Julie Thompson on Digital Transformation in the Jewelry Industry

So my name is Julie Thompson. I’m from a French background. I have been doing digital and industry transformation for FMCG goods for the last 20 years or so, working for brands like Lancome, Dove, Unilever, more recently for Piaget with the Richemont Group. And as part of this kind of a good capability in transforming traditional industry, I was asked to start up this project, taking on a new business challenge in the area of vintage and real jewellery.

So the brand is called The Jewelers Circle. It was founded around the pandemic time, just as a bit of background on the industry. It’s an industry that’s quite traditional or was quite traditional and very much a business where lots of deals are still made with handshakes. And it’s very much based on trust. It’s a wholesale business.

So dealers and merchants would meet in fairs. And obviously when the pandemic happened, all of that didn’t happen anymore. So we had to have this first move from a purely physical offline kind of way of dealing to introducing a B2B platform for merchants to be able to showcase, buy and trade their pieces. So that was kind of the start of the project.

Seeing the opportunity from a B2B standpoint, in 2022 we decided to take this to a retail approach based on a couple of important opportunities and insights. The pre -loved markets in luxury is really booming. Rare and vintage jewellery weighs about, it’s an estimate of $10 billion worldwide. So it’s obviously there is an opportunity there. Clients and people are looking more and more for things that are unique and different. There is a huge trend and change in the mindset of people that don’t want to have something that’s new, not only for just a circular economy parameter, but also because they want to stand out and find things that resonate more with their own style. So we, the difference between maybe what exists out there was the idea that we could create a vertical dedicated to rare and vintage jewellery because we rely on a network of about 150 dealers worldwide that have been working together for generations, I would say, and trust each other. One of the main hurdles in the, well, there are two main hurdles in this industry is finding the piece.

So having the inventory and also making sure that when you buy something at a price point that goes from say $1,000 to thousands of dollars, you know what you’re getting. You know that it’s authentic, know where it’s sourced from, you have all the right paperwork. So there is also that reassurance factor that’s very important. So building this model on the basis of 150 people that have been doing this for generations, they’ve established their trust and credentials in that space. But it was very much a challenge of transforming the industry, moving from something very traditional, very one -on -one kind of relationship, from one dealer to one client, to many dealers to many clients. So that’s kind of the switch from the old to the new model and leveraging the power of digital, but keeping also the human factor and the interaction between the end clients and us throughout experts. Because again, we are operating in luxury wants to have some expertise information. You want to be reassured. And you also want to be able to look for something that’s unique. So what doesn’t always appear on the website, we can still find for you because of the size of the network we have. So, I think it’s very important that we keep the duality of online and human personalised experts dimension. So that was one of the learnings, say, in the last couple of years post pandemic.

We have two profiles, I mean main profiles, of course, if you take away the fact that there is a certain price point as in any luxury good and we see that clients sometimes trade off when they buy something to treat themselves in luxury between different categories, if we are only looking at jewellery, the two main profiles are collectors.
People who already have a certain knowledge of rare and vintage jewellery, a certain knowledge of the eras that they like, the sort of piece that they are looking for, or what I would say, first entrance into this market, but who want to buy something that’s unique, that won’t be found on the high street or brand website. So a bit, maybe a bit oversimplifying, but those two profiles. Then you have a second factor, which is geographies, not only about geographies linked to income, but also geographies linked to the fact that some areas are already more aware of vintage and rare jewellery, and some geographies are less so. So if you look at the US, it’s a very important market for us. It’s our main market. And then I would say some parts of Asia, and then probably a bit less potential in Europe. This is the kind of the two dimensions basically in terms of clients, the type of jury they’re looking for and where they’re based.

Well, I think there is competition, but there is no competition that’s a pure global vertical. We have competitors that are very established today that trade, that have marketplaces that trade different categories of luxury goods. But our take on this is to say, because of what I was mentioning earlier on, we want to really focus on jewellery, not even watches, jewellery, what we call rare and vintage, is up until the 1980s. And that’s kind of where that’s the first point of difference, a vertical. The second is what I mentioned is a network of experts. It’s a network of merchants that have been doing this for years. So and that are vetted by the founders of the company. So that guarantees an infinite inventory of quality and reliable obviously for our end client.

The other thing I want to mention as well is I always say it’s a hybrid marketplace in the sense that The Jewelers Circle will manage the end -to -end client relationship because retail is a very different culture from moving from wholesale. And we also want to make sure that the client experience is seamless, looking at the interaction they have on the website, but also the conversations they can have with us, the way they would receive their package, the aftercare services. So it’s very important that the brand experience is controlled so that it’s a really luxurious experience for our end client.

This is a good one because you have one end rings. I mean, from a category standpoint, rings are always a big favourite. And as long as we can resize them for our clients, it’s kind of easy. And then in terms of brands, we’ve seen an interest, a booming interest in Tiffany, which I think is something that we’ve seen in the market in general, but it reflected on vintage. And in terms of eras, Art Deco is a very, very great era for us in terms of best sellers. Price points will go from $1,500 to what I would call price upon request, which is above 100k.

So we are at this phase, so we are now really operating. I mean, everything’s operating, I have a team based out of New York. We have a website, We have customer service. So we basically have everything. But we are at that phase where we are doing some funding rounds after one and a half years operating on the founders financing and some friends and family rounds to scale up now to make sure that we really support the creation of a brand, the brand awareness and all the marketing efforts that you need to put into that.

That’s kind of the moment that we have hit, which is also very interesting for someone like me who’s come from a corporate background, because suddenly you have to start learning and doing things from an entrepreneur standpoint that you didn’t really do in corporate life. It’s quite a fascinating challenge telling your story and pitching to explain the unique opportunity. When we can do that, which is kind of scaling up in the US markets, obviously the vision in the longer run is geographical expansion. But we will remain focused on the same industry in the same categories.

The only thing that we could include would be gemstones, loose stones, but we will not expand to other luxury category because of the expertise that we have and that makes us so different from anyone else.

It’s successful and it’s surprising as well. There’s a bit of both. So we are very proud of the growth of organic traffic. And it’s taken us a bit of a couture approach in trying to understand what works for us from a Google or let’s say search engine marketing strategy that has taken time, but it’s built up. And now we have both- paid and organic traffic that’s really healthy and growing. So great success in that space. Great success also in email marketing and very much the example that has shown success because our numbers in terms of opens, bounds and all the usuals are pretty strong compared to what I’ve seen in the past is on education, what I would call educational, more entertaining content, the less commercial kind of content, the kind of content where people feel they are learning something about this industry, they are brought into the magic. You know, we open the vaults, we share stories, and this is where we see that we kind of drive stronger numbers than if we are like saying, okay, it’s a holiday season, here is the curated selection, which we still need to do. But in terms of interesting marketing strategy, the right balance and the storytelling in our industry is a critical factor of success.

And then just to add to marketing strategies, no big surprise that social works really well for us to expose the products and to get some leads. So probably, I would say 30 % of the leads we get today come from social network. And last but not least, the rise of Pinterest is also being a very interesting, even organic surprise in our strategy. We are starting to do a bit of PR and a bit of trunk shows. So we always need to bring the two worlds together, the physical and the digital. It’s very important in the industry we trade in, obviously.

Yeah, well, you know, it’s only been less than two years. You also have to learn. And I think make sure that you don’t have sort of leaky buckets where you start spending money in one space and not control the way you’re spending your budgets, making sure that you understand what works for a brand that has a very specific audience.

I think I mentioned briefly one of the key challenges which I always find interesting is a moment where an industry understands they need a form of transformation at least, moving from a very traditional, very one -on -one, very sort of old world based to introducing and leveraging the power of digital. I think that’s something that’s still taking time, but we have overcome a lot of that. The second was to build a team, lean, but sometimes when you have a lean team, you’d better invest in the right skills because you can’t have too many people. So finding the right people to support you in that effort is very important. And look for external partners that can be part of that team but give you the financial flexibility to scale up or down depending on the moment.

I think it’s, I mean, I didn’t expect entrepreneurship to be so exciting in the sense that you get to do lots of things that you were never exposed to before. You have to like that. You have to be able to sort of spread your brain and your mind and your hands to do lots of things that you had sometimes the luxury to have like vast and large teams to help you do. So I think that’s one of the first learnings, but it’s extremely exciting because you put your know-how and your corporate skills in a different way. I think that’s great. It’s much more agile and it’s also one of the things I’ve so much appreciated in the last couple of years is the ability to make these take decisions, revisit decisions, change very quickly. And that’s something that’s very different from probably a more corporate environment.

You’re very welcome. Thank you.