By JENNIFER SMITH

Law firms are finally starting to recover from the recession, but they aren’t taking their young lawyers along for the ride.

Even as profits return, cautious partners with one eye on damaged balance sheets and the other on stingy clients plan to hang onto the lean silhouettes they acquired during the downturn.

That means little relief for young associates—who took on hefty law-school loans, only to run into layoffs and stagnant pay in the years since 2008—and fewer chances for new law-school graduates to get in on the ground floor. And the elusive brass ring of partnership has grown more remote.

“What happens if Greece falls apart again?” says Greg Nitzkowski, managing partner at Paul Hastings LLP, an international firm that has reduced entry-level hires by about a third since 2008. “We just think it’s prudent to plan as if this coming year is going to be a relatively flat year.…We’re not planning for a big upsurge in demand.”

Conditions at law firms have stabilized since 2009, when the legal industry shed 41,900 positions, according to the Labor Department. Cuts were more moderate last year, with some 2,700 positions eliminated, and recruiters report more opportunities for experienced midlevel associates.

But many elite firms have shrunk their ranks of entry-level lawyers by as much as half from 2008, when market turmoil was at its peak. Salaries and bonuses for those associates have remained generally flat. Meanwhile, a degree at a top law school can cost $100,000 or more.

Associates at prominent law firms say some of their peers hired during the boom years are happy just to have jobs at all. “The world has changed,” says a senior associate at a top firm.

During the downturn some firms pared associate ranks through layoffs and by delaying start dates for fresh law-school graduates. And many firms for routine tasks now use less-expensive alternatives to young associates, such as contract attorneys and outsourcing firms.

“Law firms basically focused a lot of head-count reductions during the recession on associate ranks, says Dan DiPietro, chairman of Citi Private Bank’s law-firm group. “They feel like the associate ranks are where they want them to be.”

White & Case LLP, an international law firm, plans to hire about 60 entry-level lawyers this year, compared with prerecession classes of 90 to 100.

“The efficiency of law practice has just changed dramatically in the past five years,” says Bill Dantzler, a hiring partner and head of the firm’s tax practice. “We don’t have to have these armies of young associates. It’s good for the clients, it’s good for everybody.”

That means reputable firms can be even more picky about whom they hire. While firms still compete for the highest-ranking graduates from Ivy League and other top law schools, it is a different story for solid candidates who lack gold-plated résumés. Students with lower class rankings or from second-tier schools who once would have made the cut “wouldn’t have a prayer of getting in now,” Mr. Dantzler says.

For those who do land jobs at big law firms, the hours remain grueling. In 2010 associates at firms with more than 700 lawyers billed an average of 1,859 hours—the equivalent of more than seven hours a day—according to the National Association for Law Placement.

As head counts fell, the average workload for those associates has risen 2.3% since 2007, or about 50 extra hours a year.

And the road to partnership is longer and more uncertain than in the past. Many lawyers now toil eight or even 10 years before being chosen. A decade ago, the most common partnership track took seven years. Other firms have thinned their top ranks of partners who didn’t bring in enough business, making it even tougher to elbow into a spot.

Partners at several large law firms also say they don’t plan to raise associate salaries, which haven’t increased since 2007. December bonuses remained roughly the same as in 2010, with first-year associates at elite firms such as Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP getting $7,500. The most senior associates received bonuses of $37,500 to $42,500.

“Most firms are hesitant to lock themselves into something they can’t sustain,” says Paula Alvary of consulting firm Hoffman Alvary. “While there is clear evidence that work levels are returning, they’re not at prerecession levels for most firms.”

Still, many people continue to pursue law as a career, not least because the median starting salary for entry-level lawyers at top New York firms is $160,000. That is nearly double the going rate in 1996, before the tech boom drove salaries skyward.

And phones are ringing again at law-firm recruiters. Junior lawyers who once clung white-knuckled to their jobs are loosening their grips and moving to corporations’ law departments or to law firms where they might have better shots at making partner.

Eric Fishman in 2010 took what many colleagues then saw as a huge risk when he left one of New York’s elite practices for midsize Pryor Cashman LLP, where he hoped to get more experience running cases and building a practice.

“There was little chance many of my peers would have considered a move from a big law firm at that time,” says Mr. Fishman, now a senior associate at the respected firm. “Now they’re less fearful; the economy is getting better.”

But the pace of such movement isn’t what it was. Before the downturn, firms lost between 25% to 30% of their associates after a few years, people in the industry say. R. Bruce McLean, chairman of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, says the attrition rate at his firm is around 15% now.

“It’s like lots of things in our economy,” he says. “The outlook is brighter, the anxiety level is diminished, but it’s not completely gone.…This is still a period of anxiety for our entire associate population. This is not what they anticipated when they started law school.”

Natalie Keyssar for The Wall Street Journal

160 E. 38th St.

As tenants are growing restless and struggling with the economic downturn, many business owners are reading the fine print of their leases to see if they’re overpaying for everything from window cleaning to electricity.

Rent escalation clauses, which provide for increases in rent each year to help account for inflation, have proven a particularly contentious subject.

Take a recent dispute between the El Rio Grande restaurant and its landlord, Murray Hill Mews Owners Corp., over the rent for the retail space at the base of a large apartment tower at 160 E. 38th St. The discrepancy centers essentially on how the rent escalation is calculated.

The method used would make a big difference in rent especially in the later years of the lease. Based on the landlord’s preferred formula, the annual rent would be about $5 million by 2018, according to court papers filed by El Rio Grande.

Under the formula that the restaurant is advocating, the rent that year would be about $370,000, the court papers state.

The landlord recently won a summary judgment in an appellate court, but the tenant’s attorney, Richard Leland, of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP, says the restaurant will seek to appeal.

Disputes of this kind—albeit usually involving much smaller discrepancies—are springing up frequently. It’s even helped lead to an industry of accountants and attorneys who specialize in combing leases for points of dispute, usually on a contingency basis. “There has developed a cottage industry of lease auditors,” says Gary Rosenberg, a real-estate attorney. “Fifteen years ago there was maybe one guy who did it and now you get letters from big firms saying, ‘Now you should have your lease audited.’”

While that might make some landlords nervous, for business owners pinched by tough times, it’s become increasingly popular. “When the market was tough and everybody was looking for every nickel they could find, the tenants were a little bit more focused on that,” says Seth Molod, a partner at Berdon LLP, an accounting firm.

—Laura Kusisto

$5M vs $370,000

Landlord and tenant’s rival estimate of what rent should be in 2018

Address: 160 E. 38th St.

Tenant: El Rio Grande restaurant

Landlord: Murray Hill Mews Owners Corp.

By JOHN LETZING

Amazon.com Inc. is purchasing property in central Seattle with plans to construct about 3 million square feet of office space, a move that could have the online retail bellwether owning its corporate headquarters for the first time amid dramatic expansion.

Amazon is buying three large contiguous blocks in central Seattle—a short walk south of where it leases its current headquarters—from Clise Properties Inc.

Real estate developer Seneca Group Inc., which is working with Clise, has filed papers with the city to build three office towers on the properties, each of which could include 1 million square feet of office space.

“I think it’s a first, because of the size,” said Clise Chief Executive Al Clise. “There are corporate headquarters in Seattle, but nothing of this size.”

Mr. Clise declined to disclose the price being paid by Amazon. The deal is expected to be finalized later this year.

An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment, and a representative from Seneca Group did not respond to a request for comment.

“This is a new direction” for the company, Mr. Clise said. “They’re planning for the future.” Mr. Clise said Amazon also has options to acquire “significant” parcels of adjacent property in the future to accommodate further growth.

Bryan Stevens, Seattle’s industrial permit liaison, said the city has not yet received applications from Amazon with design details.

Current zoning for the properties Amazon has acquired allows for buildings up to 500 feet in height, or about 40 stories, Stevens noted.

Amazon’s real estate purchase comes as it finds itself in the midst of a dramatic growth spurt. The company reported recently that it ended 2011 with 56,200 employees, a 67% increase from the prior year.

Amazon’s spending on employee additions, fulfillment centers and data infrastructure contributed to a sharp drop in fourth-quarter profit, as the company’s normally impressive rate of quarterly revenue growth missed expectations.

It was not immediately clear how many employees Amazon could house within the 3 million additional square feet of office space.

Yahoo Inc. won approval in 2010 to build a 3 million square-foot office campus in Silicon Valley, not far from its current headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. That campus could accommodate roughly 12,000 employees.

Write to John Letzing at john.letzing@dowjones.com

As pedestrian plazas go, the one in the heart of Jackson Heights’s commercial district isn’t very attractive.

OK, it’s downright ugly.

Six light-blue tables with umbrellas. Twenty-four seats. And boulders whose purpose may always remain a mystery. (Extra seating? Abstract art?).

On a recent weekday afternoon in what is one of the city’s most bustling and diverse neighborhoods, the plaza—spanning 37th Road between 73rd and 74th streets—was eerily empty.

To be fair, Jackson Heights sees the bulk of its business on weekends. And I happened upon the plaza on a cold day, not the kind of weather that encourages lingering for a cup of chai and some chaat.

But to the merchants in the area, the emptiness symbolizes the state of their affairs since September, when the plaza was created.

“In my 12 years here I have not seen Jackson Heights this dead,” said Rita Kamdar, owner of Mahavir Pack & Ship, a phone card and FedEx shop on 37th Road.

“We have lost a lot of business, almost 60% of our business, because of no traffic,” she added. “If this continues like this we’ll just have to go out of business one fine day.”

Next door at the Jackson Heights Music Center, owner Karim Abdul said he’s had to lay off four employees and is down to two.

Negotiating space in the city is never easy. And so the closure of one block has created a firestorm of controversy here in the metropolitan region’s South Asian hub of commerce. On one side are the shop owners who say the road closure has chased away the bulk of their business because buses no longer stop there and out-of-town customers have been flummoxed by a cumbersome new traffic pattern that leaves drivers heading for the highway.

They’ve closed their shops for several hours in protest, confronted a beautification group that came out for a street crawl and even formed a business coalition (in addition to the existing largely Indian and separate Bangladeshi groups. Apparently it takes a plaza to unite a subcontinent.)

But supporters say the plaza lessens traffic congestion along 37th Road, which posed a safety hazard, and provides for open space in a neighborhood sorely lacking it.

The plaza itself was an afterthought, said City Council Member Daniel Dromm.

“This was really a street closure and then a, ‘What do we do with it?’” he said.

That shows. Unlike pedestrian plazas in other parts of the city (think Times Square), often created in partnership with Business Improvement Districts or similar groups, this one looks like a slapped together effort.

That could be explained by the fact that for the moment it’s considered temporary. A decision on whether to make the plaza permanent is expected to be made next month—and according to Mr. Dromm it will likely remain, albeit with some changes.

Len Maniace, vice president of the Jackson Heights Beautification Group that sponsored the street crawl that ended in confrontation, said the plaza itself is not one of the group’s main priorities, though it does support the idea.

“I would like to see it stay there because I think it could work,” he said.

“It’s something that we think had real promise and real possibility to improve the business environment down there,” he said. “Now if the merchants down there don’t want it, what am I gonna say? It’s up to the city to decide what they want to do with it.”

The plaza was one of a number of things done following a multi-year Department of Transportation study aimed at improving safety and mobility in the Jackson Heights area.

A DOT spokeswoman said via email that maintenance efforts are being funded by local officials, such as Mr. Dromm, and the department is continuing to look for partners and enhancements through initiatives like the CityBench program.

But many business owners in the area say they want the plaza dismantled or moved—even just a block away.

Kabab King owner Shaukat Ali is among the lucky ones. His corner business hasn’t been hurt too much, but Mr. Ali still opposes the plaza as vehemently as the others. On a recent afternoon he ferried me around from business to business, nodding in sympathy as storeowner after storeowner spoke of plunging business that has led them to lay off workers and fall behind on paying their bills.

“It doesn’t help us to look nice,” said Mr. Ali. “The traffic pattern has to be circular.”

Among the most concerned are Razi Ahmed and Razib Haq who plan to open a grocery store and food court at the defunct Eagle Theater on 37th Road.

The duo say they are months away from an opening but are considering scrapping the project if the plaza remains.

There is no easy answer here. No one wants to see a business district that thrived even during the economic downturn being hurt. But anyone who has been to Jackson Heights also knows that traffic congestion and parking are issues that need to be addressed.

Mr. Dromm said there are plans to use the plaza for events and groups have volunteered to do clean-ups. He said the city intends to put in additional loading zones and parking spots and will change the direction of 37th Road past 74th Street to aid drivers coming to the area.

Clearly there is a need for better signage for drivers, at the least, maybe even directing those coming off the interstate on how to best get to the heart of the business district and where to park.

Moving the plaza is a possibility, too, though that could pose additional problems.

No matter what happens, if the plaza is to remain, some sprucing up is critical. Street lights, greenery, signage and the money to maintain and clean it would be a start.

Put a Bollywood theater there and, voila, we may not be so far from Times Square after all.

—
sumathi.reddy@wsj.com

By TY MCMAHAN

Four years ago, Jared Madsen started a company that makes bicycles built for five. He sold his bikes—which had two wheels and a rear bucket big enough to tote four children—wholesale to shops around the country.

But today, 90% of sales at his small business, Madsen Cycles, in Murray, Utah, come from an online store that took his Web designer half a day to embed within his company’s website.

The company’s bikes are now sold by him directly to consumers for about $1,485 apiece, at what he describes as a “way higher profit.” He declines to specify his markups.

Getty Images

Mr. Madsen says he initially thought the online store would just fill in “holes” where he didn’t have distribution. But the benefit to him in the end, he adds, was that the Web store made it possible for him to dramatically reduce his reliance on third-party shops.

As a result, the online store is now his business’s main source of income.

Have a company website? If you’re not using it to sell your goods or services, then you could be losing out on an opportunity to boost your company’s bottom line.

Forrester Research says online shopping has surged in recent years and is continuing to grow. U.S. online retail sales, which rose 12.6% to $176.2 billion in 2010, are expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 10% through 2015, the research firm reports.

Building an ecommerce platform within your company website doesn’t have to be complex or expensive. A number of new services—such as such as Goodsie, Shopify, Storenvy and Weebly—now make the task easy and affordable. You can use these services to design a store, upload product, create shopping carts, manage fulfillment and more, —all for as little as a few dollars a month.

Older platforms such as eBay and Etsy allow merchants to sell direct to consumers with benefits such as built-in site traffic. But these new services give merchants more control over the look and feel of their online stores.

“I wanted to have some sort of online presence or shop, but I thought it would be too much work and I couldn’t do it on my own,” says Kimberly Lash, who uses Goodsie to sell vintage clothing at ShopAmour.com. “I thought eBay felt like just selling clothes. You couldn’t build a brand or company. There’s tons of traffic and people are already going to the site, but you can’t create a brand.”

The cost to use the new Web-store services ranges from as little as $5 up to $179 a month. Both Storenvy and Weebly are “freemium” services, offering the basic platform for no charge. The services can be free because the platforms make their money selling additional features, such as more storage. Storenvy charges monthly fees of $4.99 to link a store’s own domain name and $2.99 for a discount code feature. Weebly charges $5 to link a domain name. Goodsie offers the first month for free, then a flat $15 each month for all features.

The Shopify platform is the most feature-packed and also the priciest. The company charges $29 a month and a 2% transaction fee for all e-commerce features and up to 100 products. The company says its most popular offering is $99 plus a 1% transaction fee and up to 10,000 products.

We spoke to executives at Goodsie, Shopify, Storenvy and Weebly, as well as Tom Davis, global head of e-commerce at footwear and apparel company Puma.

Based on their suggestions, here are our tips for using these services to create an online store:

1. Invest time, and possibly money, in taking good photos.

Photography is the “dirty little secret” of e-commerce, according to Mr. Davis. “[Customers] can’t touch and feel your wares, so your photography needs to be an important element.”

Merchants should professionally photograph as many details of a product as they can afford.

Goodsie Chief Executive Jonathan Marcus recommends shooting each product individually, as well as while it’s being worn or used by a model, in order to show how big the product is.

2. Use a voice that matches your brand.

“There’s a fine line between cute and strategic,” says Mr. Davis. For example, a flower shop may describe marigolds as “perfect for fall and a favorite for moms,” while an electronics store may provide a more technical description of products. Merchants should also consider how their descriptions might surface in search-engine results, he adds.

3. Experiment with the layout, and mix it up.

The new services, which emerged within the past five years, provide hundreds of templates for the arrangement of products on the page, as well as a wide variety of different colors and fonts. “Change things every two to three weeks over three months and see what drives the best results,” Mr. Davis says.

Goodsie’s Mr. Marcus adds that stores need to be thoughtful about what products fit together on a page. For example, an apparel company may consider arranging items that make up an entire outfit.

4. Figure out the payment gateway.

This is the trickiest part of creating an online store, according to Mr. Davis. Store owners will need to set up a merchant account with a bank to link funds from the credit card company or a third-party processor like PayPal, which lets customers use its merchant account under certain terms, usually with very little setup required. PayPal does not charge a setup fee.

Currently, Weebly stores only accept Paypal or Google Checkout to process payments. Goodsie offers those services, as well as Braintree Inc. and Authorize.net, a Visa Inc. company, to accept credit card payments. Shopify offers dozens of payment options.

PayPal accepts all major credit cards with no setup or monthly fees. The service takes a 2.9% fee per transaction on monthly sales up to $3,000. The rate reduces as monthly sales increase. Google Checkout charges the same. Authorize.net charges a $100 set-up fee, a $20 monthly fee and 10 cents per transaction. Most services charge about $10 per chargeback in the event a refund is issued.

5. Try to make online shopping feel like an experience.

“Do you have the right boxes? Do you have packing foam? How do you want merchandise to be presented when your customer opens the box? Remember, that’s the only one-on-one you’re going to have with a customer,” Mr. Davis says. He suggests offering gift wrapping and sending hand-written thank-you notes to add a more personal touch to the e-commerce experience.

Alternatively, you can outsource fulfillment. Shopify integrates with third-party fulfillment services such as Fulfillment by Amazon, Shipwire and Webgistix. The cost of this can range for tens of dollars into the thousands depending on the product and volume of shipping. Those who choose to outsource fulfillment should do several trial orders with a service before committing to a provider, Mr. Davis suggests.

6. Promote heavily.

With the growth of social media, these e-commerce platforms have baked in Facebook and Twitter integration so the store and individual products can be “Liked” and tweeted across the social networks. This requires registering for those services separately. The e-commerce platforms will ask the usernames and passwords of those separate services to sync the store. Gaining a following on services like Facebook and Twitter is a good way to alert customers to new products or specials, and to gain customer feedback, and potentially evangelism.

Goodsie and Storenvy have tools to “port” an entire store to Facebook, enabling shopping directly through the social network. They say the process is as simple as installing an application and all products are automatically imported into a Facebook store. Store owners lose some control over the look of their store on Facebook, of course, however.

Storenvy also combines all stores built on the platform into one big marketplace. It claims its stores are making almost 15% of their sales through the marketplace rather than through direct traffic. Goodsie also plans to launch a similar marketplace.

A similar version of this story appeared previously in Dow Jones VentureWire.

Write to Ty McMahan at ty.mcmahan@dowjones.com

By SIMONA COVEL

All that glitters is not gold, William Shakespeare cautioned. These days, it might turn out to be Platanium.

Platanium — a stainless-steel alloy whose name is meant to invoke the luster of platinum and the strength of titanium — is a new metal offered by John Christian, a small custom-jewelry company in Austin, Texas.

John Christian’s new product line is a direct response to something affecting all sorts of businesses: soaring commodity prices. Gold rose to more than $1,000 an ounce early this year before settling back close to the $800 mark recently — still double where it was three years ago. Such prices put gold out of reach for many customers, who also are cutting back in a weak economy.

This double-whammy prompted John Christian to do something innovative: It gave a stainless-steel product a fancy name, crafted a new brand around it and marketed it as a lower-cost alternative to pricey gold.

Courtesy of the company

Wes Weaver

“People are still going to get married and love their kids and celebrate special times in their lives, but the jewelry’s going to have to change,” says Wes Weaver, John Christian’s chief executive. Currently, nearly half of the firm’s orders come from the new, cheaper product line.

Product diversification can help a small company survive — and grow — especially when it is dependent on a product that becomes uncompetitive thanks to a change in the economy, such as rising prices. It allows a business to balance economic risks and reach new customers. But small firms that create a new product line also run the risk of muddling their brand’s identity — especially those that have limited brand recognition to begin with. And high-end companies that extend into lower price ranges or less-fancy materials in particular risk alienating customers.

A small company with limited brand recognition “doesn’t want to compromise the reputation of the premium product,” says Sasha Strauss, managing director at Innovation Protocol, a Los Angeles-based brand consulting company.

But if a firm is able to “isolate and protect” its higher-status brand while leveraging an existing manufacturing platform and reaching a new audience, he adds, the results can be gratifying.

A Matter of Survival

Executives at John Christian considered that risk. But the company, which sells personalized jewelry through its Web site, was in trouble.

As metal costs rose, they raised prices. Custom rings that sold for $599 in 2003 or 2004 gradually crept up to a current price of around $900. For 2006, the company posted $6 million in revenue. In 2007, as the economy weakened and retail spending tapered off, revenue slipped to $5 million. Profit margins were lower because of commodity-price jumps that outpaced retail-price increases.

“I was fighting to survive,” Mr. Weaver says.

It’s a fight that is reverberating across the jewelry-manufacturing industry, which is made up mostly of small companies. As metal prices marched higher, many of those companies set themselves apart by offering custom work, says Gerry Davies, managing editor of the MJSA Journal, a publication put out by the Manufacturing Jewelers & Suppliers of America, a Providence, R.I., trade group. But as economic concerns mounted, creativity and custom service weren’t enough for many of the upstarts, which now are looking to alternative metals and lighter, cheaper jewelry styles like mesh and filigree.

Mr. Weaver knew John Christian needed to find an advantage in its small size. “So many companies have gone out of business, but we can turn on a dime,” he says. The firm experimented with its product line, increasing the number of lower-cost sterling-silver items in its lineup. But margins were lower, and the soft metal was harder to work with.

So he considered other options. Titanium can’t be cast in a wax mold, so it wouldn’t work for custom engraved products. Palladium was nearly as expensive as gold and didn’t have much name recognition. Then he thought about stainless steel: It’s inexpensive and doesn’t scratch much or tarnish.

The company experimented with a stainless-steel ring line targeting military personnel, emblazoned with the seal of the Army, Navy, Marines or Air Force. Men were immediately receptive to the idea of an industrial-strength metal. “I’ve got a big, burly Marine — no problem,” Mr. Weaver says, “The real question was, ‘Can I sell a stainless-steel ring to a man to give to his wife, and can I get a woman to buy it?’ ”

In a brainstorming session, executives came up with the name Platanium — positing that the alloy looks like platinum and is hard like titanium. They felt the name connoted quality. Immediately, Mr. Weaver applied for a trademark.

A New Audience

John Christian built its 10-year-old business selling custom items in the $400 to $700 range — reaching out to high-end customers through ads in the New Yorker and Smithsonian magazines. Afraid those customers would be put off by a $169 stainless-steel ring, the company decided to keep Platanium separate. It started a new brand, called Carved Creations, with a different Web address (www.ccforlife.com).

Carved Creations launched in April, ahead of Mother’s Day, offering engraved jewelry in Platanium and sterling silver. All of the items cost less than $200.

For weeks, Mr. Weaver spent most of his time building the new site, guiding the making of the jewelry prototypes and posting product photos to the site.

The company spent $30,000 upfront on ads that ran in April, May and June — the biggest expense in starting the new line. Instead of high-brow magazines, Carved Creations ads appear in USA Today and US Weekly among others — publications whose readers tend to be younger and fall into lower income brackets.

Key for the small company: The ordering process for John Christian and Carved Creations items is the same. The company didn’t need to install new software or systems. A computer prints a nearly identical invoice that says which product line the order belongs to.

Lifetime Guarantee

So far, the company has sold about $100,000 in Carved Creations jewelry. In the weeks following the new brand’s launch, 30% of customers selected the silver option for their purchase — a proportion Mr. Weaver wanted to reduce because of the difficulty in working with silver and its tendency to tarnish.

So the company began offering a lifetime guarantee on the Platanium. Mr. Weaver says it was easy to do so because of stainless steel’s natural durability and resistance to scratching. Sterling items, in contrast, come with a 30-day warranty. With that change, some customers’ resistance fell away. Today, 95% of Carved Creations orders are for Platanium.

Still, some customers are wary, Mr. Weaver says. The staff fields plenty of calls from potential buyers asking what exactly Platanium is. “When you get a customer on the phone and you explain what it is,” he says, “they pick it every time.”

Old-line jeweler acquaintances have given him a hard time about the cleverly titled alloy, Mr. Weaver admits. But, he adds, many of those jewelers “are getting killed” trying to sell high-priced gold in a tough economy.

Write to Simona Covel at simona.covel@wsj.com