Diana Ransom looks at The Art of the Gimmick:
When a young couple getting married in Boston last November spotted rain, they weren’t upset a bit. That same day, Richard Berberian, owner of Elyse Fine Jewelers in Reading, Mass., where the couple purchased their engagement and wedding rings, was doing what he calls “the happy dance.”Six months earlier, Berberian had started a sales promotion that called for a full refund of the price of a couple’s engagement and wedding rings if the National Weather Service at Boston’s Logan International Airport reported at least half an inch of precipitation on the couple’s wedding day.
To limit his risk, Berberian had sought out prize insurance, which took about six months to find. “It is very difficult to insure a program like this,” he says, largely because the payout hinges on nothing more than the weather. But from that one fateful day, the couple got back the $13,000 they paid for their rings and Berberian — who didn’t have to pay anything besides roughly $1,300 for the insurance premium — won an impressive amount of publicity, including a front-page story in the Boston Globe and numerous television reports. Thanks to the promotion, the four-year-old business now “sells three to four more engagement rings a month,” he says. “At about $11,000 to $14,000 a pop, that’s a lot of money.”