Whether you own a jewelry shop or have a private collection, keeping an inventory is a smart choice. It helps you keep track of everything you own, what you’ve sold and how much it sold for. It’s an easy way to ensure nothing is ever stolen or missing from your collection.
This is especially important in businesses that keep a number of small pieces in their inventory. Even delicate jewelry can be worth a significant amount, so knowing where all of your pieces are is important to maintaining the financial health of your business.
In this blog, we’ll walk through some tips on how to manage your jewelry inventory so you can feel confident everything is in its place.
Use Software
The first thing you should do when taking inventory of jewelry is to invest in software that can help. Jewelry inventory often comprises thousands of pieces, which is too cumbersome to count by hand or use paper methods. Jewelry inventory software takes the monotony out of the process and is more reliable at keeping track of lots of items.
In addition to helping you track items, your software can also help you with sales reports, measuring your vendor mix and assessing your entire collection. It’s a powerful tool to ensure you have a diverse business that can attract of variety of interests and customers.
Label Items
This is another key aspect of managing your inventory. You have to include labels and cataloging systems in your business so there is a way to track items aside from their descriptive properties. There are a few different ways you can label items:
- Barcodes — this is the most advanced way to label your jewelry but also requires the technology to scan and read the code
- Item numbers — these can be computer generated to make creating labels easier and automatically attach a number to an item
- Private system — you can also come up with your own system of labeling items, but remember that it should be repeatable and easy to understand by anyone in your business
Organize Storage
When running a jewelry business, you’ll inevitably have backstock in your shop. It might be tempting to keep numerous boxes all stacked against a wall or strewn about a back room, but this isn’t an efficient way to manage your backstock. It only makes it easier for things to go missing or for you to forget what you have on hand.
Instead, add some organization to your storage space. Put up shelves and label each area for what type of jewelry you’ll store there. You can purchase professional jewelry storage containers to ensure it’s safe and protected, but also allows you to put more than one piece in a box. This will help to consolidate your backstock and make items easier to find.
Take Pictures
This is one step many people skip or forget about, but it’s incredibly important to preserve your inventory. Take a photo of each piece in your collection with its label. You can store these on a company computer, a personal flash drive or in a cloud-based system. Just make sure you have pictures of each item in its original condition.
Having photos helps you in the event an item is stolen or you need to file an insurance claim. You can prove the item was in good condition, show the authorities what it looks like and back up your claims for its worth. Plus, if you ever need to dig through your collection to find something, you can simply look through the photos instead of opening all of your storage boxes.
Make a Contingency Plan
Customer habits in the jewelry business can be hard to predict. For most people, purchasing an expensive new piece of jewelry is a big investment. You might have great sales one month, then slow sales the next, so you need a contingency plan for when things get slow. Think about how your sales affect your inventory and what you can do to maintain a balance.
Oftentimes, this means keeping a reasonable level of physical items in your inventory. You want enough to support a busy month, but not so much that you’re weighed down when things get slow. This level will depend on the size and scope of your business, however, so you’ll have to determine it for yourself.
These are just a few tips on how to manage your jewelry inventory. Use them to streamline your process and improve your business’ efficiency.
