What are the key factors driving the demand for precious metals?
Why consider buying gold and silver?
Join Michael DiRienzo, the Executive Director at The Silver Institute, Krishan Gopaul, the Senior Analyst EMEA at the World Gold Council, and GOLD AVENUE CEO Alessandro Soldatito find out.
The discussion will be followed by a Q&A session where you can ask all your questions to our experts.
Building a Brand for your Flower Shop is not an easy task, As a Florist; you will have several questions you need to ask yourself. How do I want to look like? Will I resonate well with my target audience? A study shows that people will buy from brands that they are familiar with.
Florist resources
What’s a brand?
A brand is how people perceive you when they come into contact with your business. A brand consists the name of the product, logo, colors, the font used, language and reputation that makes who you are.
The process of building a Brand for your Flower Shop
Research your Target market
You need to understand your potential customers and define your target audience for your flowers business. Know how they prefer goods, the language used and use that information to define your brand.
Define your brand persona and focus.
Think of your brand as an individual and come up with a persona that will resonate with your target customers. Have a consistent tone language when communicating with them.For example, have a position statement that well describes your brand and answers the right questions.
Choose the look of your brand
Select colors and typography that you would want to represent your brand. Colors do just represent the look but also the feeling you want to communicate different colors have different meanings and feel. You will have to also choose a different color from your competitor to not confuse your customers.
Choose your business name
Choosing a name for your flower business will be one of your biggest commitment you will have to make. you will need a name that is hard to imitate at the same time it should not be confused with your competitors. Though branding is more than the name but the personality and reputation of the brand, your business name should be one of a kind.
Be consistent
Have a consistent with your brand message, design colors and also typography. This will reinforce your brand to your customers and help them to know what to expect with your products and services.
Evolve your brand as you grow
Have your brand colors and name in your shop and website, with time try to learn more about your customer how they interact with your brand and how to speak to them effectively, Evolve your brand according to what you learn. It is important to know that you can’t control how your customers would react to your brand.
The way that children learn about, and experience money has changed significantly since many of us were kids. In the digital age, physical currency is being used less and less, and for many children nowadays, money is seen as something that lives on the computer or in a card from the bank.
That’s why gold can be a great tool to help teach the next generation about the value of money and start their financial education off strong. Here are a few ways in which using a tangible asset like gold can help to bring to life abstract financial concepts and make learning easier and a lot more fun.
Teaching the value of money
Remember having a piggy bank as a kid? Along with being a treasured keepsake, these piggy banks helped many of us to shape our understanding around money and its value. For many of us, piggy banks were our first introduction to saving. We learned the tangible value of money this way and all the possibilities we could get by saving up our coins. Gold is another way to give kids an understanding of value and how you’re using it to build your own golden nest egg for the future. Giving them something they can hold and interact with really brings the idea of money and value to life for kids.
Discovering the history of gold
Gold has a very interesting history that kids find fascinating. A great way for children to learn about the value of gold is to share how it has been used and traded across the world throughout history. From ancient Egyptian artifacts, through to the Otago Gold Rush right here in New Zealand, there’s plenty of fascinating stories to share and learn from.
Learning how gold is mined
By showing children how gold is mined, refined and used, you can help them understand why it’s such a valuable asset. You can even take them on a guided tour of a real-life gold mine, where they can get up close and see how gold is extracted from quartz rock and turned into bars of bullion. As well as being a great learning experience, it’s also a fantastic family adventure they’ll love.
How value can be created over time
Gold is a great way to show kids how the value of something can change over time. The bar of gold they’re holding may be worth twice the amount than when it was first bought! Take a look at the graph below showing how the value of gold has increased over time and why it’s been a reliable investment for the last 20 years.
Show how it’s provided a safety net
Because gold is a finite resource, it can hold its value even during times of economic uncertainty. A great example to share is how during the COVID pandemic the value of gold shot up, and also increased again during the recent economic downturn. Introducing children to gold buying can help them understand risk management and manage financial storms that will inevitably occur over their lifetime.
Encouraging financial responsibility
Gold is also a great way to show how creating value takes patience and discipline. By explaining that gold is a long-term investment, you can help children understand the importance of saving and investing their money wisely. By teaching the concept of financial responsibility early on, you’ll be setting them up for a more profitable future.
Providing them with opportunities for the future
Investing in your financial future is important, but for many young people, buying a home may not seem like a viable option. However, that doesn’t mean that they can’t start building their financial security. Gold is an excellent investment for those who don’t have the means to purchase property right away. By saving and investing in gold from a young age, you are giving yourself options for the future. You could hold onto your gold for years, eventually selling it to put towards a home deposit.
How starting small can lead to big things
The earlier you start buying gold, the better, and the great thing about bullion is that there are many different options. You don’t need thousands of dollars to get started. There are plenty of more affordable options, such as silver coins, which you can use to get your child’s savings started.
By investing in precious metals early on, children can start building their own portfolio of assets that will continue to appreciate in value over time. With the right education and guidance, children can learn how to use gold and other tangible assets to protect against inflation and other economic factors.
Teaching children about money is more important than ever before in today’s digital age. By introducing them to gold as a store of wealth, we can help them understand the true value of money and learn how to manage their finances better. By explaining the value of gold, encouraging financial responsibility and helping them build wealth, we can set children up for success in the future. Ultimately, teaching children about gold is a great way to invest in their financial education and set them up for a bright financial future.
Buying bullion, specifically gold, may not be as common as buying a property, but have you ever considered why that is? Perhaps as parents, we need to be more proactive in explaining the value of gold as a store of wealth.
About New Zealand Gold Merchants
There’s a lot to love about the original currency of gold, and Managing Director Tony Coleman for one is an advocate. He’s been buying, refining and selling gold since 1985, and opened the retail offering in 2006, so he knows what he’s talking about. His team at NZ Gold Merchants have ridden the highs and lows of many economic cycles and they’ve witnessed first-hand the powerful role gold – and other precious metals – can play in wealth protection and growth. “We never say people should put all their money into gold – but it should be part of your investment portfolio. Financial history proves that gold protects your wealth from big downturns, and we consider it the ultimate insurance in a financial portfolio.”
Old jewellery and gold scrap produce surprising amounts of pure gold.
The chess set looked like it was made of lead. It was heavy, with a dull sheen to it – but it was actually 24-carat gold, worth a fortune.
“It was smuggled out of South Africa in the days when it was illegal to take wealth out of the country,” says John Hunter, business relationship manager at New Zealand Gold Merchants Ltd – the country’s leading bullion trading company and precious metals (gold and silver) refinery.
“He’d been very clever with it; he’d moulded and cast the set and painted it a lead colour with lead-based paint. Then he turned up in our office carrying it – his family fortune.”
That is an example – admittedly an unusual one – of private sellers who arrive at NZ Gold Merchants with gold to sell. Yet direct private transactions like that form only a small percentage of the gold the company refines and manufactures into beautiful, fine gold (999.9 parts per thousand)
Instead, NZ Gold Merchants pursue something called “urban mining” – the art of recycling old gold and gold scrap from manufacturing jewellers. Internationally, urban mining makes up about 30 per cent of the available above ground gold in the world at any one time (as measured by the World Gold Council).
You get a better idea of the importance of this source of gold when Hunter says that China, the world’s leading producer of gold, releases about 400 tonnes a year. “It’s not that much in the scheme of things,” says Hunter. “Imagine a 20-litre container; 400 tonnes a year of gold would fill only 1000 20-litre containers.
“Of course, it weighs a lot more – full of water, the 20-litre container weighs about 20kg. Full of gold, the same container would weigh 400kg.”
New Zealand, with gold mined in Coromandel, West Coast and Central Otago, is among the top 30 gold producers in the world – but Hunter says NZ Gold Merchants’ urban mining makes up more of their business than the 30 per cent international average.
It is an interesting process – and in comparative infancy until 2008’s global financial crisis saw Kiwis (and people all over the world) selling off gold and jewellery to raise much-needed cash. In 2009, there was a veritable flood of gold.
It created a new and ongoing revenue stream, not just for refiners like NZ Gold Merchants but also jewellers, antique dealers and second-hand shops. It was established in two ways – those businesses sold on whole pieces of old, unwanted or outdated jewellery to Hunter’s company; they also bought what is known as lemel from manufacturing jewellers.
Lemel is the small shavings of precious metals that accrue through the manufacture of jewellery. These shavings are collected and purchased by NZ Gold Merchants.
Hunter says: “That’s where our cutting-edge technology comes into play. The lemel and the old jewellery go to our refinery in Onehunga and we melt them down into a bar.
“Then the bar is analysed using X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) which qualitatively and quantitatively analyses the sample in moments. It highlights the gold, silver, platinum or palladium present, as well as metals other metals like nickel, copper, iron, zinc and cadmium.
“So we know the level of gold in that bar and then we use a series of acids – including hydrochloric and nitric acid – and other processes to refine the gold to a pure form.”
The process of gold purification is a highly skilled operation which is often more art form than process; technological improvements refining processes over the years have led to extremely high quality gold emanating from New Zealand refineries.
That enables NZ Gold Merchants to manufacture bars and ingots from locally refined gold under the NZ PURE™ brand, to complement the range of international brands such as ABC and Royal Canadian Mint that the company typically holds.
A new article by Jia Wang, human resource and organization development researcher, scholar and practitioner, is live in the NAW Blog: Distributing Ideas: How to Create a Winning Team
Here is a preview.
With modern organizations moving away from the traditional hierarchical structure to embracing more project-based operations, working in teams is no longer an alternative choice for employees, but an essential consideration to ensure successful business outcomes. In this article, we’ll look at the five key components that affect team effectiveness, and what types of people you need to bring on board your team.