I sat down in Tucson with Graham Sutton and Scott Werschky, the owners of Mineral City, the largest consortium of fine mineral dealers (over 150) at the annual Tucson Gem, Mineral & Fossil Showcase. Mineral City currently includes 13 warehouse buildings in Tucson, located west of Oracle Road, east of 15th Avenue, and south of Plata Street, with most of the units converted into welcoming showrooms, exhibiting the finest and most valuable rocks in the world. Several of the dealers who rent the units do business year-round. There’s truly nothing like it in the world. The event has minerals for serious collectors, high-end buyers, and wholesale minerals for resale. I interviewed Graham and Scott because I believe their gem show philosophy and business model are on the vanguard of what’s trending in the gem and mineral show world and what will shape its future. We chatted for an hour or two about what’s changing with buying and selling rocks and how technology is redirecting the gem show paradigm.
Xpo Press: How are the internet and social media affecting how rocks are currently being sold at gem and mineral shows?
Mineral City Guys: No doubt, with the internet it's a lot easier to do business, everybody's online at some level now. A lot of the people in our industry have a significant online business. Anyone can now reach out to someone in Austria or Australia or wherever, and a customer can look online in their own time zone and decide if they want a rock. Then they can do a WhatsApp call and video. You can move around the rock in your hand, rotate it. It's no longer sending an email with a static image. I can readily send you a video while we’re discussing the rock. And this has really changed things.
Xpo Press: How do you think this has affected sales at the shows?
Mineral City Guys: A lot of dealers used to do 50% to 70% of their business at their show in Tucson. But today, a lot of buyers are saying, “You know what? I can come to Tucson and spend thousands of dollars on hotel rooms for a week, or I could stay home and sell and buy rocks.” They're making this calculation, and it's definitely affected attendance.
Xpo Press: Talk about the trend of rock and mineral dealers from all over the U.S. and around the world buying property in Tucson and, instead of selling their inventory at a show, they’re opening their warehouses during the Tucson Showcase in January and February and selling from there.
Mineral City Guys: Businesses who come to the Tucson Showcase to sell need to get their inventory from somewhere, and many of them are savvy enough to buy while they’re in Tucson and not just sell. And, yeah, there are dozens of rock warehouses now in Tucson that have a lot more inventory than a vendor at a booth has at a show. There's a lot more business-to-business going on in Tucson than there used to be.
Xpo Press: Are live social media shows having an impact on the traditional gem and mineral shows in Tucson?
Mineral City Guys: You bet. The younger generation of rock sellers is coming on. You know, we're all 50, 60 years old now, or older. The people who are coming behind us are changing the business. Live gem shows on Facebook and Instagram for example, that’s their style, and they’ve successfully figured out this new business model. Here at our show, Mineral City, if you come here at 8, 9, even 11 o’clock at night, there’re guys doing live shows from this building. They're partnering up, you know, guys like Jarret Ross, the guy's got some serious hustle. He's coming in and he's saying to our dealers, you know, I have a bunch of new this or that, or, hey, you got a bunch of new this or that — let's do a “live” from your room. I don't know how many thousands of social media followers he has, probably tens of thousands, but guys like Jarret are partnering up with others; they’ve built a significant internet presence and they’re doing serious business. This kind of thing is going on in our building every night during the Tucson shows.
Xpo Press: Sounds like guys are figuring out how to do as much business, if not more, than many of the vendors at the shows, and without the overhead spent on travel, display cases and lighting rentals, and booth and hotel room fees.
Mineral City Guys: Exa
Xpo Press: Yeah! How do you keep up? How do you compete with that?
Mineral City Guys: It’s not as much how do we compete, but what are we, as basically older brick-and-mortar guys, doing to facilitate these guys in their business? We are trying to do just that at Mineral City. We're providing a room here that we allow people to use at any time. We’re having concerts and outdoor stuff to draw people in after dark. And my feedback from that idea was that wow, you know, there weren’t that many people in the parking lot, but when you walk through the halls, everybody's rooms had people in them. They came to listen to music and to eat some barbecue, but they came to do business.
Xpo Press: That seems to be the great advantage of what a locally owned Tucson facility can offer that out-of-town show operators renting tents and hotels can’t do for buyers and sellers.
Mineral City Guys: Every one of the Tucson shows has its niche. Go down to the 22nd Street Show, or go to JG&M Expo, Danny Duke’s show, those are public-facing retail shows. Sure, those people are doing some behind-the-scenes, dealer-to-dealer trading, but most of the people at those shows are basically end-users. Warehouse shows in Tucson, like ours, we’re basically 24/7 access, 365. Our dealers can leave their display case up, they can set up a mini studio here to use year-round, and during the Tucson Showcase, they have the ability to do business the brick-and-mortar way and five minutes later conduct a live show from here.
Xpo Press: I’ve heard it said that there’s concern in the rock and mineral world that it’s comprised mostly of older folks, and that the younger generation doesn’t seem to show enough interest. Do you see this as a problem in the industry?
Mineral City Guys: We couldn’t disagree more. We see a huge influx of good young collectors and younger dealers, and it's just been growing every year. For instance, I love this Young Mineral Collectors group (www.youngmineralcollectors.org). There are, like, 3,000 members. It's worldwide, and they're really active. It's a vibrant group. I just see more and more younger people into roc
Xpo Press: That is exciting. Where I see there not being enough young participation, though, is with gem and mineral clubs and societies.
Mineral City Guys: Yeah, it's always a worry that everybody's aging out. But, believe me, there's a whole new group coming. To your point, though, those groups haven't quite figured out how to incorporate the younger people who care about minerals into what they're doing. They're kind of set in their ways, which has caused problems for those organizations. Oftentimes, the leadership in those groups is in their seventies, and, in some cases, eighties, and they’re not understanding what matters to these young people. So, there's a relationship problem between these guys passing the baton to the next generation and with these young guys being interested in touching the baton. And you know, there's going to be some clubs that literally fade away because of a lack of understanding of what matters to these guys with Instagram and Facebook.
Xpo Press: How are you incorporating social media into your business model at Mineral City?
Mineral City Guys: We’re looking to add dealers that have a good social media presence, that present themselves well, and that do a good job of doing live shows because these things matter to people who are coming after us. That's part of our strategy. We are going to age out, yeah, and somebody's going to want Mineral City after us. Who do we pass the baton to, or do we just leave it in the street and hope the next guy picks it up?
Xpo Press: As the Tucson EZ-Guide publisher for over twenty years, I keep a close eye on the number of vendors who sell at the combined forty-plus shows in Tucson each year. When we published our first guide in Tucson, there were over 3,500 vendors. Twenty years later, it’s down to 2,500. That’s a thousand businesses — nearly a 30% drop — that aren't coming to Tucson anymore to sell at the shows.
Mineral City Guys: The cost of doing a show, you know, versus the cost of staying home and selling and buying rocks online. Do the math.
Xpo Press: Trade show
Mineral City Guys: You've addressed some of it already, but another part of it is just that everybody wants to come to Tucson. It's a great time of year weather-wise. Another factor is that many buyers need to see and feel the rocks that they want to purchase. One of the negative aspects, though, is just how long Tucson is. That's not necessarily constructive. Same with Denver. Denver used to be a five-day show. People liked that. Now it spans two weekends, nine to ten days, plus setup time for the dealer. So, suddenly, you're investing two or three weeks of your life into your show, which probably doesn't increase anyone’s profits. Doubling the length of a show, if you’re a dealer, your expenses just doubled, your time commitment doubled, but your profits remain about the same. A lot of dealers can't afford to do that. From the buyer’s perspective, though, we know the internet and social media have affected and will continue to affect the way gems and minerals are bought and sold, and it’s our belief that shows that do not accept and facilitate this reality will, like many unbudging mineral clubs, also fade away. We have been in the mineral business for forty years now and have seen the ebb and flow of our industry and now Mineral City is part of that ebb and flow. Stay tuned as we continue to mix the old and new in ways that maintain the excitement of the biggest mineral show in the world in Tucson.
For more information about the Mineral City Show (venue address, contact info, dates, hours, admission, etc.), a list of vendors, photos, and Google-map directions to the show, visit the Mineral City profile page on the Xpo site.