Rob Bates

Varda Shine Talks to JCK
January 26, 2007

First off -- yes, I will get my own blog soon, so I can quit hogging this one ....

And now, ending our merry week or so of speculation about Supplier of Choice II, Diamond Trading Company managing director Varda Shine has very graciously given JCK an interview about the new policy. She cautions that they have not finished unfurling SoC2: "there is much more to come," she says, some of which will be discussed with sightholders at upcoming meetings. At another point, she says, "This is obviously still very much a work in progress."

One thing she wants to clear up: Regarding Nicky Oppenheimer's comments about "tenders," mentioned in this post, she says that he was "not advocating" them, and that ultimately the DTC is "sticking with SoC because we genuinely believe that this is the strategy that will deliver the best long term returns to the wider industry and to the DTC."

We'll have more of Varda's thoughts in a future issue of JCK, but here are some highlights:

Changes in Assessing Sightholders: Our message to Sightholders is simple: do what you do best, and do that excellently. If you are an excellent dealer, or an excellent preparer, or an excellent polisher, or a mixture of these and maybe other things, then doing what you do best to the utmost of your abilities will very likely carry more weight in our assessment of your Contract Proposal, whereas trying to do lots of things and maybe not doing any of them well is probably not going to result in excellence ... If, for example, a diamantaire produces a mediocre advertising campaign, or mediocre jewellery, or runs a mediocre retail business, then that part of the diamantaire’s business will inevitably be assessed as being mediocre ...This is not – and never has been – about everyone doing everything in order to score well under SoC. ... What do we mean by “excellence”? In a nutshell, having a sustainably profitable business that stands out from the crowd - but how you do that is up to you!

Marketing in the New Policy: Marketing is absolutely intrinsic to SoC - but this does not mean that, for example, every Sightholder must be an expert in consumer-facing advertising, and this is another myth that we have consistently sought to dispel over the years that SoC has been in place. By 'marketing' ... I mean the whole management philosophy of structuring your business to stand out from the crowd by understanding your customers' needs and then meeting them profitably. Under that broad definition of marketing, upstream companies can have great marketing propositions.

The DTC's Falling Market Share: We can’t ignore is that our market share has changed – although somewhat paradoxically, this does not seem to have changed the level of demand for our goods ... What this means for the length of the Sightholder list in 2008, I don't know. There's no magic number – as always, the list length will be a result of our selection process, and not a parameter of it. But I’d like to take the chance to correct a myth .. smaller Sightholders and new applicants have nothing to fear if, in their chosen areas of excellence, they really are world-class experts ... We certainly don’t have any preconceptions of the ideal size or type of Sightholder and we never have, as the Sightholder communities from the last two SoC contract periods have clearly shown.

So chew on that all weekend ... And have a good one, everybody ....

Posted by Rob Bates on January 26, 2007 | Comments (0)