Lights, Camera, Gem Show In Japan

This #MarketFriday by @dswigle come with me to Kobe for our gem and mineral show.

One thing about being a stranger in a strange land is I am expected to perform, to educate and to give people a discount! You see I am a gem & mineral dealer, along with my wife and sometimes our children, and we travel around Japan doing shows with Mineral Marche. For the past 4 years it's been nothing but fun, despite covid, but I wonder if it will ever become "work"?

Back in September I was in the Kansai region(Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe) of Japan for two shows, one in Kyoto, one in Kobe. While Kyoto was good, Kobe was great. The reason being it was the first year for the Kyoto show, but the 3rd year for Kobe. That meant more return customers for the latter show.

Marche isn't only a gem & mineral show though, they also have "healing" zones for people to offer massages with crystals, mediums, how-to's as well as full blown science shows for kids.

The show was held in a two story event center right next to the bay, sandwiched between high rises and an elevated train line.

This was my first time doing the Kobe show so I had no idea what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised when I was shown my booth was right in front of the entrance for the event.

My booth has the blue tarp over it. A+ real estate!

It also meant I was going to be busy and had to bring my American Cowboy A game. That's the other thing, being an American I am expected to be bombastic and loud. Since I am neither, except after a few beers, a cowboy hat helps my stage presence.

Depending on the city Mineral Marche has between 50-100 dealers. Attendance is free and crowds run between a few thousand to 10,000 depending on the city. Kobe saw a few thousand.

While setting up on the morning of the first day, Friday, I made my biggest sale to a fellow dealer, Mineral Adventure. This is often the case, a dealer will buy from us before the show begins because we offer American minerals no one else has. He checked out at $700 worth of stones after wholesale discount. I would later repay him the favor by spending about $350 for some Akita artichoke quartz he had mined earlier in the year.

BTW, these are still available in my Etsy shop.

That pre-opening sale put me in a very good mood as the show opened about 1 hour later. However sales would be slow for the next few hours until after lunch when buyers were almost non-stop.

Show sales are interesting. You never know when you will have down time, when you are going to get slammed with customers or when that whale will stop to buy enough gems and minerals for you to have a nice steak dinner!

My second big sale came on day two when a couple who own a gem and mineral shop in Osaka stopped by. They would end up spending close to $700 too, even after the wholesale discount I gave them. Of course I don't mind giving wholesale prices to other dealers, it's when someone comes by and wants me to give them the same discount on a single $20 specimen. Call me a gentleman, call me a sucker, but I usually relent, however not before a bit of haggling. It's a game you have to play with people in order to gain a returning customer. A lot of my minerals I mine myself so price is fairly subjective for me anyway.

The second day a friend from the Kyoto show stopped by to say hi. His name is Yasu and is a jewelry maker under his WonderGround business.

In my opinion he's got a good eye for the stone and the design. You can check out his Instagram here. I'm going to try to get him on HIVE & Liketu.

The morning of day 3 I did my shopping at the other dealers. My wife wasn't with me, but asked me to get her some quartz, so I did.

I also picked up some rainbow garnets and sakura ishi(stone). Most of which we've already sold, but I still have a few rainbow garnets on my Etsy shop.

This one has beautiful zoning and I can't believe it hasn't sold yet.

FYI the best rainbow garnets are unique to Japan. They are from a now closed skarn deposit near Tenkawa Village, Nara. They are both translucent, as you can see in the garnet above, but they also reflect the spectrum of visible light due to thin layers in the crystal that contain slightly different compositions between andradite & grossular-andradite garnet.

As the show wound down I noticed something interesting, this person in a wrestling mask.

If you notice he was in the photo above for the healing section of the show. I only noticed him when he was in front of my booth. He goes by the name Phoenix and offers healing via crystals.

While I do not believe in those things, I think crystals & minerals offer plenty of healing through their beauty and story of rarity or creation through geologic forces.

It was a great time in Kansai. The people were wonderful, shows were good and the weather was nice. Now I'm back in the states mining, buying and prepping minerals for our next show at the end of November and the big Tokyo show in December.

I'll leave with a commercial from Mineral Marche. They do a lot of media buys on television for the shows all over Japan, like this one that aired in Tokyo.

Thanks for reading!