Transcript

I am Eric Laker. I founded Lashbrook after about eight years in on the retail side in 2000. So this is our 25th anniversary From the beginning, we have been all about custom.

It’s the tech. We’re able to produce a wider variety of product than virtually anybody on the planet. We’ve married that with a builder that truly is the best builder experience in the industry. The builder now will provide a SKU, a price, and a photograph for over 1.2 trillion items. That experience is so good that with a little help from a retail sales associate will take a customer that comes in thinking that they’re gonna spend $300 and turn them into a 17, 18, $1,900 average ticket.

One of the things that’s great is that because there’s so much variety there, so many directions to go from each point. We’ll see 12 and $15,000 bands being made, designed and purchased on a regular basis. So there’s the long tail effect on those price points just continues to pull the average up. You truly make it so that your customer is not limited and will take themselves to what they truly could afford if they were excited and having an amazing experience.

It really is all about the experience. I mean, we’ve been hearing that in the industry for 20 years. Ever, ever since the advent of online shopping, we’ve been harping on, we’ve gotta provide a better experience in the store, and this is the premier experience. The benefit is, is simply in added value, added profit. I had one store in New Mexico that we opened, and I had a sales rep stop in there two weeks ago, and the owner came to the sales rep and, and he, and he said, Eric told me he was gonna double my average ticket, and he didn’t. And she’s like, oh, crap. He said he didn’t double it, he tripled it.

We need them to understand that what the customer says they want has nothing to do with truly what they want. If we can get the customer again away from their, their initial expectations and they’ll drop their initial expectations just like that. There’s no hesitation for them to drop their expectations. The hesitation is, is with the jewelry store personnel. We really, truly have to expect that every customer coming in, regardless of how they’re dressed, regardless of what they say they want, could spend an amount that would blow our mind.

Lab has been enormous for us. You know, you look, you look at the, the pieces that we’re selling that are, you know, just every week that are six, eight, $10,000. An awful lot of those are lab grown diamonds. The next investment that’ll roll out, we expect to be showing it at JCK in a couple of weeks. It’s not live yet, but we will have lab color.

10 years from now. Every experience will have bespoke interwoven into it.