Bumped up inventory and sales of lightweight jewellery

A degree holder from Swiss Business School, Zurich, Manbir Khurana, Director, Khurana Jewellers and Sons, is a third-generation jeweller from Karnal, Haryana. He joined the business in March 2019, after the successful completion of an intensive family business course from ISM in Germany. He tells The Retail Jeweller how minor changes in the system yielded lasting results for the business.

Introduced ERP and Seamless Visibility

When I joined the organization, there was no single software to manage the day-to-day business activities such as billing, procurement and inventory planning and management, etc. Although there was a billing software, it was only limited to generating bills. So, it was the first change that I decided to implement in the organization. Each piece of jewellery was barcoded, integrating and simplifying the entire process from sourcing to billing through one ERP system. It gave immediate and more visibility to our fast-moving and slow-moving items, which in turn helped us manage our inventory more efficiently. Since this activity, our dead inventory has come down from 20% to apprx 5%.

Insightful Feedback

As a family-run business, we never had any mechanism to collect feedback from customers. I worked on developing a customized customer feedback system with a vendor in Surat. I started using the system in Nov 2020 and soon after linked it to the main software.

After the introduction of the customer feedback system, we started getting to know buyers’ preferences, likes, and dislikes. After studying the trends for some time in 2020, we decided to make relevant changes to the existing inventory by offering more lightweight and trendy jewellery. We are  better known for our heavyweight jewellery, thus lightweight jewellery was only around 20% of the overall stock. I decided to bump up the share of lightweight stock to almost 50% currently. It has had a direct impact on the sales of lightweight jewellery which has shown a healthy growth of 20-25% over the last two years. Apart from the traditional print media, we have also started using social media platforms extensively to promote our latest jewellery designs. In order to increase customer engagement, we have started photoshoots with professional models.

Servicing Clients

Today, staff training has become an important part of the jewellery business. So I introduced an in-house staff training program for 40 staff members that includes personal grooming, dressing, customer interaction, product knowledge, etc. It has increased the confidence and performance of the staff.

Courtesy: retail Jeweller India News