Friends:
The brochure about the Royal Silver Club that used the positive comments from Silver Stackers about our product was initially written for our shareholders. It was a private communication, explaining the concept of the Club. We showed this to our shareholders in private on last Thursday, July 7. It was not meant to stay up on the website any longer than it took for our shareholders to look at it. I just now erased the comments and posted the revised brochure, now that we are going to promote the Royal Silver Club to the public. Please understand that many of our shareholders do not follow silver forums, and I thought they might like to know that our rounds are becoming known. Please don't fault me for only showing the positive comments, I dislike the negative comments--who wouldn't? I don't mind constructive criticism, but sometimes the negative postings against me personally and against Royal Silver reflect points of view taken to extremes.
The Andean Cats were our first design. We've learned much about coin esthetics since then. The Macaws should quiet our critics. We also have other private label coins in the works, coins that you will never know we made, except for the fact they will be 5x9 pure--our trademark.
As for price, we are searching for our niche. We obviously do not depend on retail sales for a living. We sell most of our product to an Asian wholesaler. To protect their markets we keep our online price high. But it is a big world, folks. What seems high in one part of the world seems reasonable in another. We offer the public a chance for wholesale pricing through the Royal Silver Club. Over the last two days, more than a few have accepted our offer.
And time.... All of you will agree with me that time changes all points of view. (I remember being criticized for selling our rounds for $21.) Time changes everything, you will agree. What seems expensive today might in hindsight to have been a bargain. There is an artist in Bolivia named Mamami Mamani. Fifteen years ago you could have bought his works for less than $100--just enough to cover his cost of oil and canvas. Today you pay many thousands for an important piece. Time changes all perspectives.
Royal Silver also struggles with production. We are a small company which has set an almost surreal standard. We re-refine silver over and over to remove infinitesimal amounts of impurity. I've sacked lab techs for mistakes in Atomic Absorption readings that would be super fine silver by anybody else's standards. The dictionary defines infinitesimal as "an indefinitely small quantity--a value approaching zero." We worry about silver that is so fine that it only has 10 parts of impurity in 1,000,000 parts of silver. This is obsession taken to an extreme. But that is the standard I set. No wonder no other mint even comes close to this level of purity--they couldn't afford it. So price is relative. And time will tell if our product will hold its status as a collectable, high re-sale premium round.
Finally, about the Macaw video on You Tube. Sure I make mistakes--more so than most, because I am pushing the horizon on what I want our company to accomplish. I should not have mentioned the royal family who will receive the first Macaws--I know--but please do not look at this from your Western, First World, or ex-colonial perspective. Our market is in Asia right now. There are countries where royal families are actually humble people, loved by their populace, and revered as symbols of a by-gone age--a sort of mystic time, long removed from modern reality, but remembered in their national psyche. I cannot say more, but please allow us our own human foibles. Because you cannot imagine the pride that swells up in the hearts of our workers when they realize that their long hours late at night are to produce a thing of beauty that will be given to a "princess." Our coin minters are poor men of great spirit, living in conditions you cannot understand or appreciate--you who live in the First World--who live in rich countries. (When I say Royal Silver grew from humble beginnings, you would never guess how humble.) Our men go home to their homes in the dusty hills lit with a single bulb and tell their children with pride that now they work with don Brian and he has taught them how to make silver coins so beautiful they are given as gifts to princesses, and you can imagine their daughters gazing up at their fathers with a sense of wonder, as if hearing a fairy tale. Please allow us to give them that, without criticizing us, because if our distributor pulls it off, it will be a private source of pride for all of us who labor here in Bolivia making these coins. We live in a dusty town in a country lost in time--so the concept that our coins will be presented to a person called a princess in an exotic country far away that we only know of from pictures, that concept lifts our morale. Please allow us that small human weakness known as a sense of pride.
I apologize, if any of you were offended.
Thank you.
Regards
Brian McConnell
