Context
Christies Jewelers sells fine jewelry from a storefront in a College Station shopping mall, in a market shaped by Texas A&M University and the students and former students around it. The cases carry bridal rings alongside birthstone rings, pendants, necklaces, and earrings, pieces bought as gifts and keepsakes as often as for a single occasion. The store is Aggie owned and operated, a fact the owner was glad to advertise, and it keeps a website and social accounts alongside the storefront.
Demand follows the calendar. The Christmas season carries the bulk of the year, with Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, and other seasonal holidays behind it, and the store's habit is to price for everyday value rather than run advertised sales. By early 2021 two things were shifting around it. Local retail was coming out of a difficult year for storefronts and mall traffic, and the store was buying its inventory through domestic intermediaries rather than dealing with manufacturers abroad directly, which was the question it brought to TASK.
Challenge
Christies Jewelers is an Aggie-owned and operated jewelry store in a College Station mall, known for bridal rings, birthstone pieces, and everyday necklaces and earrings. Heading into 2021, the store wanted a more direct way to source its inventory and more ways to bring shoppers through the door, especially the student community, while building its presence online. The owner was looking for suppliers that were established and reliable and open to producing designs specific to the store, and had decided to put the store's energy into its online presence rather than a second spot in the mall. Most of the year's business arrives in a few seasonal peaks, and the store prefers everyday value across the case to advertised sales, so any new idea had to work within those habits. TASK was asked which ideas could be put to work quickly and which belonged to a longer horizon.
How the team worked
The team began with a written questionnaire to the owner covering sourcing requirements, best-selling categories, seasonal patterns, appetite for student promotions, and openness to in-store signage. The answers set the boundaries for everything that followed: what the store would and would not sell, what it wanted kept private, and which of the team's early ideas were already closed. From there the group split into two subteams, one on purchasing and distributor options, the other on marketing and foot traffic.
The sourcing subteam worked from wholesale catalogs and distributor websites, reading each one for the terms that actually govern an order rather than the catalog alone: minimum requirements, account setup, insurance and warranty, order tracking, how shipping is calculated, sales tax treatment, and whether the supplier could be spoken to directly. A member with prior retail management experience worked distributor contacts in parallel to test what the published terms left out.
The marketing subteam worked outward from the store's own street. Members walked and called the businesses nearest the mall to find gift retailers whose occasions overlapped with jewelry, then built each promotional idea on published research rather than instinct: rewards research for the loyalty program, giveaway studies for prize choice and entry mechanics, signage research for the sandwich board. Members split the calls and the research so each recommendation arrived with a source attached.
Over the spring the two threads produced a long list of ideas, which the team narrowed to five that could be implemented within the year, keeping the rest as longer-term suggestions. Each recommendation in the final document pairs the idea with the research behind it and, where useful, the tools or contacts needed to act on it. The engagement closed with a next-steps handoff and an open line to the team as the store began implementation.
Workstreams
- Researched wholesale jewelry distributors and profiled four candidates on product range, ordering terms, order insurance and warranty, shipping, sales tax treatment, and whether prices could be negotiated directly with the supplier.
- Shortlisted three neighboring businesses near the mall, a florist, a candle shop, and a gift arrangements shop, as candidates for joint promotions modeled on a well-known jewelry and bakery collaboration.
- Outlined a points-based loyalty program and grounded it in published research on what makes rewards programs hold customers over the long term.
- Built a giveaway and raffle playbook tied to seasonal peaks, with guidance on prize choice, entry mechanics, timing, common mistakes, and live streaming on Instagram and Facebook.
- Developed ways to express the store's Aggie-owned identity: an engagement discount tied to the Century Tree tradition, in-store banners behind the register, and a sidewalk sandwich board carrying promotions and new products.
- Recommended a sustainable social media routine, including a fixed posting schedule, scheduling software, and a simple brand kit of colors and fonts.
What the team found
- The distributors reviewed differed less on catalog breadth than on the terms attached to an order: insurance, warranty window, how shipping was calculated, and how sales tax was handled.
- Only some of them let a buyer reach the supplier directly, which is the point at which wholesale terms stop being fixed and become something a store can negotiate.
- The businesses closest to the mall sold gifts bought for the same occasions as jewelry, which made a joint seasonal promotion easier to explain to a shopper than a discount on its own.
- The published research on rewards pointed the same way each time: a program holds customers when its value clearly exceeds the effort of joining and when long-standing customers are recognized differently from new ones.
- Giveaways tended to fail for consistent reasons: a prize that was hidden or too thin to matter, entry steps that took too long, and timing that put the promotion up against everything else.
- The store's Aggie identity was the asset its national counterparts in the mall could not copy, and it read more naturally through in-store signage and campus traditions than through advertising.
What the client received
- Next-steps document narrowing the recommendations to five near-term actions, in priority order
- Comparison of four wholesale jewelry distributors on range, terms, insurance, and shipping
- Local partnership shortlist of nearby gift businesses, prepared for outreach
- Points-based loyalty program outline with the supporting loyalty research
- Giveaway and raffle playbook covering prize choice, entry mechanics, timing, and common mistakes
- Century Tree discount, Aggie-owned banner, and sandwich board concepts with sign sourcing options
- Social media toolkit: posting cadence, scheduling tools, brand kit guidance, and palette generators
Outcome
Christies Jewelers left the engagement with a short, ordered list of near-term actions and the research behind each one: distributor options to weigh against its current sourcing, a set of neighboring businesses to approach about joint promotions, a loyalty and giveaway playbook, and a clearer way to present its Aggie-owned identity in the store and online. The store could see which ideas were quick enough to start that year and which were longer-term, what to ask a distributor before committing, and how a consistent posting routine and brand kit would support whatever it chose to do next.
Recommendations
- Weigh the four wholesale distributors profiled against the store's current sourcing, comparing them on ordering terms, insurance and warranty, shipping basis, and whether the supplier can be reached directly.
- Approach the neighboring gift businesses on the shortlist about a joint seasonal promotion, modeled on the well-known jewelry and bakery pairing the team used as a reference.
- Introduce a points-based loyalty program that awards points on purchases and converts them into a discount, designed to recognize long-standing customers as well as new ones.
- Run giveaways and raffles at the seasonal peaks, with a prize worth entering, a short entry step, and the drawing streamed live on the store's social accounts.
- Express the Aggie-owned identity in the store itself: a discount tied to the Century Tree proposal tradition, banners behind the register, and a sandwich board outside carrying promotions and new products.
- Put social media on a fixed posting schedule using scheduling software, and settle a simple brand kit of colors and two or three fonts so posts stay quick to produce and consistent.
Next steps
- The client was handed a next-steps document narrowing everything the two sides had discussed to five actions the store could begin over the rest of the year, with the longer-term ideas kept separate.
- The client was handed distributor profiles with the terms of each arrangement laid out side by side, ready to be compared against the store's current sourcing.
- The client was handed a partnership shortlist of nearby businesses prepared for outreach, together with the collaboration model the idea was drawn from.
- The client was handed a loyalty and giveaway playbook covering prize choice, entry mechanics, timing, and the research behind each, plus a social media toolkit of scheduling tools and palette generators.
- The client was handed an open line to the team, with an invitation to raise questions on any recommendation as the store began putting them in place.