#75 How to Create an Unforgettable Jewelry Brand (and Get Customers for Life)

11:47PM Aug 2, 2021

Speakers:

Tracy Matthews

Keywords:

jewelry

designing

brand

people

wear

creating

clients

unforgettable

story

business

customers

bootcamp

important

piece

buy

mother

moments

designer

redesign

tied

Creating that emotional connection that’s tied into your why in this personal history and understanding the real reason why people buy jewelry is helping you create an unforgettable brand.

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Welcome to Episode 75. This is Tracy Matthews. I’m your host today of the Thrive-By-Design podcast. I’m thrilled to be here per usual. I’m just winding down my 2017 and I’m exciting to be recording this podcast today even though it’s being released in the second week of January. It’s kind of funny because I’ve had this song in my head all morning because I was thinking I’ve been working really hard over the past several months to bring to you our newest bootcamp experience, the Jewelry Brand Makeover Bootcamp.

We’ve been working on our master class and the pieces of the puzzle for the jewelry brand makeover and the challenges and everything that we’re going to be doing during that challenge period for the ten days that we’re going to be having the brand makeover. One of the words that came up was I want to develop an unforgettable brand. So today we’re going to be talking about how to create an unforgettable jewelry brand and get customers for life.

You know I love talking about this stuff. For me customer experience and creating something that you’re known for is really my passion and I would say I’ll will give myself a little cred. I’ve done a pretty good job of doing it for my own jewelry business. I have a lot of repeat customers. I have a lot of clients who have been buying jewelry for 10-15-20 years, even longer, from when I first started. Some of those I will admit there are some family members or friends in that category, but they wouldn’t keep buying from me if it didn’t mean that I was creating a really unforgettable experience for them.

So I’m excited to talk about this topic today and I did an entire talk similar to this for our live event in September of last year which was really fun. If you haven’t done it yet, I would love, you still have time to join us for the Jewelry Brand Makeover Bootcamp. It started yesterday, technically, January 9th but you have plenty of time to still participate in the bootcamp and participate in all the challenges and it’s going to be so fun and I guarantee you it’s going to really help you uplevel your brand. You’re going to make more, sell more and get noticed this year. It’s going to be an awesome experience or it already is an awesome experience, I can say because I know that bootcamp has been going for a little. It’s going to be so fun and I’m really excited to be supporting.

So if you’re someone who is ready to start attracting more dream clients, [3:00] those kind of clients that buy everything from you. They’re salivating. I have lots of them and they’re the best because they become the best referrers. They tell their friends about it. They continue to buy from you. I have this customer Amy who I mentioned in the episode last week who came to me to redesign some family heirlooms. Her mother had passed away and she had her grandmother’s ring and her parents had both just passed so she wanted to create something that she would wear in rose gold because she didn’t like her mother’s wedding band.

I created that and several months later, probably six to eight months later, she sent me an email and she’s like hey and she’s like literally so adamant. I’m doing a refresh on my website and switching over to a different platform so I have been putting off updating anything because I don’t want to spend the time to update or hire someone to update testimonials and images if in a month or so I’m going to be moving over to this new platform. So every time I talk to her she’s like, I’m looking at your website. You still haven’t put my testimonial up. She is a super fan of mine.

She called me up a couple months later and she was like hey I was looking for Bengal and I don’t know why I didn’t think of ordering it from. I’m so happy with my rings. Can you create this Bengal? Here’s my vision. I design several things from her and she always says to me, you’re the artist. You have the creative vision. I want you to go for it. I trust your design. I always present her with a couple of options and she gives me maybe a little feedback and we’re done. It’s awesome. She’s my dream client.

She had a momentous birthday. I’m not going to reveal her age but she had a big birthday this year and I ended up designing another ring for her which was an opal so that was really exciting. Same thing she was just like when are you going to get those testimonials up. You know where to find me when you’re ready to change the testimonials on your website.

Those are the kinds of people that you want behind you because they tell everyone. She’s like I referred another friend yesterday. It’s a great way to build a business and to keep those sales coming. I know a lot of you might be feeling insecure or trying to deal with internal struggles or confidence issues on how to put yourself out there. So we’re going to help you get over that hurdle and get noticed and shine without even having to do that much which is just having the confidence to really put yourself out there. Finally we’re going to help you cultivate a crave worthy brand that is going to create a really great emotional connection. So if you’re interested in creating a brand that everyone is talking about that is getting a lot of publicity on a local small scale or even on a really big scale, we really invite you to join because people do not buy jewelry as you know, raise your hand if you know this, because they need it. They buy it because they want it.

That’s why I’m really excited to present this podcast to you today. We’re wrapping up our bootcamp [6:00] on January 18th and when we wrap that up we’re going to be revealing a really amazing master class that I would also like to invite you to. It is called Creating an Unforgettable Brand in 2017: The fast and simple roadmap to attract the right clients, double your sales and work less this year.

I know for a lot of you that you’re working your tails to the bone. You feel like you’re pulled in so many directions. You don’t know which things are going to move in the needle. That reminds me of a noodle fight that we had at our mastermind in Austin a couple of years ago. You’re not really sure about the exact things that are going to move the needle in your business, and you’re trying to figure it out. You’re trying to make all these things work so that you can have a brand that’s working for you or a business that’s working for you.

I’m happy to announce that I have done this for myself and I’m happy to share with you how I’ve done it. You’re going to figure out the real reasons why people buy. We’re going to walk you through everyone’s least favorite topic about sales and show you how to approach sales as coming from a place of service and that inspires a sharing economy. We’re going to reveal some industry secrets that no one is talking about, and then you’re also going to learn how to make your brand unforgettable by standing out in a sea of millions of independent designers which I know that you will be excited for and then you’re going to turn those fans into brand advocates by making them customers for life and using them to build sustainable growth for your business in 2017. That’s what this is all about.

You can check that out and register today at https://www.flourishthriveacademy.com/timeless. Of course all those links and registration pages are going to be over at our show notes over at www.flourishthriveacademy.com/episode75. Go to our website, type in the extension episode 75 and everything will be right there so you don’t even have to think or worry about it.

So let’s talk a little bit about creating an unforgettable brand. I wanted to start this off by talking about something that is not talked about very often and that is the real motivating reason why you have a jewelry business. There might be a lot of different reasons. I’ve shared this story before. I’ve been really remised to share it publically because it is a very [9:00] personal story, but it’s the underlying reason why I even became a designer in the first place. I don’t know how many of you know my story and how many of you know anything about me really except I’m the Chief Visionary Officer over at Flourish and Thrive Academy.

The entire reason why I ended up falling into this profession of being a jewelry maker in the beginning and now a designer was that my mother had passed away and I was on a hiatus from college and my parents stopped paying for my school. It’s a long story. I’m going to get this wrapped up into my parents’ divorce agreement or battle or whatever, but they were sort of in the midst of settling things and I sort of got caught up in that and it ran away. Because of my circumstances I wasn’t able to get financial aid for a couple of years

So I took two years off of school. I’m a really (9.52 unclear) person for those of you who don’t know me very well, but when I get my mind on something it’s hard for me to not go after that. I’m really goal oriented and really focused on those things. I knew that I wanted to finish school at Loyola Marymount University where I started. It’s a very expensive school. It’s a private school and I was making probably, working full time, $30,000 at that time a year, and my tuition was over half of that. So there was no way I was going to be able to pay for it on my own.

So I started working full time trying to figure out a solution. I’m a really good, creative problem solver. So I stayed in the loop. Stay in L.A. Lived with my friends who were still going to Loyola, and got to thinking about how I could get back. I kept meeting with the financial aid advisors and I was finally able to get this great grant. Unfortunately this didn’t really happen until after my mom passed away. I was able to get a grant that paid for half my tuition and then the rest I was able to get in financial aid because my mom had just passed away

During that time I had to change majors. So I decided to change from a communications major, which I thought I was going to be a broadcaster and be on TV. I think that’s always what I thought I was going to be, and then I changed to European studies major which was something I never really thought about but it was really studying European art and language and history and all that stuff. The thing I like about that major is that I was able to take fine arts classes as an elective. So my first fine arts class was jewelry making and that was how I became a jewelry designer.

All of this experience of my why and my purpose for building a jewelry brand came out of a really tragic situation, my mother passing away. It seems weird to dial it back to that, but if she had died when she did I would not be a designer. I’m pretty certain about that because I really believe if you haven’t seen that movie Sliding Doors from ages ago that when one door opens another door closes or when one door closes another door opens and we have ultimate, unlimited opportunities to change [12:00] the direction of our lives. In times of hardship and sadness these are our choices that we get to make that move us into or propel us maybe is a better word, into another direction.

So the whole foundation of why I even started a jewelry business in the first place is deeply tied to my mother passing away which was one of the most tragic experiences I’ve ever had in my entire life, if not the most tragic to this point. She died very young and she was my age when she actually died and that to me is really crazy. This year when I turned her age it was just like nuts because it brings back a lot. What I’ve used, I was really shy to ever talk about that before until I really got clear on what my purpose is and what I actually bring to the world as a jewelry brand.

My main offering besides designing engagement rings and wedding bands is heirloom redesign for my jewelry business. I design custom, for those of you who don’t know. I specialize in redesigning heirlooms. The reason why I’m so passionate about this is because my first redesign was my mother’s diamond. I inherited a couple of pieces of jewelry from her and one of them was this diamond that was an earring. I’m not a diamond earring person so I turned it into a ring that I wear every day. I was like oh my gosh this means so much to me. It gives me a little piece of my mom to remember and tie me back to her. I’d love to do that for other people.

Then my first project came and then more projects came. Now I’ve done hundreds of projects that are heirloom redesign. It’s so important to me to be able to offer that service to people because I understand on a really deep profound level how tramatic an experience like that can be and how losing a loved one really changes the course of your life and you want to stay connected to them.

So this whole underlying reason for this is I want to be able to create a moment for the people that I’m designing for. This ties also into what I do for engagement rings. I’m creating moments for my clients and you are to so I don’t want you to forget that.

So as I walk you through the content for the podcast today remember that what you do is so much bigger than just creating a simple piece of jewelry. It is tying to someone’s history. It’s becoming a part of someone’s life. It’s becoming a part of someone’s moment in their lives, your customers’ moments in their lives. This is how, if you do it right, you become an unforgettable brand that gets people coming back for more and attracts these customers for life that want to keep buying from you because they’ve bought into your stories. This is really important, profound lesson today. [15:00] So perk up your ears because I’ve got a mouthful for you.

Let’s dive right in. I wanted to talk a little bit first about the real reasons why people buy jewelry. You’ve heard this from me before and you’re going to hear it again. I even mentioned it earlier. People don’t buy jewelry because they need it. They buy it because they want it, and they want it because it’s creating meaning for them. So it might be that it’s trendy and cool and makes them feel hip and on the edge or it might be that it’s giving them some sort of status, that it makes them feel successful like they’ve arrived or it might also be making them feel beautiful and confident, and then it also has this power to connect to specific moments in people’s lives.

Think about this way. If you were to go on vacation and you bought a token a remembrance of that time, that is going to stay with you for the rest of your life. Think about when people buy jewelry in a resort town and they’re collecting something from their travels. That’s something that I do whenever I travel around the world. I try to find a piece of jewelry that I want to bring home. I don’t always successfully find something that I will wear but I do it. I’m always on a hunt for it. My last two trips to Italy I was on such a hunt and I couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for and I was so bummed because my first trip to Italy over the last three years I had found some amazing jewelry in two separate spots in Tuscany and these last two trips that I took I didn’t find anything.

For me collecting jewelry while I’m traveling is a really important part of me and when I’m wearing that jewelry and when someone compliments me on that jewelry it brings me back to that place in time where I bought it. Think about, for those who are designing important jewelry for someone’s life, a milestone, maybe for an anniversary or a birthday or a graduation or like I do for engagement. I’m part of those people’s moments, my clients’ moments for the rest of their lives or for as long as they stay married. Hopefully they stay married for life, but you get the picture.

I’m part of their story forever when I’m designing something. I always think back, a couple years ago my apartment got robbed. I was devastated mostly because it’s not even that I wore a lot of the jewelry that was in my jewelry box that got stolen. More than anything it was that all the jewelry that got stolen were things that documented moments of my life like my 8th grade graduation ring got stolen. My college graduation watch got stolen and the ring that my dad gave me for my 16th got stolen. So all these pieces of jewelry that I loved and actually are an inspiration for things that I design today, they’re just a distant memory that I try to think about these days, are pieces that were so significantly tied to something really important and memorable for me.

Remember you are creating moments for people and you are in the moments business, as my mentor Ryan likes to say. The next thing that you’re doing is you’re creating this emotional connection. We talked a little bit about this in Episode 74. You are creating something [18:00] that is powerful. Jewelry is a really powerful thing. It allows you to streamline and make people feel a certain way. I say this because if you think of the transformative power that a piece of jewelry has on the person wearing it, you could take a simple black dress and change up your accessories and it looks completely different. You could wear it with very traditional pearls and pearl earrings and it comes off with a classic look.

You could wear it with a super edgy necklace or spiked earrings and come off as appearing super edgy. You could wear it with super fine jewelry and you look like you’re dressed up for a night on the town. There’s so many different ways jewelry can create this not only emotional connection but a persona and it’s powerful because at the end of the day it is making a statement and helping the person wearing it, your customers, feel confident in who they are. It’s empowering. It’s a powerful thing and I want you to remember that.

It really is something that creates a deep sense of beauty for the wearer, especially those of you who are designing jewelry for women, but the same thing goes for people who are designing jewelry for men. A lot of men don’t wear a lot of jewelry but the men that do, they’re wearing that jewelry as an expression of their personal style.

It is interesting. My boyfriend from a long time ago, Scott, I met him at a trade show and he’s in the fashion industry. I laugh now today because I’d never met a guy who wore so much jewelry up until that point. He wore almost more jewelry than I did, but the thing I was really impressed by and amazed by with Scott was he was super masculine. Willing to rock that jewelry and he was confident about who he was wearing it. It was something that all the pieces that he wore were, I want to use the word tokens or mementos or something from different parts of his story, he was wearing a lot of those things because he had been in recovery for addiction and a lot of the things that he wore reminded him of where he had been, where he’s gone and where he is now and that whole journey.

So remember your clients are collecting things like that. You are becoming part of their story. You’re creating a moment and creating that emotional connection that’s tied into your why in this personal history and understanding the real reason why people buy jewelry is helping you create an unforgettable brand. It helps build this cycle of repeat clients. People buy jewelry because of this emotional connection and it ties into so many other things including your story and why you’re designing jewelry in the first place.

I think all of you, and I know that for some of you it’s really hard to pull out for yourselves the reason why you started designing jewelry. [21:00] The thing I hear the most is that people just oh they liked it, it was therapeutic, they started working with their hands, but there was a deeper reason behind it. I want you to really get to that origin of why you started designing jewelry. That origin story is a little bit different. There’s going to be like a slight tweak to the why of your brand and why that’s important to your customers, but there is a correlation and a connection to that.

Remember that you are becoming part of someone’s story when you do this right. Your story is what helps attract and keep those customers along that journey or what we like to call the desire journey for the long haul. It’s a proven fact that on your website the “About” page is the number one visited page for almost any website. When someone is trying to figure out who you are or what you stand for, that’s the page that shines and that’s the page that connects with. So if you can leverage your story and use that to draw in customers, it’s a really powerful tool for you to connect with them and get them for life.

A lot of you have heard this. On the homepage of my website, www.tracymatthews.com, I have a video. That video is designed to build trust and to get clients to fill out my contact form and trust that I’m a reliable person if they haven’t met me or haven’t been referred by someone who is actually worked with me before. So that whole video is designed, the way it’s scripted, the way I tell my story, in the way I show the B roll, all those things are designed to take my clients on the journey of my brand and communicate my story and my life throughout it.

I guarantee you that you guys have a similar story like that. So think about why you started designing jewelry in the first place. If it was therapeutic, talk about the reasons why it was therapeutic. What were you struggling with at the time? What was the next step or was it that you came across taking a bead class and someone actually wore a piece of your jewelry and you were like oh my gosh this is the best experience ever. Talk about that or the evolution of your history and why it’s important.

I was talking with Diane House [ph] of Tiny Devotions. I’ve talked to her a lot this year but I interviewed her for a podcast a while back. That podcast is Episode 45. You can check it out if you haven’t already. We were just talking and getting to know each other. Diana told me she started Tiny devotions because she was going through a period of reinvention. She went on this retreat to Bali and found meditation and that transformative experience made her want to bring that intention out into the world. Her reason in that transformation and bringing all the things and the changes that had happened with her, within her were the reasons why she wanted to create jewelry with intention. That’s the whole reason why she created the Tiny Devotions brand which is one of the premier yoga jewelry brands on the market today and probably the forerunner in that style of jewelry [24:00] that people have jumped on.

I remember before Tiny Devotions came onto the scene, a lot of the yoga jewelry out there was a little bit super hippy dippy and not as fashionable so it was kind of hard to wear if you were someone who was walking that line between regular fashionable standard person or a hippy dippy yogi. So she bridged that gap. A lot of you have those same kind of stories. What was it. I was talking with a designer the first time we ever ran our Laying the Foundation course. I think her name was Pricilla. I can’t remember. This was so long ago. It was four and a half years ago

I remember her just feeling compelled to share her story about why she started designing jewelry with me. I think I have that effect on people, but it was something she wasn’t sharing with the world and I really encouraged her to share it with the world. She had gone through a really low point. She had hit rock bottom. She was a drug addict and jewelry was the only thing that allowed her to stay off drugs and kept her sane and sober. I remember she sort of went on her own way. She went through a few more personal tragedies.

I always have been really affected by that story because that is a great thing that should be shared with your audience because you wouldn’t believe how many other people out there can resonate with what you’ve gone through. Whether it be tragic or happy, it doesn’t have to be a negative experience. So if you think about it maybe my wife or creating all these unforgettable experiences and moments for my clients came out of a personal tragedy of my own, but think about the brilliance the amazing evolution of what happened with Diane House and how she came upon this brilliant experience when she was in Bali and she wanted to bring that to the world.

So there’s a lot of different ways that people come across this or come into it. So I want you to really think deep and go deep about what it is, why you’re doing this and all this stuff so that you can tie that into your branding and create an unforgettable brand that people remember. I want to kind of pull this all together.

I know that some of you don’t feel comfortable putting yourself on the forefront or being the face of your brand and all that stuff and that’s fine and dandy and you could find other ways to brand yourself just based on product alone. That’s great and it’s going to work for some people, but I can tell you that for most of us who are really independent niche brands that’s not going to work as effectively as tying it in to the story of your brand. Like I mentioned in the last episode, this starts to filter it through all your imagery and through everything that you do.

So the next time you’re on vacation, the next time you celebrating a milestone, the next time you get married, not married already or thinking about getting remarried, I don’t know, think about the power of that jewelry or that symbol or that token has in your life. Think about something that was passed down from [27:00] a loved one. By creating what you are doing you’re creating that same experience for the people who buy from you.

I want to add one more piece of puzzle about leveraging your story because I think this is really important. The things that you value and the things that you find important are going to attract people who value and find the same things important. Remember that. I’m going to tie this back to my jewelry brand. I design a lot of heirloom redesigns. Family is so important to me. I’m really close to my family even though we’re all nuts and crazy and it’s so big and exhausting and exhilarating at the same time.

For me family has always been a really important part of my life. So when my mother passed away losing her was really traumatic for obvious reasons but also because she was really the head of our family. For me what I value is family, is connection, is interactions with people, is not wasting my time on a bunch of stuff that’s meaningless. I want to have meaning in my life and meaning in my work and meaning so that I can be doing something that has meaning for someone else.

So I say this, and that might sound a little esoteric, but when you can really clearly define what you value as a brand, as a business, people who are like minded, who value the same things and are attracted to your design, if you can clearly communicate that, will flock to you like crazy. I can tell you that this works so well. You start getting to a point where you don’t even have to work that hard on marketing your business. I say this because I built a brand that was sold in 350 stores around the world. I feel like I was working that thing, working so hard to build a business for so long because I was pushing it instead of pulling people in and trying to approach my business in a very different way than I approach it now.

I feel like the biggest shift was I’m okay only working with the right people who want to buy from me. I’m okay to say no to people because I want to work with people who are aligned with my vision for my business, who are aligned with the fact that I charge a lot of money for my creativity and they’re willing to pay it because I can offer them something that someone in China can’t or something that they buy on Amazon.com can’t and because they are aligned with what I stand for as a company and what I stand for as a human being. So remember that, and because of that and because I’m so clear on what that means to me now, there have been times this year when I’ve been in a little bit of a sales slump and then all of a sudden I just flip it around and flip my mindset around and then all of a sudden customers come flocking in.

This holiday season is the perfect example. I’ve hardly worked for the last year on getting clients and in fact [30:00] I probably lost a few clients this year because I’ve been very busy with Flourish and Thrive Academy and I haven’t been able to follow up in a timely manner and that makes me feel a little bad and it’s unfortunate, but it’s the truth. In 2017 I’m working on getting more support so that that doesn’t happen again. At the end of the day what that has resulted in is a ton of consistent business that I didn’t have to go after. They just started coming.

It was referrals from other clients. It was because of how I SEOed my website and I’m not saying SEOed from like putting weird keywords all over the place. It’s just the kind of content that I put on there. It’s from doing promotions or having energy around a fundraiser that I was hosting, and all these other things and then getting on the phone with people and really aligning and being able to communicate in a way that gelled with the customers and made it right. It’s okay if people aren’t the right people.

In fact I got on the phone with a poor girl, not a poor girl, but a poor girl because she had just lost her mother. On the phone she talked about her project and her budget wasn’t in alignment with what I charge and so I gave her other options and I wished her the best and it was fine. It was part of the experience and part of the process. Remember that when you are fully aligned and really clear on what it is that you value and what it is that you want to put out into the world and what your messaging is and your branding is and all these things start to come together your brand becomes so unforgettable to those people that you end up getting customers for life who end up becoming your biggest referrers.

This is such an important thing to remember because 80% of your sales comes from 20% of your customers. You really need to nurture that 20% of your customers and build an unforgettable brand so that you have this cycle of repeat business, and it’s really easy once you get it right. So I’m pumped for you guys.

So thanks so much for listening today and I’m looking forward to seeing you in bootcamp. I hope you’re going to join us. Until next time this is Tracy Matthews signing off. Thanks for joining me today.