Diamonds & Pearls UK Jewellery Retailer Claimed By Credit Crunch
The credit crunch is like a hurricane rolling through town: merciless and brutal, sweeping up and destroying anything that’s not properly secured.The UK has seen the fall of some pretty big and well established retailers such as Woolworths and MFI in recent months. Now its the turn for diamond and pearl jewellery retailer Diamonds & Pearls. The jewellery retailer, based in Bedford, just north of London, have recently announced they’re going into administration. Over three hundred jobs could be lost, with 91 high street stores across the UK under threat of closure.Global accountancy and management consultancy firm KPMG have been named as administrators. Myles Halley, and Richard Philpott, the administrators appointed by KPMG Restructuring, said they plan on selling up the business and are looking for a buyer.It was clear from their statement that this is going to lead to branch closures, and, in their words, “a number of redundancies”.
So another one bites the dust and joins the growing list of recession casualties in 2009. Yet fairly recently the chain described itself as ‘one of the UK’s fastest growing fashion retailers’. So what exactly went wrong? Does this mean it’s set in stone that if you’re one of the smaller players in the retail industry, you will not survive? Not in my opinion. While Diamonds & Pearls’ physical stores may have been doing well in recent years, a quick look at their website, www.diamondspearls.co.uk - and you’ll quickly see the problem. Leave aside the poor web design and head straight for the ominous sounding Online Shop link - you get the message “Our Online Shop is currently under development, Please call back soon”! Well I never! End of mystery, to my mind. There’s no doubt in my mind that Diamond & Pearls suffered because they completely failed to complement their stores with a web presence. The one defining feature of consumer behaviour in the credit crunch is that people are going online to find the cheapest prices. This is especially important for small to medium businesses. If you are not at least holding your own in the online world, and relying purely on traditional methods of retail, its simply become a question of how long before you go bust, not whether you do. Even retail giants such as MFI, Woolworths and most recently Principles have suffered greatly. One of the key failings of all these retailers was that they didn’t have a strategy for online sales and marketing at a time when their competitors were staying afloat by these means. If I was looking for information on saltwater pearls, or browsing for freshwater pearl jewellery for a Mother’s Day gift, the first thing I’d do is search for those things. The same as hundreds of thousands of internet shoppers would also do - and they wouldnt have found Diamonds & Pearls this way
. If you run a retail business, take note, or you could end up in the same state as them.
Tags: diamond jewelry, jewellery, online shopping, pearl jewellery, pearl jewelry, recession, Retail