Retailers are busy.  I have never met one who did not have 3 times more to do than time to do it.  Finding good actionable advice without a lot of filler material is near impossible on the internet without participating in bulletin board communities for each area of expertise.

There are a lot of generic articles and books written with advice that leaves you without direction for implementation. Retail Gems is different.  Instead of telling you to send postcards to your customer base, we tell you what steps to take and give specific providers for each service. 

None of our recomendations are paid for, they just happened to be the provider we chose when looking to do similar things for our business.  The alternative is to start you own general research, visit the many websites that look like possibilities, and then separate the good from the bad. 

We hope you appreciate the work we put in to finding these solutions to common tasks faced by small retailers.  It will free up your time but more importantly it will help get the projects done.  If you do find these articles to be helpful, all we ask is that you forward this website to your Chamber of Commerce webmaster so they can link into this resource for the benefit of others. 

Author Steven Pollack received his B.S.B.A. degree in economics from the University of Missouri - Columbia.  He also has a certificate in jewelry manufacturing technology from the Texas Institute of Jewelry Technology and a J.D. from the Chicago-Kent College of Law. After running his retail jewelry company for 14 years, he now operates an online retail store which imports bathroom vanities and other fixtures from China.