In a Trade Built on Trust, You Can’t Pitch Your Way In. You Have to Prove It
- Written by: William Chu
The jewellery industry doesn’t buy new technology on the strength of a brochure. Here’s what I learned selling to it, and what any leader selling to sceptics can borrow.
The first time I tried to sell a jeweller on photographing a diamond ring with a smartphone, he politely told me it was impossible. He was spending a small fortune every month on professional photographers, and he was certain a plastic box and a phone couldn’t replace them. He wasn’t being difficult. He was protecting a business built on trust, where a customer’s belief in what you show them is the whole transaction.
I have spent over a decade selling technology into that sort of room, and nobody there changes their mind because of what you tell them. What I’ve learned along the way applies to any leader whose customers have reason to be careful.
Proof beats pitch
When I built the first prototype in Sydney, from acrylic cut at a small local factory, I did the only thing I could. I carried it into shops and put it on the counter. I walked through the CBD with it, from office towers to heritage arcades, and asked each owner for one thing: two minutes. Then I put a ring inside, took the photo and held the phone up next to the piece itself.
That comparison did what no pitch could. The sceptics didn’t need to trust me. They only needed to trust their own eyes. When we took the boxes to our first trade show in Sydney, they sold out on the first day, and by the second we were taking back orders.
The lesson for leaders is that in a trust-based market, your word counts for little until you’ve earned it, so put your effort into creating proof rather than polishing claims. Ask what your customer could see, hold or test in the next two minutes, and build your sales process around that.
Show first, explain second
We took the same approach overseas. When we decided to enter the US, I rented an apartment in New York for a month and went door to door in the Diamond District every day with the product under my arm. It was slow and unglamorous, and some days produced nothing at all.
But we never began with a slide deck. We began with the result. Explanation came afterwards, once the customer was already curious, and by then it answered questions they actually had. That sequence matters more than most founders admit. An explanation delivered to someone who is still doubting is heard as a sales line. The same explanation delivered after they’ve seen the evidence is heard as information.
We still run the business on that principle. Trade shows remain our most effective channel because a jeweller can watch the result happen in front of them. The line I hear most often at our stands is that they didn’t believe it until they saw it. I’ve stopped being frustrated by that. I treat it as the business model.
Let customers co-design the product
This is the lesson that has compounded the most. Trust isn’t only earned at the point of sale. It is also built when customers see their own fingerprints on what you make. Much of our hardware and software has been shaped directly by jewellers’ feedback, from retailers who needed it to fit on a shop counter to bench jewellers who wanted fewer steps between the photo and the sale.
When customers ask for something and see it arrive, they stop being buyers and become stakeholders. That is how a relationship business grows. Today most of our customers come to us through another jeweller, and I can’t think of a stronger endorsement in an industry where a peer’s recommendation carries more weight than anything a company says about itself.
The catch: it’s slow
This approach takes time. It rewards patience and repetition over cleverness, and it doesn’t scale the way a campaign does. There were months when the numbers didn’t justify the effort, and I had to believe each convinced customer was worth more than the ads I could have run instead.
But trust compounds in a way advertising doesn’t. Every sceptic who converts becomes the most credible salesperson you will ever have, because they have no reason to flatter you. For any leader selling something new to an industry with every reason to be sceptical, the order is simple: give them proof, show before you tell, and let them help build what you sell.
William Chu is founder and CEO of GemIQ, an international jewellery technology company used by more than 20,000 jewellers in more than 100 countries to capture, share and sell their jewellery with ease. Chu was listed in Forbes Asia’s 30 Under 30 in 2022 (Retail and Ecommerce).
