Think: phyllo dough.
That’s how Minneapolis-based designer George Sawyer describes mokume gane to prospective buyers. Think of it as pastry, he tells them, thin layers of metal of various types, colors, and karats, laminated together and then folded again and again to form patterns resembling wood grain. Sawyer provides the pastry analogy so that buyers might better understand that what they are considering is something truly special. It is Lesson One in educating the consumer-the first in a series of instruction he imparts again and again.

Sawyer has been making and selling mokume since the early ’70s. Over those nearly 30 years he has seen the technique go from an obscure Japanese art form practiced by fewer than a half-dozen Westerners to a viable jewelry product turned out in several variations. Despite that growth, many consumers have never heard of it. So Sawyer must continually instruct them. And the best way to indoctrinate the gold-and-platinum crowd to the arcana of wood-grained metal is by relating mokume’s inherent romance.

“There’s a certain technical romance about how it’s built and the history behind it-how it was handed down from sword maker to sword maker as a ritual,” Sawyer explains. “In Japan, a person has to purify himself and go through a ritual of metalworking to produce mokume. The knowledge was passed on from grandfather to father to son or from uncle to nephew. The reason it was done this way is that it’s the only way you can keep a technique intact for over 1,000 years. Just as in religion, rituals are repeated in unchanging patterns. The object you’re making through a ritual-if you don’t do it properly, it will lose its spiritual power. You can’t violate a religious rule.

As a matter of fact,” he continues, “if you’re making a sword and you violate the ritual, there’s a chance that your sword will not be the powerful object, both spiritually and physically, that you want it to be. It will break, and your customer will either be dead or he’ll come back wanting to talk to you-and he won’t be happy.”

Fascinated yet? That’s Sawyer’s selling secret: gold and platinum may be pretty, but mokume has the power of history behind its allure. Whether it is the wedding bands for which he’s best known, engagement rings, or earrings, each piece contains that power.

With the history, the technical aspects, and the aesthetic elements in place, Sawyer says, mokume is not a hard sell. But since he sells out of galleries and retail stores, Sawyer must rely on those outlets’ sales personnel to know and understand what makes mokume special, and to be able to convey that to potential buyers. So Sawyer begins his lessons with them.

Anytime we sell a collection to a new store, either my sales rep or I go there,” Sawyer says. “We meet with the staff and go through the collection with them so they understand it. We also provide written material-a short technical and romantic history of mokume.

“We hope that the staff will repeat the information to the customer,” he explains. “Why is this ring expensive? Well, it’s a technically challenging, handmade object with a history and a story, and it’s individually made for the couple buying it.”

And therein lies another point of sale for Sawyer, and more education for both the retailer and the customer: His specific technique creates pairs of wedding bands with mirror-image patterns. “When we cut the slices for the rings off the folded gold billets, the patterns on the two pieces facing each cut mirror one another,” he says. “Those two pieces are used for a wedding set. I can make 10,000 rings, and no set will ever duplicate another. Couples see an analogy in the rings. The uniqueness of the patterns parallels the unique match of their relationship.”

So mokume gane has ritual and romance-two things customers won’t know until they actually come in contact with it. But given that the average consumer doesn’t know mokume from macrame, how does Sawyer draw in the customers? One way is by teaching the stores that carry his product how to properly place it.

“If my pieces are displayed in a collection, and it’s all my work, it draws the eye,” he explains. “If it’s spread out over the store and there’s only one or two of them [among] platinum or gold rings, no one ever sees it. If they don’t see it, they won’t ask about it.”

Sawyer also instructs his stores to market his product as George Sawyer rings, not mokume. “The reason is that after educating all my stores on how to sell it, if someone else comes in and says they’re also making mokume, the jeweler wants to put it in a ‘mokume corner’ of the store. To avoid having mokume become a generic material and to encourage the customer to look at the uniqueness of my rings, I’ve stopped using the word ‘mokume’ in my advertising.”

Mokume also benefits from very strong word-of-mouth promotion. “Many of our customers purchased the rings because someone showed them what they were wearing and told the story.” Again, Sawyer points out, in many cases the story begins with the salesperson.

However, there are two inherent problems in delivering the mokume story through a retailer: teaching the story in the first place, and having to re-teach it every time someone new comes on board. “The bigger the store or the more staff they have, the harder it is for them to train properly,” Sawyer notes. “Often, because of time constraints or turnover, [the mokume] story never gets down to the person working the counter.”

The answer, then, is to deliver the message through a more reliable medium-one that the customer can visit to learn the story before they set foot in the jewelry store. By now it should come as no surprise that the medium of choice is the Internet.

“This year we’ll have ads in three issues of Vogue and In Style, as well as all issues of Martha Stewart Weddings,” Sawyer says. “Those ads send people to our Web site,” http;//www.georgesawyer.com. [Although the site was only about 20 percent complete as of presstime, Sawyer expected significant progress by early October.] “It tells people about pattern-matched rings. It tells them about the variety of color. And it will tell them the whole romantic story as well. In essence, what the site will be is an illustrated version of what we would tell the store staff. Customers who have visited the site will go into the store already knowing the story. They may know it better than the salespeople!

“This lets us jump over the problems that we have if the retailers aren’t diligent about educating their staff,” he adds. “We’re going directly to the consumer. They’ll then go to the store and ask for George Sawyer rings because they know the story.”

Whichever way they’re discovering it-whether through the Web site or from salespeople or from Sawyer himself-people are learning the story of mokume gane. And once they hear the story, learn the magic, and fall under its spell, chances are they’ll buy. Then they too can pass on the story, beginning with “Think of it as pastry…” JOHN SHANAHAN

AJM, October 2000

HooverandStrong.com | 800-759-9997 | (fax) 800-616-9997
info@hooverandstrong.com

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 1st, 2000 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Metallurgy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.