Tip of the Hat – David Geller

by Abe Sherman – CEO, BIG – Buyers Intelligence Group

December 10, 2024

It’s said that the jewelry business gets into your blood, once you get into this business, it’s hard to leave. Our industry is built on multi-generational family businesses, and it’s sad when someone closes their business because there is no interest in its continuation. David Geller is a 14th generation jeweler who spent 25 years in his own retail store in Atlanta before selling it to an employee in 2000. He then spent the past 25 years building the Geller Blue Book and consulting to thousands of jewelers.

Which is why I was happy to learn that David Geller’s nephew, Jonathan Geller, is going to take over his business and continue to produce the eponymous “Geller Blue Book”!

There are very few people in our industry who have had a larger impact on so many people. In fact, Geller isn’t just the name of David’s price book, it’s become a verb. You Gellerize your repair department. Or, when asked how some jewelers price their repairs, they might say, Geller + 20%! What’s remarkable about that is that pretty much everyone in our industry knows what that means!

David shared the news of his retirement with me a couple of months ago and gave me permission to share it at one of our Plexus group meetings since the group was asking about using the Geller Book with new POS systems that some of the jewelers were moving to. I was relieved to know that Jonathan and his wife were going to continue David’s work and importantly, that the digital version of the Geller Book will be available to any POS system that would like to import it.

But David’s career went far beyond producing a book of repair prices. He has been a very active participant in most of the industry chat rooms for decades and has written numerous articles on various subjects beyond how to improve profitability in the repair department.

If it didn’t happen this way, it should have: The question that started it all? … ‘What do you charge to replace a battery’! The battery question has become a meme, a punchline and a way to bring to light how the conversation had gone down a rabbit hole… But the point of the battery question is about what we charge for our knowledge and service. It’s our version of the “have you been to your dentist lately”, or “have you had your car repaired lately”, questions. In short, we weren’t charging enough for our services. The result had been an awful lot of people doing an awful lot of work for not an awful lot of reward.

I know that most of you would agree that not only did David Geller ask those questions, but single-handedly built a systematic approach to providing the answers. The repair departments of thousands of jewelry stores started making money. Tradespeople were compensated based on how much work they could produce and the sales associates were able to quote repair prices without having to leave the customer and interrupt the folks in the shop. In the decades since David introduced his first Geller Book, the process of quoting repair prices has become ubiquitous in our industry. I cannot imagine our industry doing without it.

I would be remiss were I not to mention David’s wife, Renie, who was the one banging away on the keyboard, updating all of those thousands of entries whilst David was on the phone or answering the myriad questions that improved so many businesses for so many years.

A BIG Thank You to David Geller! Enjoy your retirement and best of luck to Jonathan Geller, the next generation. Well done, sir. Well done.