Offering Luxury Jewelry Via the Web

Раздел: Новости на английском
12 ноября 2007 г.

(RAPAPORT) Financial Times Surveys: Anyone in the market for some fine jewellery no longer has to bother trekking to Bond Street, Place Vendome, or Madison Avenue. Just wander over to your desk, grab your mouse, and click, click, click.

De Beers entered the online e-tailing market this June -- though, so far, the brand has restricted its e-tailing to the United States. "Sales have grown 65 percent each month," says Guy Leymarie, chief executive of De Beers Diamond Jewellers.

"We know e-commerce reaches a significant market in the U.S. because Blue Nile sold more engagement rings last year than any other jewellery retailer (Blue Nile, a jewellery website, reportedly considers itself to be the largest online retailer of certified diamonds.)

"We entered e-commerce because De Beers is the diamond destination and we are pleased to be the first resource for diamonds. We want the consumer to understand that e-commerce is not discounted sales – we sell high-end diamonds and jewellery via the web," he said.

"Thanks to the introduction provided by our e-commerce site, we recently sold a $1 million diamond piece. The web is the market in the U.S."

The company has no plans to expand its e-tailing offering outside the United States.

Boucheron, however, is taking a more worldwide approach: its online service is currently only available in Europe, but it plans a United States launch next year and Asia is in the pipeline.

It sells its entire offering of jewellery, watches and perfume online.

"We decided a year ago to go online and it took us about a year to develop our product and launch it," says Jean-Christophe Bedos, chief executive of Boucheron.

"In high luxury, there is still resistance to the web and e-commerce from many brands, but we decided we should look beyond that paradigm.

"When we did our research, we discovered that wealthy people have no taboo and no boundaries with regard to e-commerce. They often have access to the latest technology and for them time is a luxury and they find it easy to surf the web and find what they want."

Bedos is careful to point out that Boucheron does not think the web offering will replace retail. "The integration of our retail network and e-commerce is a cornerstone of our strategy.

"We sell watches and jewellery and we believe that people need to touch our products and try them on. However, with e-commerce you offer privacy, intimacy and reachability. Making ourselves accessible any time, anywhere at their convenience is what luxury is about," he said.

Meanwhile, Tiffany, which launched its online service in November 2001, recently updated its web offering.

Melvyn Kirtley, president of Tiffany UK, says: "It`s been in the works for quite a while and I think the whole idea was to give the user more of an experiential approach to our website, getting the customer into the Tiffany world and enveloping them as much as possible.

"Even our screen is better; our older site had a much smaller amount of space, but now we`re filling the screen and there`s a lot more technology underlying it to allow more imagery, more searches, more descriptions and more features that make it a pleasurable experience."

As with Bedos, Kirtley doesn`t think the web will replace stores. "It`s a different conduit," he says. "It`s a touch point (for customers) and they will utilise that when it works for them and they will also visit us in our stores; it all works harmoniously together, so one builds on the others."

All three of these brands report that they have experienced no price resistance when it comes to online retailing, a point also borne out at UK-based on-line jewellery boutique, Astley Clarke.

"The volume of orders is shooting up, but the interesting thing is that the average transaction value has gone right up – it has doubled from last year and now 10 percent of our sales are above GBP 1,000," says managing director Rebecca Clarke.

"We`re quite surprised by it, but we`re carrying a lot more expensive jewellery this year because we can.

"You have a broader reach if you`re online rather than a store. We`d inevitably be a much smaller business if it was just a shop, as we`d have to rely on relatively local traffic, but our traffic comes from all over the world each day, from places as diverse as the UK, Japan and California," she said.

Though there are some restrictions online – Tiffany, for instance, does not sell diamond engagement rings online – brands aim to offer a web experience that is as close to the retail one as possible.

"We decided that luxury is not just about product but also about offering services such as secure delivery, or made to order and bespoke – what we do every day in our stores," explains Bedos.

"So the idea was to offer these services online; it was not so much about what services we should offer online, but the idea of services we already offer in our stores and can we find what kind of technology we need in order to make this possible online. This was a challenge".

But for Mr Bedos it has brought plenty of benefits. "We learned a lot about our clients," he says.

And Boucheron is also learning that by being client-oriented as opposed to brand-oriented, joining the e-tailing world is a comfortable step for a luxury brand to take.

Copyright © 2007 Financial Times Ltd.
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