Reading Time: 8 minutes
Key takeaways
• The concept of “”changing the weather”” implies that altering your immediate environment or terrain is the most effective way to change behaviors and achieve new outcomes.
• The jewelry industry thrives on selling identity, stories, and emotional connections rather than just physical objects or materials.
• Successful retailers create spaces and experiences that allow customers to easily visualize a future version of themselves, their memories, or their aspirations.
I got to see and meet Jesse Itzler at JCK this year. Fantastic show, by the way. Five out of five stars. Would exhibit again.
Family’s live-in Navy SEAL identified.
Source: https://nypost.com/2015/11/03/familys-live-in-navy-seal-identified/
Meeting Jesse was the high point of the show for me. I was as star-struck as a nun with front-row seats to see the Pope. If you don’t follow him, you should. He’s a self-made billionaire, entrepreneur, endurance athlete, and one of those rare people who somehow makes voluntarily suffering sound like a recreational activity. I’m still riding the high from his keynote in Vegas.
Jesse is the author of Living with a SEAL. If you’re not familiar with it, the premise is wonderfully absurd. After becoming successful, Jesse realized that all the friction had quietly disappeared from his life. He had the businesses, the money, the family, and all the conveniences that come with success. The problem was that he suspected all that comfort might be making him soft. After all, friction gets a bad reputation, but friction is also what sharpens an edge. Remove enough resistance, and eventually you stop getting sharper.
So Jesse did what any reasonable person would do.
Which is to say, something completely unreasonable.
He hired a Navy SEAL to live with him.
The SEAL then spent the next month making Jesse’s life miserable through long runs, random challenges, impossible workouts, and enough physical punishment to make most people start shopping for mobility scooters. Most readers walk away from the book with lessons about discipline, grit, and mental toughness. Those lessons are certainly there. The book does a fantastic job of showing that most of us are capable of far more than we think.
But that wasn’t the lesson that stayed with me.
The thing that stuck was Jesse’s conclusion. The more I thought about it, the more I realized the SEAL wasn’t really a trainer. He was a landscaper. Human landscaping, not manscaping, which is an entirely different service. The SEAL wasn’t there to teach Jesse how to do pushups. He was there to reshape the terrain Jesse lived in. Different terrain creates different behavior, and different behavior creates different outcomes.
Looking back, Jesse wasn’t really hiring a Navy SEAL.
He was renting a new climate.
The SEAL changed the weather. The weather changed the behavior. The behavior changed Jesse.
And that’s when I started noticing the same principle all over the jewelry industry.
Take bridal, for example. Nobody walks into a jewelry store looking for compressed carbon. That’s not what they’re buying. They’re buying a proposal, a future, and a story they’ll tell for the next forty years. The ring matters, of course, but the environment surrounding that ring is doing a tremendous amount of the heavy lifting: the anticipation, the planning, the dinner reservation, the family reactions, the photographs. The ring is the artifact. The future is the product.
Once I noticed that, I started seeing the pattern everywhere.
Permanent jewelry isn’t really about chains. People aren’t lining up because they’ve suddenly developed a fascination with chain construction. They’re buying the experience, the ritual, and the memory. The chain comes home with them. The story stays behind.
The same thing happens with engravables, memorial jewelry, class rings, birthstones, and family heirlooms. If you’ve been in this industry long enough, you’ve probably watched customers become emotional over pieces that weren’t particularly expensive. That’s because meaning doesn’t follow a pricing formula. A memorial pendant containing a loved one’s handwriting can be worth more emotionally than a flawless diamond. A class ring isn’t valuable because of the metal. It’s valuable because it serves as a tiny time machine. One glance and you’re seventeen again.
The more I looked around, the more I started to wonder if we’re actually in the jewelry business at all.
We’re in the identity business.
Faith jewelry isn’t selling metal. It’s selling connection. Memorial jewelry isn’t selling pendants. It’s selling remembrance. Bridal isn’t selling diamonds. It’s selling a future. The object matters, but it isn’t the whole story. More often than not, the object is physical proof of a story already unfolding in someone’s mind.
We discovered this ourselves with men’s jewelry. One thing we learned years ago was that most men don’t actually dislike jewelry. Many don’t think jewelry is for them. That’s a completely different problem. Once they stop and try something on, many of them love it. The challenge isn’t convincing them to like jewelry. The challenge is helping them imagine themselves wearing it.
That’s where concepts like the Man Cave came from. Not because every guy secretly wants a military-themed display. The idea wasn’t to build a jewelry fixture. The idea was to build a familiar environment, a man’s domain, the kind of place where he already feels comfortable. A place filled with signals that tell him, “You belong here.” Once a guy feels the category is for him, the conversation changes completely.
The funny thing is that the more I chased this idea around, the more places I found it. At one point, I compared jewelry stores to gyms, which sounds ridiculous until you think about it for a second. Nobody walks into either one as the person they want to become. They walk in, hoping to become that person. A gym doesn’t really sell dumbbells any more than a jewelry store sells metal. What people are really buying is access to a future version of themselves. Stronger. More confident. More connected. More accomplished. The equipment happens to be different.
Which brings me back to Jesse.
The funny thing is that Jesse thought he was hiring a Navy SEAL. Looking back, he was trying to create a new environment. The SEAL changed the weather. The weather changed the behavior. The behavior changed Jesse.
And the more I look around this industry, the more I think the best retailers are doing the same thing. They’re creating environments where customers can picture something they couldn’t picture five minutes earlier. Maybe a future. Maybe a memory. Maybe a version of themselves.
Which makes me wonder what environment you’re creating.
Not just in your store.
In your business.
In your life.
If the results you’re getting aren’t the ones you want, maybe the first thing to change isn’t the goal.
Maybe it’s the weather.
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