Displays designed to snag the modern shopper

Holographic showcases can help jewelers tell the story behind their pieces, appealing to the desire of today’s consumers to find out information on their own.

Michelle Graff michelle.graff@nationaljeweler.com

Holografyx’s Showcase 7022 displays the product as well as video or animation explaining the story behind it or reinforcing its branding, as seen here with this brand of rum.

New York--Jewelry is about romance, and romance--whether it’s in the setting a man picks to pop the question or the way a jeweler displays his engagement ring settings--is largely about presentation.

This year will usher in several new technologies designed to attract consumers, from holographic showcases to 3-D information kiosks.

Future projections
Holographic technology continues to develop, and to gain importance in the jeweler’s bag of display tricks.

At Victoria, B.C.-based Holografyx, marketing and sales specialist Naveen Sohi said the company’s latest product, the Showcase 7022, is designed to provide a pre-sales hook, enticing shoppers who might not have intended to enter the store.

The Showcase 7022 is a box that displays the product inside as well as video or animation that shows and explains the key details of the product, she said. The video plays, or the image projects, on a see-through screen, which makes it a sort of hologram--picture the image of Princess Leia that R2-D2 projected in the original Star Wars.

Jewelers also can buy just the video screen, and build it into their own showcases.

“Nowadays, people often go into a jewelry store having pre-shopped online, and they know what they want,” Sohi said. “This showcase might make them second-guess, because the video will tell them more about the product than they can find online.”

WATCH: See what the Showcase 7022 can do in a jewelry-store setting and how to operate it.

Another Holografyx product is iClear. New for 2015, iClear is an information kiosk with a hologram application, which could consist of a pre-recorded message or a live-streaming video of a salesperson talking. It also can hold printed materials.

“Lugaro, a Canadian jeweler, is our biggest client, and SK Diamonds uses us at trade shows,” Sohi said. “If you can use a computer, you can use our products. They offer information that the salesperson would otherwise have to deliver orally. If you put it in your window, people will walk past it, do a double take, come back and pay attention to the captions, pictures, and message, and might come into your store even though they wouldn’t have ordinarily.

“People nowadays like to find out information on their own, so this acts as an intermediary, telling you about the product before you enter the store.”

The remote-controlled Showcase 7022 consists of a transparent LCD screen set in front of the actual

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product. Its screen can give a full or partial view of the product, or completely block it from sight at times, if desired.

Two built-in speakers provide music, sounds effects or spoken words. The Showcase runs an Android operating system (OS), compatible with virtually any video file, and its built-in Wi-Fi allows users to browse and use online videos as well

The iClear, which will launch this spring, displays a life-sized 3-D virtual presentation on to a polycarbonate cutout. It can be used as an information booth or a welcome display, among other things.

Light it up
“Color temperature” is a key phrase in jewelry store display lighting, and several vendors are stepping up with products that will give the jeweler more versatility in terms of “cool” or “warm” lighting ambiances.

At Wessel LED Lighting Systems, sales director Butch McKeown said their lighting system alternates between 3000 and 4500 kelvins (K), providing a warmer look that’s ideal for gold jewelry and some colored stones. The jeweler can work with the extrusions, which are customizable to 1/16 of an inch, to produce a warmer or cooler look depending on the merchandise on display.

“Jewelers often use an even cooler light, 6000K, which works great with platinum, sterling, and diamonds,” McKeown said, “but it makes gold look washed out. The warmer light makes gold look great, but makes platinum dull.

“Our lighting works well with watches: Breitling is one of our big customers. The versatility is helpful with leather goods, too, since you’ll be working with tan one week, and black with gold the next week.”

Howard Gurock, president of Tappan, N.Y.-based Eco-Lite Products said the company has an analogous product that he calls the Hybrid: a combination of warm and cool diodes that provides warmth and sparkle at same time.

“It’s a stem fixture: vertical, or horizontal for inside the case,” he said. “It’s a mixture of 3000K and 6000K.”

He said the company is toying with the idea of making this lighting switchable, meaning it could illuminate just the warm spectrum, just the cool spectrum, or both at the same time.

Gurock said that lighting technology isn’t changing much at the moment, except maybe with regard to efficiency. At present, he says, the Hybrid consumes eight watts per foot. “Maybe in a year or two we’ll be at six watts per foot,” he said.

“Lighting is pretty simple now in that everything is driven by LED,” agreed Jacob Swiger, product manager at Pegasus Lighting based in the Pittsburgh suburb of Beaver Falls, Pa. “LEDs allow fixtures to be very small and low-profile, easy to hide. We have LED tape lights that are literally like putting a piece of masking tape on your display case.

He said that every year, the efficiency continues to improve in relation to the wattage used. The latest innovation is O-LED (O stands for organic), a film that’s printed on the windows of a home that slowly illuminates at night and will be an alternative to lamps.

“Jewelry cases would be an interesting application for that technology,” Swiger said.

Michelle Graffis the editor-in-chief at National Jeweler, directing the publication’s coverage both online and in print.