Viva vermeil
Milan’s office is a small slice of a much larger pie that traces its roots back to 1978 when Felix Chen founded PAJ—Prime Art & Jewel—after noticing a void in the market, particularly among department stores, for ‘bridge jewellery’, which offered a luxurious look minus a hefty price tag. His idea worked and soon established brands, such as ELLE Jewelry, were approaching him to design, manufacture, and distribute their lines.
Over the years, PAJ has grown to include manufacturing and/or distribution deals with other brands, such as STEELX, Roma 1947 and its latest addition, PIARA by Elaine J, although as a handmade line, most of it is manufactured by artisans in Italy and the United States. Reign, a collection of silver jewellery with proprietary-cut cubic zirconia, is a PAJ house brand. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, PAJ has offices around the world, employs over 3000 people, and churns out more than two million pieces of jewellery every month from its manufacturing facilities in China. Its control over designing, manufacturing, and distributing makes it a vertically integrated company, allowing it to protect its clients’ proprietary information and intellectual property.
Now responsible for PAJ’s Canadian operation, Milan got her start in the industry as an account executive for Montreal-based Continental Jewellery Co., which at one point was considered one of the country’s largest manufacturers of fashion jewellery. In 1998, PAJ acquired Continental, forming PAJ Canada. Within two years, Milan had become sales manager. Five years later, she was named PAJ Canada’s vice-president and just this year, its senior vice-president. The promotion also now makes her responsible for all PAJ brands sold to U.S. independents. “It keeps me just a little busy,” she says tongue-in-cheek.
The weak Canadian dollar is not helping in that respect. Like most importers, PAJ Canada has had to contend with the loonie’s lesser value against the U.S. dollar and trying to maintain its pricing structure. Increasing prices by 30 per cent to make up for the exchange rate is not an option, she says, given the economic landscape and stiff competition in the jewellery industry to vie for smaller stashes of consumers’ disposable cash.
“We’ve tried to maintain pricing for the most part and made cuts to other areas of the business,” Milan says. “At the end of the day, if you add 30 per cent onto the product, it’s not going to work. I think the reason we’ve been successful is by trying to be consistent on not raising our prices very much.”
While the Canadian dollar has declined, so has the cost of silver, which makes up the bulk of PAJ’s product offering.
“You save in one area, but lose in another,” Milan explains. “Labour costs have also gone up dramatically. Any breaks we used to get by manufacturing in China are no longer there. Transportation costs have also risen. You’d think with oil prices going down, shipping costs would decrease as well. If anything, they’ve doubled in the last two years. If you look at what we used to charge when silver cost more than $40 U.S. an ounce, our prices haven’t really changed that much because other costs have risen.”
