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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

By BETH GARDINER

Just like large companies eager to get a foothold in one of the world’s most important markets, international business schools are moving into China in a big way.

Eager to capitalize on demand in a fast-growing economy that has a huge need for well-trained managers, big name B-schools from Europe and the U.S. are launching and expanding M.B.A.-program collaborations with Chinese universities or going it alone with courses aimed at mid-career executives.

Experience in China is also a selling point at home, since Western students increasingly see the benefits of studying at an institution whose faculty have close-up experience of the country. Such links can also give M.B.A. students the chance to study in China for a module or a semester.

“The lure is to go and learn about what’s happening, and be in the middle of the action in one of the most dynamic economies in the world,” says Krishna Palepu, senior associate dean for international development at Harvard Business School. The school has had a faculty research base in China for about 20 years but now shares a new Shanghai classroom with other Harvard schools.

“In the last four or five years we have ramped it up to a much larger scale,” he says.

A flurry of deans from top international institutions who have moved recently to run programs in Asia shows the influence the continent’s institutions now wield in the B-school world, says Matt Symonds, whose company, Symonds GSB, does consulting for business schools.

George Yip is leaving the top post at the Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands for the China Europe International Business School, or CEIBS, where John Quelch, a onetime head of London Business School, recently became dean. Arnoud De Meyer quit his job as director of the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School last year to become president of the Singapore Management University.

China has scores of its own business schools, which now attract thousands of students a year.

“But nonetheless, such is the thirst for a managerial talent pool that there remains tremendous demand for the Western business-school product,” Mr. Symonds says.

Duke University is setting up a campus in Kunshan, near Shanghai, and its Fuqua School of Business is slated to be the first to offer programs there. Some other Western universities run full-fledged M.B.A. programs in partnership with Chinese institutions, and many more offer shorter training courses.

Chinese companies are growing so quickly that training programs can barely keep up with the demand for qualified managers. With companies vying for their services, such employees jump ship frequently, so firms must make sure they have a pipeline of new talent available to manage their own growth, says Mr. Palepu.

Big multinational firms also look to the major business schools to train managers for their Chinese operations. And given the projections for China’s economic growth, the need is only likely to get bigger.

“The demand is already huge, but it’s going to grow several-fold,” says Rama Velamuri, academic director of the international executive M.B.A. program at the China Europe International Business School. CEIBS was one of the first international business schools in China when it opened in 1994 as a joint effort of the European Union and the Chinese government.

But Chinese students are no longer willing, as they were then, to listen unquestioningly to anyone bringing Western ideas to the classroom, he says.

“The market has become very discerning now,” Mr. Velamuri says. “It’s no longer good enough for you to come up with a theory that was done up in the West and present it to an audience in China. The Chinese will push back and say ‘Tell us how it will apply here.’”

The most promising new source of students may be from Chinese companies that are looking to expand globally and seeking to educate employees about Western markets.

Chinese companies “are now looking outward to the rest of the world,” Mr. Symonds says. “A lot of their executive-training demands will focus on the Western business schools teaching them how to reach out.”

Harvard Business School is among those seeking to tap that market with a new, simultaneously translated program for Chinese CEOs who do not speak English and whose companies are aiming to go international.

It is not just Chinese students who want a global perspective. Building a presence in China is key to a school’s attractiveness at home too, says Bernard Ramanantsoa, dean of HEC Paris business school, which offers joint M.B.A. degrees in China with Tsinghua University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and executive M.B.A.s in partnership with Chinese government agencies.

“It becomes a strong marketing tool if a school has this China engagement,” Mr. Velamuri of CEIBS says.

In many ways, though, China is still not an easy place for foreigners to do business. Bureaucratic and cultural hurdles can be high, Mr. Symonds says. And while many Western schools boast of their links with Chinese universities, “they happen at such different levels,” Mr. Symonds notes. “There are lots of flimsy partnerships.”

Markets like Singapore are becoming overcrowded with international B-schools, but Mr. Symonds predicts China may get only a few more.

“If it was as easy to do business in China as it is in Singapore, perhaps we’d see other main players setting up there,” he says.

By CAMMY BROTHERS

London

What was radical architecture before it was chic? At a time in which the mantle of the avant-garde has been inherited by architects such as Rem Koolhaas (designer for Prada and the Chinese government) or by Zaha Hadid (architect for Moammar Gadhafi before his fall), it is worth remembering what revolutionary architecture meant when it was more than an attitude.

ullstein bild / The Granger Collection

An early 1920s model of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, with its three rotating levels. A 33-foot-tall scale version of the tower has been constructed in the courtyard of the Royal Academy.

For a brief, utopian moment in early 20th-century Russia, artists and architects together sought to forge an abstract language of form suited to the politics of the new state. Vladimir Tatlin’s famous model for a Monument to the Third International—envisioned in 1920 as a 1,300-foot-tall ziggurat-like tower rotating on three levels—embodied the visionary, futurist aesthetics and idealism of the movement. The commitment to abstraction and the sense of shared purpose between painters and architects paralleled that of the Bauhaus, and in fact some of its members traveled to Moscow. Yet while the Bauhaus is enshrined in the history of European architecture and modernism, the Russians are often sidelined, and only a few protagonists—such as Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky—are widely known by nonspecialists.

“Building the Revolution: Soviet Art & Architecture 1915-1935,” a small exhibition now on view at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, conveys the electric energy and genuine radicalism of the works created during this period. Architecture shows are notoriously difficult: The building itself isn’t there, models can be clunky, and architectural drawings are hard for the uninitiated to read. But here large, color photographs by Richard Pare, executed over 15 years, show Russian avant-garde architecture in various states of use and disuse, shininess and dullness, and demonstrate that an architecture exhibit can be a beautiful thing to behold. Implicitly, the photographs of the decaying state of many of the buildings are their own powerful polemic about the need to preserve this vital but often undervalued heritage. Interspersed with Mr. Pare’s images are photographs and texts of the period, as well as drawings, paintings and collages. And enticing audiences into the show is a 33-foot-tall scale model of Tatlin’s monument, constructed in the courtyard of the Royal Academy and standing in stark contrast to its stately Palladian architecture.

The show brings several fascinating and timely aspects of the period into sharp focus. While many young designers and students are now seeking to expand what they see as the traditional purview of the profession—making beautiful houses and offices for the rich and powerful—the show serves as a reminder that their utopian view of the purpose and audience of architecture is by no means new. The architects of revolutionary Russia could rely, however, on a phenomenon almost unknown today: large-scale public financing of monumental architecture. This is of course a longstanding tradition—even Roman emperors built public baths to garner popular favor—but one that has virtually disappeared. Thus contemporary architects such as Shigeru Ban, Bryan Bell (in the tradition of Samuel Mockbee), Anselmo Canfora, Teddy Cruz, Walter Hood, Sergio Palleroni and Cameron Sinclair have sought to side-step this problem by seeking patronage elsewhere: among the communities they hope to serve.

In light of these new efforts, it is useful to witness the idealism with which the much-blighted concept of social housing was conceived. Certainly many of these buildings have fallen into disuse and neglect, but the exhibit reminds us of the hopeful spirit in which they were created, and of their beauty. A structure such as the Narkomfin Communal House in Moscow, designed by Moisei Ginzburg and Ignati Milinis in 1930, remains a poetic embodiment of rigorous geometric principles combined with moments of experimentation. The building’s social agenda—creating spaces that would encourage traditional families to move toward communal living—was advanced not at the expense of aesthetics, but in concert with it. The building illustrates the close dialogue between Russian and European Modernists: Taking up Le Corbusier’s principles, it was elevated on pilotis, had banded fenestration and a roof garden. Le Corbusier didn’t have a chance to bring these ideas to fruition until he built the Unité d’habitation in Marseille more than 15 years later, a building that shows his careful observation of Ginzburg’s design.

Despite these close ties to European Modernism, building conditions in Russia remained stubbornly rooted in the past: In a fascinating interview in the exhibition catalog, Mr. Pare describes how the unavailability of new materials forced architects to imitate the appearance of steel while using traditional wood construction methods.

Another compelling aspect of the show is its demonstration of the engagement of painters in architecture, theater design, graphics and so forth. Calling themselves ZhivSkuptArch (painting-sculpture-architecture), artists and architects sought to create works that transcended these traditional categories. A gorgeous set of studies by Ivan Kudriashev for the decoration of the First Soviet Theatre in Orenburg, from 1920, conveys the convergence of spatially conceived paintings and architecture conceived in geometric planes. They suggest a dynamic movement through space through a remarkably simple palette of shapes and colors.

Ultimately, the exhibition asks: Is the idea of utopian architecture an impossible paradox? The short life of this exciting, experimental moment—which would soon collapse into Stalinism and the repressive expectations of social realism—suggests the precarious nature of a state-sponsored avant-garde.

The relation between aesthetics and politics, or the ideology of style, remains a puzzle. The most visible legacy of this period today is in the sleek, geometric aesthetic of Ms. Hadid, who by her own account draws inspiration from the work of Malevich and El Lissitsky, but whose projects include works for patrons ranging from King Abdullah to Eli and Edythe Broad. What does it mean for an architect to adopt the aesthetics of early 20th-century Russia and the politics of Switzerland?

Make what you will of Marxism, this was a historical moment when ideas mattered, and when geometrical abstraction was the new universal language. Architecture today is personality driven, participating in the competitive logic of the market, fueled by rivalry, intensely professionalized and most often serving private clients. The exhibit is an instructive reminder that creativity can also thrive collectively, in dialogue with art, and in service of shared goals.

Ms. Brothers is an associate professor at the University of Virginia and the author of “Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture” (Yale).