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“Made In” Labels and Country-of-Origin Marks are Required by Law—Is Your Company Providing Them?
March 7, 2008
The jewelry industry has been facing much scrutiny regarding a U.S. Law that requires country-of-origin marks on fine jewelry imports—a law that, for reasons ranging from ignorance to ego, the jewelry industry is widely ignoring and breaking. We’ve all been outraged by poor-quality imports, poisoned pet food, etc—that we (shoppers) have begun to scrutinize labels.
Two colleagues of mine, Jennifer Heebner and Carrie Soucy, wrote an article titled Seal of Disapproval in JCK’s Luxury Winter 2008 issue. Their article starts with a story of a man returning a piece of jewelry because he saw a made in China sticker that was on the box—but assumed the jewelry was made in China and requested a refund.
It’s not as if there is a how-to operate a small business kit we all could reference for all the laws, but in this case our vendors who import know for sure and haven’t bothered to tell many of us. From reading their article I found out—the tags stating the country of origin that accompany our jewelry are not to be removed until it reaches the hands of the consumer. I had been removing them and replacing them with our own bar-coded tags.
After blogging about it here—below were some of the comments:
“When you buy a Mercedes Benz, do you get a COO for each of the components? The seats could be made in a country where the term 'human rights' is neither heard of nor followed.”
“We do not display or tell our clients that our David Yurman jewelry is made in Thailand; if we did it would ruin the cache and sales. If people want to believe that David Yurman is an amazing designer from New York who works in his studio with other master jewelers creating his master pieces then we are not going to ruin a great money maker by telling them otherwise.”
Do you sell products that require you to keep COO tags on merchandise? Do your consumers react differently to products made overseas versus the US?
Posted by Shanu Singh Guliani on March 7, 2008 | Comments (0)
