luxury index - Underwood`s Jewelers

AFFLUENT PAGE
luxury index
september/october 2009
The
TOY
Ultimate
GUIDE
Top Independents
A Buyer’s Guide
to the Best Jewelers
not for individual sale
Raising The Steaks
Allen Brothers Delivers
Steak-House Quality By Mail
Lithe & Lethal
Lamborghini’s
Murciélago LP 670-4
1
top
independent
jewelers
Underwood Jewelers
Jacksonville, Fla. (904) 398-9741, www.underwoodjewelers.com
Underwood Jewelers,
an 81-year-old retailer with three stores in Jacksonville,
Fla., has what some employers might consider a risky retention policy. The company insists
that every prospective sales associate undertake hours of coursework and training in order
to become credentialed by the American Gem Society (AGS), an industry organization that
ensures its members adhere to high ethical and professional standards.
“We pay for it 100 percent, including travel, but we don’t ask them to sign anything, so
they can quit anytime and go to work for our competitors,” says Clayton Bromberg, President
of Underwood Jewelers since 1988, and a 2003 inductee into the National Jeweler Retailer
Hall of Fame. “If we’re making them sign a contract, it doesn’t challenge our management
to retain them.”
Underwood’s staff of 38 credentialed AGS professionals (the largest of any jeweler east of
the Mississippi) and its extremely low turnover rate speaks of the policy’s resounding success.
It also explains why Bromberg received the jewelry industry’s single most prestigious honor,
The Robert M. Shipley Award, in 2004.
“We expect our employees to have a thirst for knowledge,” he says. “We like to say they’re
‘people like us,’ meaning that they’re like the people they’re waiting on, maybe not from an
income standpoint but certainly from an education standpoint.”
Known in the jewelry trade as a guild store, a term of prestige referring to retailers who
belong to AGS, Underwood has the merchandise to back up its sterling reputation. David
Yurman, Judith Ripka, Mikimoto, Rolex, and Roberto Coin are the retailer’s core brands.
Its diamond selection is, likewise, none too shabby. In fact, Underwood is at the forefront
of a burgeoning movement to leverage technology to measure a diamond’s light performance.
To help explain the stone-buying process to its customers, the company recently produced a
30-minute DVD. Designed as a customer giveaway, it is available on the retailer’s website and
has, thanks to viral marketing, helped spread the word about Underwood in cyberspace.
“Since we launched the DVD in November 2008, our name has been Googled more
than a million times,” Bromberg says. “Nobody else was doing it in the jewelry business and
it worked out well beyond our expectations.”
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