Welcome to the Jewelry District, a podcast by JCPay, brought to you by Novoda.

Today, Rob Bates and Victoria Gamalski talk about the effects of the tariffs, the American Watchmaking Revival, and executive changes at Ben Bridge and Kendra Scott.

Hey, everyone.

Welcome to the jewelry district.

This is Victoria Gimelski, editor-in-chief of JCPay-CK Online.com, calling in from Los Angeles, and I'm with

Rob Bates, news director of J-CK and J-CK Online.com calling in from New York City. How goes it?

How are you? I'm good. It's like the dog days of summer out here in L.A. So kind of quiet on the jewelry front.

But earlier when we were talking, you said there was like a crispness, a fall in the air in New York.

So it does feel like we're gearing up for another fall coming around the bend.

But you said it's very hot over there. Yeah, we've got a heat wave coming in. I live in the valley, which if anybody knows L.A., it's about 20 degrees hotter here than it is on the west side where like L.A.X is, where the Santa Monica, Marina del Rey, my sister who lives on that side of the hill is, you know, I'll call her and I'll say, oh, my God, it's 100 degrees. I'm sweating. I can't handle it. And she's like, oh, I'm wearing a sweater. And I just like being like, oh, my God, stop. It's quite dramatic the heat difference. The good thing about the valley is that at night when the rest of L.A. cools down, because L.A., you know, it's not like New York where on a hot day you kind of feel that heat because of the humidity. In the evenings, it cools pretty drastically. But in the valley, it stays warm enough where we can still swim in the pool even when it's dark out, which, you know, is a really lovely feeling. So, yeah, we'll be swimming this week because we can't

use our pool after a certain time because it's just, it's such a big pool, not to brag, but it is a bury, it's one of those pools. They don't, we didn't build it. It just came with the house, but it's, it's such a big pool that I'll never forget during the pandemic. We had like some massage people come out and set up their tables

outside for us. And the one guy's like, I like your community pool. It's just, it's like one of those

pools, they don't, they don't build them anymore. And it has a diving board, which they don't build,

you know, those things are liabilities. They don't insure them anymore. But they're grandfathered in.

And so we can't heat

it after a certain time. It's just too big. So we use it in the summer and then and then we just

stare at it for the rest of the year. Okay. Well, what are you hearing out in the marketplace about the

latest tariff regime that was announced now a couple weeks ago.

I mean, from an industry perspective, obviously there's a lot of countries that are affected,

but the ones that seem to have gotten the most attention were the tariffs on India, which

rose to 25 percent and are due to rise to 50 percent on August 27, which I believe is the day that this podcast will come out.

50% is a huge tariff, obviously.

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