With a 30-year long friendship and the same wish for the sustainable development of the whole jewellery industry, Evert deGraeve who is the owner and designer of EDG Collection Design Studio from New York, and Norman Siu who is an independent jewellery design and management consultant and strategist from Hong Kong, link the Eastern and Western jewellery world together in building a transparent, professional and educational platform specialised for jewellery executives who are working in design, branding, merchandise planning, marketing and management, and who want to transform themselves into globally recognised and respected jewellery professionals. This platform is called International Association of Jewellery Merchandize Planning Professionals Limited (IAJMPP) and was launched officially on 21 September 2015 in Hong Kong.
Aiming to create a strong notion of professionalism for practitioners, executives and organisations working together to share knowledge, expertise, resources, and support one another’s work, IAJMPP’s main mission is to support growth and continued development of the professional discipline of jewellery executives, and provide them with registration of professional titles and recognised status under the association’s Professional Title Registration (PTR) system.
Having worked for famous jewellery brands including David Yurman and Mikimoto as vice president for product development, Evert deGraeve thinks that the jewellery industry has sustained a culture of no sharing. He said: “We want to change this culture. The key point of IAJMPP is to exchange information and create more transparency and openness within the industry, not only for designers, but also for professionals and managers in the jewellery business.”
To seek wider international recognition, Norman Siu told Hong Kong Jewellery: “We are creating a strong network and strategic alliance, linking major stakeholders in different jewellery businesses and the education sector.” The first step they took, or what they called “bridge-building” for international communications, is the exchange programme for higher education in a professional manner between the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) which is a world famous design school in New York, United States and China University of Geosciences (CUG) in Wuhan.
Siu said: “Wuhan has the biggest jewellery school in China, but the professors lack the awareness of providing all-round trainings for students, as most of the courses are meant to nurture gemmologists and jewellery designers.”
He stated that, most of the successful jewellery businesses today are not wholly based on good designs, but rely mostly on the expertise of jewellery professionals who can identify market niches or latent customer needs, define and set the strategies with knowledge, know-how and skills, and execute the process of designing, producing, marketing, and logistics with a sophisticated control and balance of cost and quality.
However, based on the two founders’ observation, the gap between industry needs and the education blank exists widely and globally within the industry. IAJMPP wants to help universities or jewellery companies organise information exchange projects, feed the manpower market, and sustain the industry as a whole. DeGraeve said: “Our aim is to give the professionals opportunities to understand the mechanisms of branding, merchandising and marketing, and to allow designers to know their customers, markets, brand DNA and other elements when designing.”
“In the era of brands, it is foreseeable that some MBA programmes in jewellery would be coming soon to meet the demand for high calibre manpower,” Siu anticipated.
According to deGraeve, the association will connect more universities worldwide and offer exchange programmes amongst universities and companies, to stimulate cultural understanding of the current and forward-looking situations of jewellery business and narrow the gap between the industry and professional education in the future. “We are trying to make the industry more professional,” deGraeve expressed. “Even though the luxury industry is growing, the professional part of the jewellery industry is shrinking. It is crucial to evoke passion and desire for people to enter to and stay at this workplace.”
IAJMPP’s PTR system will be a good try to encourage people to go deeper into the industry with proper certifications of solid experience, standard of competence and adherence. The system is standing on a platform of “Industry and Professional, Academic and Research” established by the association and formed by an expert panel of honourary advisors including jewellery senior fellows and practitioners, educators, and research professors, to evaluate applications for the titles meanwhile assuring the authoritative status of them.
Siu stressed that this system is the first one in the jewellery community in the world to help individuals demonstrate their level of expertise and recognised professional status. Targets are those who have devoted the majority of their time at senior or managerial positions in the fields of design, merchandise planning, branding, marketing, corporate communication, logistic management and enterprise resource planning. He believed that those titles would sustain the development of the jewellery industry without losing good manpower.
As an international association, IAJMPP meets challenges in localisation and globalisation of knowledge. Different markets have different stories and consumers. Siu and deGraeve plan to valuate knowledge into learnable formats and modes, connecting with higher order thinking in planning and methodologies in implementation. “Our world-class projects require the participation and contribution of many experts and professors. This is why we will continue to invite honourary advisors from universities and influential organisations worldwide,” Siu added.
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