A young person I am teaching here wants to start a jewellery
manufacturing business soon and will soon be needing jewellery
suppliers in her home city Rome.
What is required by suppliers in Italy? Does she absolutely need to
get a partita IVA number to purchase silver/gold stock from a
supplier?
And lastly is there anyone here who would help her to locate some
jewellery suppliers in Rome, please?
Thanks
Brian
Brian Adam
Auckland NEW ZEALAND
www.adam.co.nz
For What It’s Worth, I can tell you a few things about my experience
in Florence. I don’t have an IVA and some suppliers will sell
precious metal raw materials to me and others won’t. Everyone will
sell me tools and supplies (but without an IVA I can’t deduct the 20%
sales tax from my own tax return).
The bigger issue perhaps is the regulation of sales of finished
precious metal pieces to consumers, which requires a registered
hallmark, certified scales, and a safe on premises (at least those
are the regs here in Florence).
All that said, no one has yet looked twice at me working out of a
private studio without all that, but I keep a very low public
profile and mostly take jobs by word of mouth. Rome and Florence are
different places, but up here people seem quite accustomed to
semi-regularized business practices and cash-only operations. If
your student speaks Italian she should have no trouble finding the
Roman regulations online from the Chamber of Commerce (Camera di
Commercio) and suppliers in the yellow pages. For figuring out the
locally acceptable practices, making friends with some goldsmiths is
her best bet. Tell her “in boca lupo” from me! And of course she’s
free to contact me directly by email to zachary at androusjewelry dot
com
For What It's Worth, I can tell you a few things about my
experience in Florence [...]
Thank you, Zachary. I’ve passed on your helpful comments. She’s an
Italiana from Rome, and may contact you directly.
By the way here in New Zealand we have a similar consumer tax called
a Goods and Services Tax (GST = 12.5%) and it’s on everything…
except fine silver and fine gold. Isn’t that great?
I do actually use a lot of fine silver in my jewellery, and prefer
to buy fine gold granules. It means the purchase price of stock is
reduced and I can pay myself for alloying time.