We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Alon Bernstein. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Alon below.

Alon, appreciate you joining us today. Day to day the world can seem like a tough place, but there’s also so much kindness in the world and we think talking about that kindness helps spread it and make the world a nicer, kinder place. Can you share a story of a time when someone did something really kind for you?

Following the recession of 2007-2008 I found myself on bad side of multiple business related calamities that cost me nearly everything. My relationship, my happiness, both of my investment properties and very nearly my modest home. Through a combination of bad luck and poor business decisions I found myself going from a net worth of about a half million dollars to one of negative four hundred thousand dollars. Between a customer going bankrupt, a burglary and various other issues I was nearly destitute and for an agonizing month I considered and explored shutting down the business to which I’d dedicated my adult life and walking away to be an employee at a company of some sort. There was one particular vendor to whom the bulk of my debt belonged and I made payments to him as possible. Sometimes the payments were a few hundred dollars. Sometimes they were a couple of thousand but for years I would very slowly chip away at that debt, Finally he was made whole. He called me a week later and said he would be in town and asked me to meet for coffee. I swallowed the shame of taking years to repay the man and met him, He told me that I wasn’t the first business associate he had who’d fallen on hard times and I wasn’t the first one who owed him a lot of money but… I was the first one who would figure out a way to send him SOMETHING every month no matter how small. And then he handed me a little tin box with a half million dollars in diamonds on consignment. At the time my net worth might have been zero give or take but this gesture put me in a position to begin rebuilding my business and with that rebuild my life

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Originally my business involved going overseas, buying diamonds and wholesaling them to retailers and dealers in the United States. During the internet revolution where so many products were stripped of mystery and reduced to commodities I witnessed profit margins slowly falling in an irreversible trend. Simultaneously I’d experienced friends and acquaintances complaining that reselling their jewelry was difficult, intimidating and frustrating and I decided to make the pivot into estate jewelry. I began buying from the public and selling wholesale to retailers and dealers as I had with diamonds but this time each piece was unique. My sales cycle was longer but more profitable and members of the public selling their jewelry to me were thrilled to receive significantly more than a gold buyer or pawn shop. If there is anything about me that sets me apart from almost every one of my competitors is the refusal to ask a retail client “what they want” for something. I hate that question. I understand if its a business to business transaction but if someone is a retail client with a poor understanding of what they have and a poorer understanding of it’s value why would I expect them to know the value? How can they protect themselves from selling it too cheaply if they set the price? My approach is different: I’ll show them an actual piece from my inventory that’s a rough comp to what they are selling. I’ll show them my asking price for the piece and the amount I paid for the piece. I’ll then make an offer. No games, no subterfuge, no pretence that I won’t sell it at a profit. At that point I invite them to take my offer to other places so they are allowed to do their due diligence and they are never pressured to sell to me at any time.
TLDR – I buy small shiny objects for ten dollars and I sell them for eleven-fifty to twelve dollars.

Have you ever had to pivot?

This was touched on briefly but I had to make a pretty dramatic pivot from loose diamonds into estate jewelry. It was an intimidating pivot as I went from diamonds which have very defined parameters of cut/clarity/color carat weight into one of unquantifiable values where aesthetics and personal preference greatly contributed to value and intrinsic properties such as gold content or gemstones carried weight but only told a part of the story. I also had to divorce myself from the rigidity of diamond prices and understand that unique items were worth more to someone who connected with them emotionally.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

When I started my business I poured myself into books about entrepreneurship and business principles and i would attempt to absorb and enact those lessons in my business but in jewelry things don’t quite work the same way because of one primary factor: Transactions aren’t singular. Most jewelry business on the wholesale side or retail side is relationship based and it’s very common for those relationships to span generations. Most of the sales books will teach you how to negotiate for a higher profit or close a deal but they will never teach to advise a customer AGAINST a transaction because it isn’t in their best interest. Or to sell an item at a lower profit so your wholesale client can make a little more money or so your retail client can have something they didn’t think they could afford. A lot of sales books teach you to close deals but very few teach you to build the relationships foundational to a successful business.

Contact Info:

• Website: bandbdiamonds.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/bandbdiamonds/?hl=en
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/b-and-b-diamonds-austin-3