It is rather common practice within jewelry showcases to have individual jewelry pieces scattered about upon a variety of elements from ring fingers, earring trees, bracelet ramps, neckforms, etc.  What jewelers too often don’t understand is that displaying their jewelry in such a manner has the potential to highlight each individual piece better than if each piece of jewelry were on a multi-element display, but a customer’s ability to absorb the information on each piece of jewelry can actually be impaired over the same unit of time when examining the showcase on the whole.  In other words, a 48” x 24” showcase could contain an assortment of 50 total pieces consisting of earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and rings each possessing there own elements to display them, or you can have a total of 4 displays that all present your jewelry on the same linear plane which measure out to fit comfortably in an 18” x 16” enclosure holding those same 50 pieces of jewelry while using only 25% of the space (based on square area).  But far more importantly, if a customer where to try to absorb the information as to what piece of jewelry they like the best within each showcase over the same course of time—lets say 12 seconds—they would be far more likely to absorb the information if their eyes do not have absorb information along 50 unique planes of vision.

Consider that we ordinarily take in information by reading along a singular plane, if a piece of paper or computer screen were to consist of multiple levels it winds up being a great distraction on the eyes and ultimately hinders one’s ability to properly absorb information.  Consider how inorganic it is to read a piece of paper that has been overly crinkled or folded up, this is what jewelers do when they scatter their pieces about with too many eye angles for a customer to absorb information of each piece sufficiently.  The worst thing a jeweler can do is to display their jewelry a showcase that hurts their sales, and perhaps the most common way to hurt your sales is by making it too difficult for potential customers to absorb information on the actual jewelry.  And far too often, showcases with too many unique pieces actually hides your jewelry instead of highlighting it, despite a relatively large amount of spacing between each piece.

We are not saying the 4 display setup is more likely to sell your jewelry than a showcase that contain 50 different planes of vision, but there should be no doubt that if a customer only has limited time to examine your jewelry, then single plane displays are no doubt superior towards presenting your jewelry in a manner where each piece can be seen without distraction.  While it is true an extravagant showcase can draw your customers in, it often does a poor job of properly presenting your jewelry in the most effective manner, so it can’t actually finish the sale.  After extensive research on this matter, we concluded that multiple plane showcases are best used in settings where your potential customers have at least several minutes to examine your pieces, but if you are trying to attract new customers under time constraints you should try to limit the planes of visions in your showcase to ten or less.