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I wrote a book.
Not because a consultant told me to. Not because I had a brand strategy. I wrote it because I kept watching guys walk into my store looking like they’d been asked to defuse a bomb, and nobody in this industry was talking to them like human beings. That’s different. Not different as a strategy — different as an instinct. I didn’t know it at the time. I wasn’t aware anyone else was doing it.
It’s called The Inappropriate Guide to Buying an Engagement Ring. It’s written for men mostly. At the end of every chapter, I tell the reader the same thing: put this book down and get yourself to an independent jeweler. Not charity. Just truth. That’s where the real experience is.
I’m a third-generation jeweler in West Bend, Wisconsin. Koehn & Koehn was established in 1919. We’re not small — we’re us. Not the 10,000 square foot showroom with the Rolex case and the marble floors, but not a shop trying to survive either. (Okay, I guess we all are, huh?) We’re exactly what we are, and we’ve learned to be good at it. There’s a freedom in that.
There’s a customer out there who doesn’t want the big room. Who walks into that place and immediately feels like he’s being sized up. That customer exists in every market in this country, and if you’re a store like mine, he’s yours if you want him. The trick is you actually have to be different to get him. Not different, like everyone is different now — the reels, the TikToks, the “authentic content” that somehow looks exactly like every other store’s authentic content. I’m not slamming any of that. But I’ll ask you the same question I ask myself: is it closing sales or getting likes?
Likes don’t pay for braces. Likes don’t fund the vacation. Someone opening their wallet is the only metric I’ve ever been able to take to the bank.
Successful independent jewelry stores spend 5, 6, or 7% of gross sales on marketing. Most of us do. And a lot of it works — sort of. It gets eyeballs. It builds impressions. It keeps our name out there. We’re guilty of it too. But ask yourself honestly how much of it you can actually measure. Ask yourself how you know — really know — that a specific dollar you spent turned into a sale. It’s painful how hard that question is to answer.
I came to know author and business coach Mike Michalowicz over the past year. He wrote the book Get Different, and when I read it, I had one of those moments where you feel simultaneously validated and annoyed that someone said it first. He writes that our own fear of standing out is the number one reason we struggle to get noticed. People lose the game of marketing because they play by rules that don’t even exist—Mike’s right. And I’d add this: the fear is worse in jewelry because we’ve spent decades watching the big players set the standard, only to try to match it on a fraction of their budget. There are best practices we can all learn from the big stores, and we should. But there’s a freedom in not being them that most of us never cash in on.
The Savannah Bananas cashed in on it. When Jesse Cole bought a struggling minor league baseball team in Georgia, he sold two tickets in the first three months. Today, they have a half-million-person waitlist and sell out every game. They didn’t get there by doing what every other team was doing. They asked what was broken about the experience and fixed it in ways nobody else had the nerve to try. Different didn’t just work — it became the whole business.
My book turned out to be something I didn’t expect.
When someone books an appointment through our website to look at engagement rings — engagement ring appointments only — we now send them an email with a Kindle version before they come in. It’s part of how we operate. Not because I ran the numbers and built a strategy around it. Because I had a hunch, tried it, and it felt right, so we kept doing it.
Do they read it? Not really. They browse. They flip through it. But they come in differently than they would have otherwise. More settled. Less defensive. Four out of six of those appointments bought a ring on their first visit. Total revenue: just over thirty-two thousand dollars. Two of those four were already referrals, so I’ll give credit where it’s due. But the big question is: did the book hurt any of them? The only thing I know for certain is they bought.
The email with the book is a better differentiator than a polite confirmation email with a discount code.
We also keep physical copies at the store. When a guy says he wants to think about it—and let’s be honest, it happens more than we’d like—we hand him the book, with the salesperson’s business card in it, on his way out. So three days later, when he’s sitting on his couch, and something clicks, he knows exactly who to call. It’s not a hard sell. It’s a thread back to us. It’s different in a way that costs almost nothing and feels completely natural because it’s genuinely useful to him.
I once calculated the ROI on the physical handouts in my store. It was 28,317%. Then I stopped tracking it because, at some point, measuring a ten-dollar investment felt absurd.
I wrote this book to help a guy who was lost. That’s it. Everything else came after that. None of it was planned. All of it was different.
Different from what the big stores do. Different from what the marketing vendors are selling you. Different from what the store down the street is doing.
Just different. And it worked.
Do something genuinely useful for your customer that nobody else is doing.
Then measure it in money you can take to the bank.
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