Endicia

Jewels of Denial

Your Premier Source for the Latest Fashion in Jewelry

Jewels of Denial

How does an online jewelry store manage to satisfy the numerous customers that need a special gift for their special someone in time for Valentine’s Day? By shipping with Endicia of course!

Founded by Tom Branik in 2007, Jewels of Denial offers a wide variety of jewelry – rings, bracelets, earrings, necklaces, anklets and toe rings – for people of all ages.

Background  The idea for Jewels of Denial originated during a trip to an out-of-state family get-together. There, a relative had a display of fashion jewelry that she was selling out of her home to earn some extra income. All the ladies at the gathering spent a great deal of time trying on various rings, earrings, and necklaces. For Tom, it was a moment of clarity:

"It became obvious that someone could sell quite a bit of fashion jewelry if they had quality products and could reach potential buyers on a much larger scale - the Internet."

A few months later, Jewels of Denial was launched. With the use of various online marketing resources, the company has grown from a simple concept to a thriving business with several thousand customers all over the world – many of which are repeat buyers.

Heart Ring

Tom and his team sell most of their items through their website. They usually send out 10-20 packages a day, but during peak periods such as the end of the year or around holidays, such as Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, it can go up to 50 packages a day. And that’s where Endicia plays a key role.

Endicia's Role  At the very start of his business, Tom decided to make Endicia an integral part of it. After doing some research and comparison shopping, he settled on Endicia Professional for its flexibility and ability to easily integrate with the other programs he uses. He was happy with his choice as soon as he started using the software, finding it intuitive and very simple to use. In fact, he lets his 13-year old daughter help with processing shipments on heavy days and she has no problem using the program.

"It’s priced competitively and is just one of those rare applications that always seems to work right, whenever you use it. I don’t have to worry about losing valuable time and money because of errors." Tom says.

Jewels of Denial Ring

Endicia is entirely integrated into the company’s workflow. Once an order is received through their e-commerce database shopping cart program, they manually process it through the system. Though this may sound daunting, it actually only involves entering the order number into Endicia Professional, a database integration tool offered with the Endicia Professional plan. After that, the rest of the process is completely automated. The software grabs customer shipping information from the Jewels of Denial database and quickly generates postage and shipping labels. The labels are printed using a Zebra LP2844 printer and the packages are dropped off at the Post Office the next day.

In general, items are wrapped in a standard-size box that weighs between 3 and 4 oz. The packages are shipped via First Class Mail, Priority Mail, or First Class Mail International. Tom uses Delivery Confirmation, which he gets through Endicia for free with Priority Mail and at a discounted rate with other mail classes.

In addition to Endicia’s Database Integration and Delivery Confirmation, some of the other features that help Tom run his business smoothly are Stealth Postage, Parcel Insurance, and automatic e-mail notification. Stealth Postage allows him to hide the amount of postage, so that he can charge a reasonable shipping and handling fee without risking any negative reaction from his customers. Endicia’s Parcel Insurance is cost effective and is typically used when fulfilling large orders for wholesale customers.

Automatic e-mail notification lets his customers know that their order has shipped and gives them the Delivery Confirmation number for their package. Taking advantage of the customization capabilities with e-mail notification, he has recently edited the text to make customers aware of Jewels of Denial’s opt-in email list. As a result, Tom has seen steady growth of the list, providing him with another opportunity to further develop customer relationships.

The Future   With Endicia, generating a shipping label and producing an email shipping notification to the customer takes a mere 10 seconds. Manually, it would take about 3-5 minutes and likely result in some errors. All this time saved lets Tom focus on the key aspects of his business, such as product sourcing, vendor negotiations, customer service and of course, marketing.

As the company continues to grow, Tom will keep looking for new ways to automate processes and to maintain an efficient operation. He is currently reviewing the benefits of Endicia Professional’s batch processing and hopes to save even more time by implementing this feature in the not-to-distant future.

To learn more about Jewels of Denial, visit www.jewelsofdenial.com.