Articles and News
Editorial: An Inspired Promotion Idea | November 25, 2014 (0 comments)
Merrick, NY—They say necessity is the mother of invention. In this case, it’s also the mother of potential promotion ideas, and here’s one that can help your customers reduce their holiday stress while it brings them into your store twice at a time of year that might be a bit slow: Host a “Let Us Be Your Butler” silver polishing promotion.
My husband and I have hosted our family Thanksgiving dinner for more than a decade. It involves the usual prep—shopping for favorite ingredients, cooking up a storm, and polishing all the silver.
We have a lot of lovely sterling tableware and hollowware that, admittedly, we rarely use. Some we bought, but most we inherited. And all of it is in a perpetual state of tarnish, save for the weekend before Thanksgiving when I spend the better part of a day trying to get it clean and bright.
“Don’t bother till it gets really black!” advised our sister-in-law last year when I was grousing about having to polish it all. Formerly a military officer’s wife (the kind that wore white gloves and regularly used her full silver tea service), if letting it get a little dingy passes muster for her, it’s ok for me. Last year I took her advice and skipped the polishing marathon, but now everything is really black and it’s time to get to work.
Over the years I’ve tried a variety of methods to make this onerous task a little easier and less unpleasant. Polishing cloths and gloves that promise an easy swipe are great for a little touch-up, but they don’t cut it when pieces start to look like wrought iron instead of silver.
Dips are the easiest. Dunk it in and voila! Tarnish gone in an instant, even from the nooks and crannies. But it’s one of the most noxious substances known to mankind, and if it’s melting off the tarnish in a split second, I shudder to think what it’s also melting off inside our pipes and doing to the environment.
This year I bought some spray polish. Spray on, wipe off, done. It seemed like a great idea until the polar vortex intervened. You have to do this in an extremely well ventilated place, and the can recommends doing it outdoors if possible. On Saturday I set up on the back porch, only to discover that when it’s cold, it doesn’t spray well and the polish freezes instead of dries.
Back to the old standby: Gorham’s pink paste polish and a lot of elbow grease. That’s when it hit me: if only I’d thought of this a month earlier, I could have boxed up the lot, taken it to a good jeweler, and gotten it done professionally and crossed it off my list. And it would have looked a lot better.
That’s when I got the idea of a silver butler promotion. By the time Thanksgiving rolls around, luxury jewelers are (hopefully) too busy to take in a lot of silver from clients, but what if you did the promotion in a slow month like August? Polish it up, wrap it so it stays tarnish-free for three months, include a nice big polishing cloth or gloves so your customers can give a quick buff before setting it out, and save them a lot of holiday season stress.
Advantages to you: as with any repair, when they bring the silver in and when they pick it up, you have a captive audience to show some jewelry, and when they start their holiday prep and realize they don’t have to polish the silver, you will be their hero. Hey, if nothing else, I’m in!
Carson the butler and Mrs. Hughes the housekeeper of Downton Abbey fame probably would not approve of my silver polishing job, but at least it looks better than it did before.