out to be the dominant jewelry motif this year. Flora may be found almost in every collection and despite it is one of the most favorite designer themes for all time, this year brought about a particularly great number of its species.
For many centuries animals remained the second most popular composition. However, all those who made a stake on this year’s totem and produced jewelry adornments with little mice lost the game. It appeared that buyers were more bent to eternal values in the animal world, namely to little horses, bears, leopards, and zebras. This time the best animalist whims belong to Cartier. Although, as in the previous year, trifle animals are so far very much behind fancy birds, unicorns, bats, reptiles and insects.
It seems that nothing can edge out froglings, snakes, ladybirds and bees from the jewelry Olympus. Butterflies are also there again. As five years ago, they turned into the most popular motif (second to flowers) and mercilessly ousted spiderlings from favorites. Hoary skulls vanished together with arthropods. Finally, lace was substituted for spider web – another new and at the same time eternal trend. The “silk moth” group this year was joined by Palmiero, Chanel, Chopard, Korloff, Roberto Coin and other fashion houses.
The pirates of the Caribbean Sea found their way to jewelry – the maritime themes are keeping the jewelry world in their clingy tentacles for a couple of years already. Evidently, to close this subject Van Cleef & Arpels released a whole collection under the title L’Atlantide announced in three parts. The collection presents all sorts of fishes, seahorses and a necklace of “weeds.” Fishes surfaced also in Stephen Webster’s designs. Though, the most popular motif with the majority of designers this summer was the one featuring five-pointed sea stars.
In the daily’s opinion, another important piece of news was rehabilitation of necklaces and pendants. If just the last year even celebrities shunned from jewelry on their necks trying to make do with a dozen bracelets and long earrings walking the red carpet, today necklaces returned to their former place – in both the proper and figurative sense of the word. Bracelets, on the contrary, slightly diminished in their numbers, though stayed. And of course, long and glary earrings and brooches are as before in vogue. But unexpectedly the main jewelry trend of this year was rendered by long gold chains with tiny pendants on their links or without. They emerged in jewelry made by Chanel, Cartier, de Grisogono, Dior Joaillerie, Tiffany and Pasquale Bruni. As for the color of gold, forecasts turned amiss: the pink precious metal, which as far back as one year ago was predicted oblivion, is still with us – along with white and yellow gold. Besides, nielloed gold giving a touch of mystery to jewelry is once again in the peak point. The main thing in this situation is to obtain the right combination.
To predict jewelry sales and to monitor movements in customers’ tastes RosYuvelirExport performed a questionnaire survey of visitors coming to the exhibition at the Moscow Gostiny Dvor Arcade. Its results were to some extent expected, but in some part they set one thinking about demand fluctuations, the Jewelry Russia weekly believes.
The survey polled 600 visitors of the largest jewelry show in Russia. It was important that this was not the opinion of a “statistically average Russian,” but exactly of the one who was predisposed to purchasing jewelry for a variety of reasons.
In all appearances, the time is passing when men considered jewelry “women’s business” – almost 38 percent of visitors to the show were men. These were not only and not so much those who were just waging their purses for the sake of their sweet ones. These were intending purchasers, who came to the Gostiny Dvor Arcade not to admire beauty, but to buy some of the jewelry they fell for.
As it turned out, men used to buy about two or three jewelry pieces in a year, while women drove the figure to ten. It’s an easy thing to draw a proportion, but this is not the point. Probably, it is not by chance that the number of men’s purchases matches the number of the largest jewelry exhibitions in this country. There is a curious psychological aspect to this: men like to make expensive purchases in full view of everybody flaunting their financial capacities. However, such motivation is quite alien to women. For them, buying a jewelry piece has always a touch of intimacy and confidence.
The questionnaire proved that the best buyer is the buyer of about thirty years of age. This buyer is still in want of many things and fortunately can afford them. Shopping in a jewelry paradise is a perfect habitat for a vacationing manager or a programmer tired of computers on a rare day off or an athlete turned an Olympic hope that made up his or her mind how to spend the prize money awarded for a recent victory. Incidentally, 25 percent of them are ready to purchase more than ten jewelry adornments a year. And every fifth of them is willing to spend more than 50,000 roubles.
Jewelry purchases made online in Russia are so far on the backyard of buying interest. The romantic Russians want to feel the touch of their would-be purchase before they buy. Women love to admire it and get counseled by their best female friend. So vendors should better make their stakes so far on sales at exhibitions and brick-and-mortar stores.
The survey introduced some elaboration into the dynamics of customer attitude towards metal color. Almost 53 percent of men and 48 percent of women gave their preference to white metal. The yellow metal so much adorned in Russia quite recently is now in the second place.
There were educed two more noteworthy figures during this survey. As many as 60 percent of silver consumers were young girls. Probably the reason was their financial abilities. And secondly, only 9 percent of buyers took interest in platinum items.
Whereas steel pieces enjoyed stable attention: almost 11 percent of buyers were not embarrassed that their adornments could be viewed upon as bijouterie. There appeared quite a number of those enthralled with embellishing such pieces using gems.
According to the survey, the most important thing for women is the wide range of products displayed. It’s quite another matter with men. Thoroughness is felt in everything: they are guided by their personal experience, service quality and price. Currently, Russian men spend one and a half times more for jewelry than women.
And finally, here are some of the opinions expressed by several pace setting companies operating on the Russian jewelry market.
Olga Senkevich, Deputy Director of the Krasnoselski Yuvelir Trading House:
- Children’s jewelry pieces find a ready sale. I noted a long time ago that parents are nowadays more and more dandling their children. This is a good sign. In Russia it is a long-time tradition to manufacture high-quality jewelry using enameled coatings. However, if before the revolution enamel was popular with any age, now it finds a market only in children’s adornments. I am a partisan of Russian jewelry whose quality and design is currently improved. I would like to advise buyers to purchase only products made by Russian manufacturers.
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Rajesh Gandhi, General Manager of Choron Diamond:
- I think that the Russian jewelry market will continue its growth. Today Russian buyers may afford expensive things. The diamond group products are in great demand; there is an emerging market for exclusive adornments such as for instance necklaces and brooches, earlier non-topical. For the September exhibition we are preparing 250 new pieces in the diamond group and we are increasing the model range of “stoneless” jewelry and offering a wider male line and an exclusive collection.
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Snezhana Leontyeva, Zolotaya Liga, Trading House Golden Blues:
- The majority of jewelry buyers know only diamonds and emeralds. When eight years ago we were among the first to start using color sapphires nobody even heard of them. Now we are moving tanzanites, tourmalines of various colors, color diamonds and rare kinds of pearls to the Russian market. We have our own customers – they are middle-class people, those who can value the beauty of a gem and are not afraid of new things.
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Dmitry Kuntsev, Marketing Chief of OAO PO Kristall:
- Today it is possible to note several trends intensely evident on the internal market of diamond jewelry.
1. Shifting of consumer interest towards large and medium size diamonds. This judgment may be made from studies performed by our company’s experts at jewelry exhibitions in Russia.
2. Orientation to clear and high quality products. There is gradual movement of buyers’ demand from relatively cheap diamonds having low characteristics to more expensive diamonds having high color and clarity specifications.
3. Interest towards fancy cuts and non-traditional cuts.
For a jewelry company exclusive cut will just underline the traditions of jewelry business in Russia. This opens unlimited opportunities for creative work, since the experience accumulated by an enterprise in designing new cuts allows making unique gems meant for jewelers. Besides, this emphasizes exclusivity of products issued by companies and facilitates demand for a jeweler’s work which pushes up the profits of a jewelry company.
4. Interest towards fancy colors. As no other gems, color diamonds combine luxury, elegance and beauty. The uniqueness of such a complicated natural process is stressed by that only one stone of 10,000 colorless diamonds has saturated color.
5. More active attitude of remote provinces in Russia.
6. Increased consumers’ interest towards loose diamonds turns into another line of jewelry trade.
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Igor Tikhov, General Manager of the Krasnoyarsk Non-Ferrous Metals Plant named after V.N. Gulidov (Krastsvetmet):
- First of all, we are preparing new jewelry collections, including in particular hollow-body chains. This is a new line in Russia. We are also getting ready with collections made of platinum for young people, diamond platinum jewelry for the young generation and middle class. We are also making men’s collections of palladium. I would like to remind that in 2000 we were the first to say that palladium should be returned its noble face and that palladium should become another jewelry metal. Formerly palladium was used to manufacture watch cases. Now up to 30 tons of palladium are used to produce jewelry. It has turned into fashionable metal. China is using it in great quantities. Even the British, who were opposed to the concept that palladium was a jewelry metal, today issued a booklet to support jewelers using palladium.
To make our position on the jewelry market stronger we started rather difficult work to promote our own brands. We have two of them. The first one – Krastsvetmet – is understandable for wholesale operators. However, if we shall not introduce our brand into retail sales and if we shall not be recognized at the level of shopwindows it will be difficult to advance our jewelry products. This is why we have designed a new retail-oriented brand – Krasberry.
