PHILADELPHIA — Digital commerce has been rough on the jewelry-resale business, including the little stores across Center City Philadelphia, where prices used to vary with the hopes of customers trying to raise cash by unloading small treasures and the street smarts of veteran buyers who knew what they could sell to melt shops or other buyers and keep a profitable cut.
So he started his own online alternative. “We’re trying to disrupt an age-old industry with a tech-first solution,” says Aversano in the Newtown, Pennsylvania, office of “It’s terrible what they’ve been paying,” Aversano said. “Jewelry is like cars: the minute you walk out of the store, it loses a lot of value. You’d think online it would be better, but what I found online is the same business model, with a lot of opacity as to how the market really works.
The store is the regional outpost of a national company, Stack’s Bowers Galleries, formed through a string of mergers over the past 25 years, and affiliated with A-Mark Precious Metals, a publicly traded company that posted gross sales of over $10 billion, much of it to industrial customers, last year.Schimel runs the East Coast stores, including a newer, busier outlet in Boston, and another in New York, where a company predecessor started in 1933.
Schimel caught the gold bug early and worked for a popular Center City store in his 1980s youth, driving the owner’s car to deposit items at a Delaware gold refinery, or carrying 100-ounce gold bars in a lunch bag up to the wholesale buyers on New York’s West 47th Street.