No E-Commerce, No Showroom: How to Build a Cult Jewellery Brand with Hattie Rickards

GoldDust

Hattie Rickards discusses her unconventional journey of building a successful luxury jewellery brand without a traditional showroom or e-com

Key takeaways

• Hattie Rickards has completed over 2,000 individual bespoke commissions over the last 15 years.
• She moved away from wholesale because high production costs for handmade UK pieces made retail margins unsustainable.

Main topics

• Bespoke jewellery business models
• Transitioning from wholesale to commissions

Notable quotes

I'd rather not know what the rest of the world are creating and designing.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a masterclass for niche luxury creators on prior

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:03) Hattie Rickards is one of the most exciting fine jewellers working in the UK today. Designing almost entirely for bespoke projects with her clients, she's built a hugely successful and widely recognised jewellery brand without actually having anything that you can buy off the shelf, nor a workshop or showroom that you can visit. Her cult status in the world of jewellery has led to a legion of fans wanting a bespoke Hattie Rickards engagement ring or piece of jewellery. But how exactly has she managed to grow a business without having a traditional bricks and mortar store, or a click and buy option online. In this episode, we discuss why she decided to move away from wholesale and focus purely on bespoke one-to-one work, how you create a recognizable brand when every piece is unique, and why investing in physical designs rather than in marketing and PR was one of the best things that she did to grow her business. I hope you enjoy this episode. Speaker 1 (0:54) Welcome Hattie Rickards. Hello. Hi Kate. How are you doing? Welcome to Speaker 2 (1:00) the Gold Dust podcast. Thank you. I'm just going to start by giving our listeners a little bit of context. So Hattie and I have worked together for probably, I want to say 15 years. Maybe we've known each other for 15 years. We worked together on the Cut London, which is the jewellery platform that I run, where I showcase. brilliant jewelry designers. And I massively admired and was obsessed with your work when I first discovered it. It was just like nothing that I'd ever seen before in terms of like a really punchy first collection. It was super bold. It was really colorful. It was just kind of like unapologetic. Speaker 2 (1:49) I felt like not many jewelers launch with that kind of collection. And it was also really, really high level. So it was like, it felt super luxury straight from the off, like the craftsmanship, the photography, which yeah, just isn't something that a lot of jewelers can start with when they're first starting out. Is that something that you took from your working experience? So I know that you worked for a jeweler before you launched your own brand. Well, Speaker 1 (2:17) I guess it did. It did all start with Central Saint Martins, I think it's like where my creativity started really being expressed. And although it was like very intense, fast-paced course, I learnt from Saint Martins my passion for design. So it was, although it was both design and making, I actually found the making side of it. quite challenging, I wasn't very natural at it, I found it very intricate, I actually found it too difficult. But what really excited me was for the first time understanding a design journey and understand taking, I guess taking like any object and taking on a design journey developing it into an amazing piece of jewellery. So that's where I understood where my passion lay, basically. And I wanted to then, when I left St. Martin's, go and work for a really great designer. And at that time, I found Solange Azaguri Partridge, and I worked with her for five years. And it was a brilliant example of really great craft standards and really pushing design boundaries. And in 2010, I launched... my own company Hattie Rickards Jewellery and I really at that point had I felt like I had a lot to express creatively and that's why my first collection Revealed and Gio were very you know, bold, large, colourful, gold, kinetic, architectural. They were really expressive. They were like pieces of art. And that's how I started out. And those were my kind of annual collections. Speaker 2 (4:23) Do you think that those five years, because five years is a, you know, you didn't come straight out of St. Martin's and launch straight away. Do you think you gained a lot from those five years? Were they really important to sort of the foundations? Of Speaker 1 (4:35) course. I mean, with Solange, I only ever did production. So that is organizing the jewelry. So Solange would design and then I would essentially be helping to move the jewelry from A to B and, you know. Seeing how a business is run, for sure. So I very much went in at the bottom and I absolutely loved working for her. So every single day, you know, you were doing a bit of production, you were doing some sales. My last two years were helping oversee, open her store. Madison in New York so you know the whole five years it was incredible and Solange is an amazing woman who I admire hugely and she was wonderful to work for so yeah I guess being a sponge with all of that going around you know it's um it's all gone in somewhere it definitely has and Speaker 2 (5:30) you can see I think that you know because you came out and just were like straight into Speaker 2 (5:36) really like you say like unapologetic really bold it feels like all your creativity was like waiting waiting waiting yeah Speaker 1 (5:45) to come out on your own exactly Speaker 2 (5:47) and then and then there it was so what did you launch with at the beginning could you talk through your first collection that you made when you first started out on your own so Speaker 1 (5:56) my first collection um was called revealed and it was 12 rings of 18 karat yellow gold and semi-precious stones. Absolute focus on colour, on design, on quite kind of geometric architectural shapes. I love the element of kinetic pieces, being able to, you know, play with a ring, to distract yourself with a ring. One of the kind of hero pieces of the collection was the Rubik's ring. And that's like my... interpretation of the Rubik's Cube but in a ring so you have three connected bands that all are connected but you can twist and rotate yes Speaker 2 (6:38) with a jam set all men love that Speaker 1 (6:40) ring because they're like finally there's a ring that actually does something and they're like it's just you know it's fun it was fun and it was um it was very it was Mike's you know very creative expression at that point and then I sold them to kind of Dover Street Market and Astley Clarke and then I bought out my second collection a year later Gio real focus on geometric shapes interlocking together going to earrings and pendants and just a love of baguette cut stones so all of the coloured stones were all this very kind of clean geometric, streamlined look. Speaker 2 (7:20) They're so beautiful. Did you consciously create that collection as kind of like a calling card to sort of show people like, this is my capability, this is what I can do? Because you didn't start small. They were very ambitious pieces straight off the bat. Do you think that that was a conscious decision? Speaker 1 (7:41) Gosh, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, back then I was... sharing my vision, but I didn't also have a huge kind of like, this is what I'm going to be doing for the next 10 years. And it was very much, this is my first collection. This is who I am. And it had a massive response. I worked so hard. day in day out kind of getting PR for it you know so to spread the word for it and that was all me you know churning away getting in touch and and I would just be a case of me looking in the back of the magazines and getting the contacts and emailing them and emailing them and no response no response or yes can I feature a ring and that was the start of it really I didn't really I didn't have a PR or marketing budget or anyone to help so it was just this is my creative output now let's try and get it out there and um I think because it it was quite it's you know it was it was quite unseen it hadn't a lot of people hadn't seen something like that before so it did receive a lot of um attention yeah it did and PR which was great but also it took a humongous amount of work to do it it wasn't just like you know, here it is and sit back and enjoy it. It was like, okay, now we've got to get going. Speaker 2 (9:09) That's good. That's what you can do when you're young and starting out. You have to just really like bootstrap it and do everything yourself. But that's great that you got some retail partners essentially right at the beginning. Yeah. You just think that was like sort of the best route to market for what you had at the time, your collection. Speaker 1 (9:27) I think so. I was also really careful with who I chose to partner up with. So there was interest elsewhere and I was very careful of making sure that it met my brand. Dover Street Market was a really great example for that. And I really was really proud to get in there. And I think it was a perfect place for my collections. Speaker 1 (9:55) I will also be honest that there was, you know, there's quite a lot of admin. There's quite a lot of a commercial side to it of selling it and getting it into magazines and taking orders and remaking them. And a lot of that side of wholesale, in all honesty, didn't work either with me personally or for my product. Because I have quite design-led pieces, they are intricate, they are a real challenge to make, even in the CAD stage. They're really difficult. They are not quick, easy things to make. And I get them all handmade here in the UK, which I'm super proud of, but I pay a premium for. So my making costs are as they are. And that has always made it very tricky to include a retail margin. Speaker 2 (10:51) I've Speaker 1 (10:51) found it hard to compete with other brands that can mass produce a ring for a third of the price. I just can't compete with that because of how my team is set up here. And then the second part of that is who I am and how I design. So I'm less attracted to that whole kind of commercial. fast-paced churning out mass production it just doesn't feel like me where Speaker 2 (11:21) I Speaker 1 (11:21) shine as a person is working with individuals with private clients I love people and I love getting to know them and I guess I'm quite an intuitive person so I enjoy reading somebody and understanding who they are what their personality is what their style is what makes them tick And you just don't get that with wholesale, do you? No. And I want to hear about their stories. And I want to put all of that into a piece of really special jewelry for an individual. Speaker 2 (11:51) Yeah. Speaker 1 (11:52) So that's not mass production. It's not wholesale. So that's why I only did those first two collections. Speaker 2 (11:59) Right. And so through that experience, you're sort of learning about how you prefer to work and also where your designs best fit. fit. And as you say, it definitely works best for you on a commission by commission, I imagine quite deep involved design process with the client rather than repeating the same design so you can achieve your wholesale margins. That makes sense. But I imagine that's quite a slow build. When did you decide to kind of... lean in more to the bespoke side. Speaker 1 (12:35) So after the first two collections, I started having private individuals come up to me and ask me for a piece of jewellery. And I always actually remember that one of the first pieces, it was a friend at that point who commissioned me to make a pendant for her godchild to celebrate their christening. And of course, Not a huge amount of story at that point for that baby. Just born. Yeah, exactly. So I kind of sat down with my friend to understand, you know, eke out any more information. And actually, there was a really fun journey for her to get to the christening that involved an aeroplane and a boat and a bicycle. And so I was like, great, let's create three little oval discs on a gold. pleated silver chain and engraved those three modes of transport. And so she gave that to the Godchild. And then that was the first piece of bespoke jewelry, which held that very precious, sentimental story in a piece of jewelry. And I just haven't really looked back since. I mean, it's now 15 years down the line and I've done over 2000 commissions and I know that that is where I shine as an individual doing bespoke with individuals and importantly, it's what I enjoy. So, you know, if I'm going to work as hard as I do, I've got to enjoy it. Speaker 2 (14:06) Yeah, for sure. How did you keep that momentum going then from the first piece? Did you make sure sort of strategically that you were photographing your... commissions as they came in. So, you know, you have something to be able to get more work from. How did you grow sort of just from working on a piece-to-piece basis? I would Speaker 1 (14:29) do my hand-drawn sketch. I would create a piece. I would get it professionally photographed. I'd get it onto my website. But as far as, you know, spreading the word or the marketing there simply was no budget for that it had to happen kind of organically but right at the beginning it did start with my with friends and they would spread the word and