BoF: Astley Clarke launched as a multi-brand e-tailer, selling jewellery by other designers. When did you first realise that you were actually building your own brand?
BAC: Quite early on we had our own jewellery collections but we sort of kept them under the radar. Initially, they were very plain, pearl studs or an easy amethyst necklace. Remember, I’m not a jewellery designer. But soon we realised that actually 70 percent of our search traffic was based on people typing in keywords like ‘Astley Clarke.’ It wasn’t like Net-a-Porter, where people were searching for brand names, like Gucci or whatever. They were searching for ‘Astley Clarke.’ So that made me think we’re quite good at this brand building thing.
In fact, we were quite good at two things. One was PR, looking after the press and educating the press about the market and fine jewellery. And the other was building this luxury experience on the website. And having interesting content and the right tone of voice and fantastic customer service. We made a big point of always having the telephone number on the homepage of the website and we actively welcomed people calling and interacting with the business. People seemed to engage with the brand. They liked the name, they liked the emails, they liked the tone of voice, they liked the products.
So we hired a creative director, Lorna Watson. She came from Fabergé. She’d worked across fine jewellery and more contemporary jewellery and we set about designing and making our own collections. And from day one it flew. And that sort of gave us a bit more confidence and we said, ‘Ok, let’s put a little bit more behind this.’ As of last year, it’s actually 70 percent of sales. I remember there was a board meeting where everyone was like, ‘You’re a brand, you’re a brand.’ So we said, let’s really give this the due attention it deserves. And, of course, commercially it made sense.