The Chimera Advantage - What it Means For YOU March 9, 2022 17:54
We are in our 20th year in business in Lowell, our favorite little town in Michigan this year. We are still a mom and pop store with the help of our good friend Jere Keyes who comes in one day a week to help Julie with repairs.
We have a goal this year to promote The #Chimera Advantage (put the hash tag there for practice!). What the heck do we mean by that? Stay with me.
We are small players, we do not have 200 natural mined or lab grown diamonds in stock for you to choose from. At first, that might seem to be a negative, but let me give you some reasons that is actually The Chimera Advantage.
- The Chimera Advantage is that we want to sell YOU the diamond YOU want, not the one we have money invested in. In the last 6 months I have had three people who came in for a particular diamond who had been to other stores who actually tried to talk them OUT of the particular shape or clarity/color combination they wanted and steer them to a diamond they had in stock. Cliff will listen to what you want, make some phone calls and bring in 3-4 diamonds that fit YOUR parameters for you to choose from.
- By not tying up huge amounts of money in inventory, we can be very competitive in our diamond prices. That saves YOU money and allows you to get the best diamond for your situation (see #1.)
Repairs - unlike the big box stores we LOVE repairs. Pssst- the salespeople in the Mall do not make money on repairs, that is why they try to sell you something new instead of fixing what you have. The Chimera Advantage is two fold - because repairs represent about 30-40% of our business, we welcome repairs AND we do them right here in the store. We don't ship repairs to a repair center or somewhere off site. The work is done here.
If we can repair this ring........
Custom Design - there are two ways to make jewelry: Fabrication and Lost Wax Casting. The Chimera Advantage is that we can do both. Julie is a fabricator - she bends, cuts, saws, solders and basically moves precious metals around to make her jewelry and to make jewelry for others.
The other method involves sketches, CAD images, making a wax mold, casting that mold in a precious metal. Cliff works with a couple of people who do lost wax casting and our custom jewelry prices are extremely competitive.