Jewelry closeouts are jewelry articles sold together in a final sale, often sold at reduced prices closer to intrinsic value.
Such jewelry articles can include (but are not limited to):
- Commercial and contemporary jewelry (See Fortunoff, Whitehall, Christian Bernard, etc.)
- Estate jewelry (See American Heritage Pieces: BB&B)
- Museum pieces
- Branded jewelry (See Henry Dunay)
- Other valuable assets such as larger natural diamonds and fancy colored diamonds(See IDG Jewelers 7.51 Ct Diamond)
These purchases can be found as part of:
- Estate sales (See American Heritage Pieces: BB&B)
- Liquidations of commercial jewelry (almost every major retailer or mom-and-pop store has done this in the past)
- Bankruptcy sales (see Whitehall, Friedmans, Colibri, etc.)
- Private sales by individuals (as common as selling to cash for gold organizations or the sale of an estate)
The general purpose of such sales is to (1) eliminate inventory for a number of reasons or (2) raise capital quickly.
The key to purchasing such inventory is:
- Being able to value mixed lots (each organisation "remembers" how similar deals have performed in the past; some have even engineered their databases to capture the maximum details possible for maximum historically searchable information).
- Being able to distribute such merchandise through various sales channels (many of the mixed lots must be segregated into much smaller lots or be sold even piece by piece over a large geographic area).
- Maintaining a pool of capital to quickly purchase such inventory (deals can vary in size, exceeding several million dollars often - See LID). Companies that are active in purchasing jewelry closeout may expend as much as 50 to 70% of their resources in purchasing deals. Larger deals are very competitive and require a significant time commitment in order to review the opportunities properly before and after the purchase.