I’m thrilled to announce that the JCK Publishing Group just won two 2008 Gold Eddie Awards.

The Eddies are presented annually by Folio magazine, the leading publication for magazine professionals. They represent editorial excellence and are bestowed only to the best magazine editorial teams.

JCK won its awards in the business-to-business retail category. We were in competition with all retail magazines, not just those in the jewelry sector. We won Best Full Issue for JCK Luxury magazine and Best Single Article for diamond editor Rob Bates’s “The Cultured Club” in the January 2008 issue of JCK.

I’ve mentioned many times in this space that quality journalism is the foundation upon which the entire JCK brand is built. We follow a simple, time-honored business model of building a strong, loyal audience by focusing on the basics of smart and essential editorial. Congrats to JCK Luxury editor Carrie Soucy and to multiple award winner Rob Bates.

In other news, we’re very excited here at JCK about a survey we recently conducted. The third-party survey—by Research Results Inc.—was conducted among retailer attendees of the 2008 JCK Show ~ Las Vegas. The survey focused on the work life of U.S. retailers and the relationships they have with their vendors. The goal was to determine why retailers prefer certain vendors and find out how manufacturers can work their way onto preferred-vendor lists.

Some key implications of the study were:

• Retailers tend to buy the vast majority of their product (an average of 82 percent) from a small list of vendors (73 percent of retailers bought from fewer than 20 companies).

• Retailers have little time to source new products (an average of 10 percent of their work time).

The top three sources for finding new products are trade magazines (81 percent), trade shows (77 percent), and the Internet (57 percent).

In light of this, we were delighted that 84 percent of this same group of retailer attendees said they regularly read (three out of four issues) JCK magazine. We’re also pleased that, considering the Internet’s growing role, JCKonline.com has been receiving over 100,000 unique visitors a month.

If you’d like a complete list of the attributes of preferred vendors, please contact me directly at msmelzer@reedbusiness.com, or contact your JCK sales representative.

Finally, I’d like to thank and congratulate the organizers of the 2008 China International Jewelry Design Contest. The subject of the contest was Beauty of Athletics and it celebrated the “Swifter, Higher, Stronger” motto of the Beijing Olympics. TTF Jewelry, the event organizer, invited me to hand out awards at their Sept. 13 gala in Shenzhen, China. It was a beautiful, exciting night, and I was honored to participate.