Setting your open-to-buy before a jewelry show
How to work out what you can actually spend at a trade show, split it by category rather than by supplier, and hold a reserve for the unplanned find.
Most buying mistakes are made weeks before the show, at a desk, in the twenty minutes someone decided was enough to work out the budget. The floor only reveals them. A buyer who arrives with a single number in mind and no structure underneath it will spend it in the first two aisles, then spend the rest of the day discovering what they should have bought instead.
Open-to-buy is the discipline that prevents this. In its plainest form it is the amount of new merchandise you can bring in over a given period without ending it holding more stock than you can sell. Large retailers run it as a monthly spreadsheet by department. An independent with one store can run it on a single page. Either way it has to exist on paper before you travel, because nobody has ever calculated it honestly while sitting at a stand.
Work out the number before you shape it
The arithmetic is not difficult. For the period you are buying into, take your planned sales, add the inventory you want to be holding at the end of it, then subtract what you are holding now and everything already on order but not yet delivered. What is left is what you can buy. Do the whole calculation at cost or the whole of it at retail, and never mix the two halfway through, which is the most common way the number comes out flattering and wrong.
Two adjustments make it real. Goods already committed on memo or on a repeat order are spent money even though the invoice has not arrived, so they come out first. And landed cost is not the invoice: freight, insurance, duty, import charges and the exchange rate you will actually be given all sit between the price quoted at the stand and the cost that lands in your books. Buyers who plan in their own currency and pay in another usually find the gap is several percent, and it is always in the same direction.
Budget by category, not by booth
Once you know the total, split it by category before you look at a single supplier list. Bridal, everyday gold, colored stone, diamond studs and basics, one or two statement pieces, findings and repair stock: each gets its own line and its own number, based on what each category sold last year and what you intend it to do next year, not on which suppliers you enjoy visiting.
The alternative, which is how most buyers drift, is to allocate by relationship. You arrive with a total and a list of stands, and the budget quietly reorganises itself around whoever you see first, whoever gave you a good year, and whoever is most persuasive at eleven in the morning. The result is an assortment that reflects your itinerary rather than your customers. Category lines make that visible immediately, because overspending on one means writing down another before you can sign.
- Total open-to-buy at cost, for a stated delivery window rather than for the show.
- A figure per category, with last year's sales and this year's intention beside it.
- Commitments already made: memo goods, repeat orders, anything undelivered.
- A price band and a short brief per category, including what you are deliberately not buying.
- An allowance for freight, duty, insurance and the exchange rate you expect to be given.
- A reserve, held back and named as such, for the piece you could not have planned for.
Leave a reserve, and leave it alone
Hold back fifteen to twenty percent of the total. Its purpose is narrow and worth defending: it buys the one thing you could not have written into a plan, because you did not know it would be on the floor. A parcel priced to move on the last afternoon, a stone that suits your customers exactly, an estate piece that will not appear again. Every buyer who has worked a floor for a few seasons has bought something with money they nearly spent on Friday morning.
A reserve only works if it is genuinely off limits until late in the show. If it gets absorbed into the first category that runs short, you did not have a reserve; you had an optimistic category budget. Keep it in its own line and make a rule about when it unlocks, such as after the second pass, or the final afternoon.
A budget tells you when to stop. A budget by category tells you what to say yes to, which is the harder and more valuable thing.
Delivery timing deserves the same care as the total. Valumira runs Friday to Sunday in each of its twelve cities, with Friday reserved for the trade, and the series moves city by city from Las Vegas in November 2026 to Sydney in October 2027. That spread means a buyer can plan a year of purchasing around two or three shows rather than one, and should: bridal and finished jewelry in Las Vegas in November, colored stone in Bangkok in April, Italian gold in Vicenza in May. Write the open-to-buy for the delivery window each show feeds, not for the days you are in the hall, and travel with the page in your bag.