Project Case Studies

I own a gold and diamond store in front of the Louvre in Paris, France, and need to know if I can still go on, from a legal, and business, perspective.

Ever since the COVID outbreak, I have not had any sales. 2020 is a very dark year financially for us. Our group's main operations are refurbishing and renovating used gemstones, from diamond, gold, emerald, and ruby, and we sell them to our customers. Our clients are highly satisfied and appreciate our services. Our prices are lower in comparison to competitors on the same street. We have been doing this for 30 years now, and have never had any financial problems or losses like today. Our inventory is full and we expect a shipment of used jewelry in September 2020, contracted 6 months ago, that we will then need to pay for. From a financial perspective, given we have almost a drop of 60% loss in sales this year from 2019 and expect it to keep rising, we will not be able to take them. Contractually, we are liable for buying them. Financially, we will need to liquidate a large percentage of our products at loss to make up for the coming expenses, or need to sell at least 15% of our inventory in order to break even with the upcoming costs. We tried to notify our supplier that we will not be able to take the shipment when it comes in September, but they have refused and stated that we are strictly liable to this contract. Unfortunately, in the contract we have not included an insurance clause if for any reason we will not be able to provide the funds, hence the lower supplying costs we incurred. But now, our situation is very difficult, given banknotes or creditors are not able to loan us for the next shipment since they know for a fact most companies operating in this sector will default. This future contract is held at an airtight perspective legally. We need to, first of all from a business perspective what we can do to gain more clients, or reduce our losses. And secondly from a legal perspective what we can do given we are strictly liable to taking this shipment.