How Camille Brinch Went from Maker to Multimillion Dollar Jewelry Brand

Camille Brinch fell in love with making her own jewelry and started to make items for others from a shed in her parents’ backyard. Over the years with the help of her brother Daniel, the siblings turned this passion into a seven-figure brand. In this episode of Shopify Masters, learn how the brand operates as an influencer, without discounting, and plans to expand into physical retail.

For the full transcript of this episode, click here.

Show Notes

How partnership between these siblings launched an empire

Shuang: Take us back to 2016. How did it all begin?

Daniel:  So the fun story is that basically, I was in the US running this entrepreneurial life. I was in a tech startup. I wanted to be big over there. And then one day Camille called me, and she was like, “Daniel, I want to start this company.” And I was like, “No, you’re not. You’re just finishing school. Maybe you should go to the university instead.” I had no expectations of her being able to do it. And she was like, “I want to create this jewelry company. You are going to help me create a website. You’re going to do the marketing.” And I was like, “Hell no, I’m not going to do anything.” I told her, “Go to YouTube, put in, “Shopify,” and call this company called Pensopay, who’s going to help you with the payment. And then you have to figure it out for yourself because if I help you too much now, you’re not going to be able to handle it if it becomes a success.” And then I hung up, and I didn’t really motivate her much back then.

Camille:  Yeah. And that phone call didn’t go as I planned it should go. My motivation didn’t stop there. I was still really passionate about starting this business. When I started it, I wasn’t thinking of it as a big business. I just want to make jewelry. I want to use my hands to make these ideas that I have in my head. I took a jewelry course. It was only four Wednesdays, just the total basics because it was the only place I have learned to make jewelry. And I brought my mother, just for fun. We can have some mother-daughter time. But I could just feel that this was what I want to do.

I was so passionate about it, and quickly I got my parents to say yes, so I could have their shed in their backyard, so where I could create this workspace, and I started with no money. So I had to build everything myself, and my uncle built some of the tools and stuff like that. It was the basics. And because I didn’t have any money when I started, I thought, “How can I earn some more money to buy some more material?” Because when I started, I used sterling silver, as I’m doing today. I bought five centimeters of sterling silver, made one ring. And then I came like, “Oh, I have to sell it somewhere.”

I have used Instagram for some years now, and it has always been a big inspiration for me to use Instagram. So I quickly posted pictures and videos of me from the workspace and got some followers. And then, after the call with Daniel, YouTube showed me how to make my webshop. And I did find it fun to make the webshop in Shopify because it was easy, and I haven’t traded before. I used a lot of hours, but it was a big learning for me to build the webshop, and therefore I could have some orders, and slowly I was just buying more silver, making two rings, buying more silver again, making three rings. And that just started the business, I guess. And then, from then, it just scaled.

 

Shuang: When I think about fashion and Scandinavia, it’s always got such a cool aesthetic, and with the jewelry market, there’s already a lot of established brands. What is it about this stream that made you stay motivated and continue with the business?

Camille:  The most important thing for me is not to have a successful business where we earn a lot of money. Not at all. For me, it’s really about the jewelry. It’s about me having all these ideas in my head that I can’t stop. I’m just constantly thinking about something, and I have to get them through my fingers and just also be able to create something physical that people can wear. I love it so much, and it’s the most passionate thing for me. So I think that it makes me want to do it more, also, and I think that “Yeah, of course, there’s a lot of other jewelry companies in the market.” But I try not to feel at them that much. I guess I try to go my own way, and for me, it’s so important to build a strong brand and not to focus that much on the money, and so on, just to build a brand that I like and that I can be happy for. I think that it was motivating me.

Shuang: I think that’s good because I think a lot of the times you need that drive and that tunnel vision to keep on going forward. So for Daniel, at what point did you finally convince yourself, and you felt confident to leave behind your career in the States to join your sister to start this company?

Daniel:  So I don’t think she realizes how much energy and time I put into it from the beginning. I didn’t tell her at all, and I helped her with the marketing and stuff like that. And I told her, “I want to spend this much money each week on ads.” And she was like, “No, you’re wasting money.” She didn’t get that it was an investment to get buyers. And I just kept going because I saw. What really made a trigger for me was, after just six months, I was following Shopify every day. I was looking at the numbers, right. It was very subtle in the beginning, but in June 2017, she had hit a milestone, like a hundred thousand kroner in revenue, which is $16,000 in one month, after just six months. So I flew back home, to our parents’ house, I spoke and my father spoke, we popped the champagne, and I was crying, it was really emotional, I just feel so proud of my sister at that point.

And from then on, it just kept going and kept going. In the first year, she did $300,000 in revenue. And then in year two, she did $1.3 million in revenue. And at that point, I probably was working full-time next to my other job. She didn’t know, she didn’t want to pay me, but I just couldn’t stop doing it. And I learned a lot of stuff in the US that we started to implement in this company. One thing that we really do a lot of is that we think of the brand as an influencer, not as a company. So Camille on Instagram, it’s more of an influencer, in the style that she’s doing everything. She wants to inspire people, not just tell people to buy stuff. And we’re building this whole one-to-one universe. If you go to a website it’s Camille who speaks to you, “I like this,” or, “I designed this piece.” It’s not, “We,” or it’s not non-personal at all. So we’re trying to build this entire, “I”, universe around Camille.

But at that point, Camille had grown the company to a few employees, and I could feel, every time I was with her, that she wasn’t passionate about being a leader or running the business. She’s really passionate about creating things with her fingers, being inspired, being creative. So I could feel this tense feeling in her, every time we spoke about it. And at that point, I just stood up and said, “Hey, Camille, would you like me to come in and actually take responsibility for the day-to-day operations, so that you can go back and focus on what really fuels your fire?” And at that point, we made a deal and I went full time, and haven’t looked back since.

Camille: It was really an important thing that happened right there. And for maybe a half or maybe a whole year, I was just working. And I couldn’t feel the same passionate feeling that I had when I started the company. I was still really happy and stuff like that, but I couldn’t celebrate if we did something good, and stuff like that, because it went really well.

But then I talked to Daniel and he said, “What if you don’t just want to be the leader?” And it hadn’t struck me before, because of course, I had to be the leader, because the company is called by my name, and it’s just the way it goes. And normally it is the way it goes, but I also had to think back, “Why did I start this company?” So now it’s actually so lovely to work with my brother. To have him doing all that, because he is so good at it, and I’m just good at being at the workbench eight hours with my head down and just working. So that’s perfect.

Shuang: So when you guys were younger and kids, did it ever occur to you guys that you guys were very complimentary? At what point did you feel, “Wow, we could actually work together and create something great?”

Camille:  I think when we were younger, I always followed Daniel. When he did something. I said, “Me too, me too.” But we are really different because maybe I’m more like, I’ve always made creative things with my hands. I couldn’t sit still. When we were watching a movie, I was always drawing or making something. I always made things. And I guess that I was really, what’s called social. I could speak with everybody. I love to be around people. And Daniel was maybe more of a computer nerd. He was always in his room, playing on the computer. So I guess we’re different, but we have always run really well together, but how do you see it, Daniel?

Daniel:  I don’t think it was on the cards for us to do business at all because I always saw Camille as more of the crazy type, and me, I was more of the controlled and geeky type. I’ve always had this philosophy that, because I’ve been so much into the marketing side of it, throughout all these years, I always had this feeling that, “If I can find one person who’s super passionate, who likes to be in the front, and who has this vision of something, just put me behind that person, and I can build the whole thing that supports that.” I’m passionate about the process. I’m a visionary in what we do online. So for me to find someone like my sister, we’ve always been really good together, who has this passion for jewelry, I just think it’s amazing. And it’s cool to be working together. It has its downsides too, when we’re with our family, we constantly talk about business, but it has its upsides as well.

Fine-tuning social ads with testing and an authentic voice 

Shuang:  How did you build the business initially, and how did you start testing with different ads and on different social platforms to build up the sales that you have now?

Daniel:  In the beginning, as Camille said, it was just her and her Instagram, doing influencers marketing, doing like for like, follow for follow, that kind of stuff, in the beginning, hustling just to make sales. I was at a conference in the US, digital marketer where this guy called Ryan Deiss, he had a talk. And the reason why I know this so much is because I found a photo. Three years later, I was doing a talk at the largest eCommerce conference in Denmark about this thing that we’ve been building. And I found a photo and the photo said, “Write this down,” but I took a photo, three years earlier, of it. And it said, “The companies that are going to win in the future are the ones that are willing to invest in real one-to-one human-to-human interactions.” But three years later, in year four of Camille Brinch, it struck me, that one sentence completely changed our lives, or how we run businesses today, because of what we set ourselves into was trying to build Camille Brinch as a super personal, one-to-one universe. So what that means is that Instagram is basically Camille’s own story about the brand. It’s her in the workshop. It’s how she styles the jewelry. It’s how she wants people to mix and stack this jewelry to create their own expressions. But it also goes onto the website, our vision is that it needs to feel like you’re actually walking into a retail store, and Camille is behind the desk, right? We want you to have that feeling when you walk into our website online, so we speak that way on the website, too. And some things that we’ve done, which are really cool is that when Facebook Messenger opened up, this company called ManyChat, they opened up so that you could use Facebook Messenger, as a communications platform, like emails. It’s very hard today, but it was open-ended for a few years. And we jumped on to that immediately, because suddenly there was a platform where you could speak to people, one-to-one, in a scalable way. So we used it in every single campaign. People were talking, they knew it was a robot, but they were talking with Camille. They were running through styles that Camille had traded on Facebook Messenger.

So it was this, what we talk about is this response, answer, kind of communication, because on a website it’s always very static, right? If you go to Amazon, you can click a bunch of buttons and add things to your cart and then check out. You do all the work, the website never answers back. But if you go into our website, now that we’re not using Facebook Messenger to do it, for example, on our size guide, it’s not just a size guide where you click what sizes you want to wear. It’s actually, so it opens up and Camille asks the question, “Is this for yourself or a gift for someone else?” And you say, “It’s for myself.” Then Camille replies on the screen, “Hey, what a great thing to buy for yourself. Do you know what size you have already?” So we’re trying to make these answers on the website.

We have it in our cart as well. You can choose if you’re buying something as a gift. So imagine you’re in a store, and you go up to the desk and you put this ring on the desk, and you say, “I want to buy this ring.” Camille behind the desk has to ask, “Is this for a gift, or is it for yourself?” So we do this in the checkout. And then you say, “It’s for a gift.” Then Camille asks, “What date are you giving this gift?” And then you can click on what date you’re giving the gift. And then Camille replies, “Hey, I just prolonged the exchange period, 30 days from the day that you’re giving the gift, I hope she’ll enjoy the present.” So we are trying to build these human interactions into the way that we do all of our marketing, how we build our website, how we think about it that way. And it all stems back from this one quote from Ryan Deiss, that I realize now, three, four years later, it was the tipping point. So that’s more of the way that we see things in our universe.

 

Shuang: So what were some of those beginning strategies that helped you grow?

Daniel:  So the funny thing was, I come from a very performance-minded background. And I created a bunch of ads and I showed them to Camille, and she’s like, “Hell no, This is crappy. This is so unprofessional.” And I’m like, “No, we could make a ton of sales.” And she’s like, “No, this is not my brand. This is my name.” So I had to understand where this whole branding thing comes from. So what I’ve realized over the past few years is that there is a big difference between selling a product and building a brand. Because if you’re just selling a product, you’re always buying the purchase. You’re doing campaigns to get people to buy your products. But if Facebook prices increase or people stop liking your product, you’ll lose your business. The brand is something that you will build, and it won’t be taken away from you. 

Camille:  I remember some tests, because Daniel, told me that we have to split test on everything. So he told me, “Now we have to make this ad. But you have to wear four different outfits, and say it four different times because they have to see which performs best.” So imagine making 30 videos with four different outfits. It takes a lot of time, but now we have learned a lot of it and we can see that, if I say, “Hi,” and wave, and if I wear colorful clothes, it will work a lot better. And also videos that are in the selfie mode are actually sometimes better because they don’t look like ads. 

Daniel:  To give you something concrete, Shuang, we did a lot of ads where Camille was speaking, selfie mode, into the camera, and that worked really well for us. And then we did a lot of videos just showing the rings and a bracelet. Back then, it was the boomerangs, on Instagram, you can make a boomerang. We did a lot of those. So, but we always had in mind that it needed to look really good, instead of just selling the product. But I think, if I should talk about one strategy that completely probably set us on the map in Denmark, it’s the way we run our Black Fridays. 

So Camille has always been very hesitant about giving discounts, because to her, giving discounts is a way to sell a product. It’s not a way to build a brand. And if you start pushing discounts all the time, people will only buy when they get a discount. So how do we translate that into a Black Friday? So what we came up with was that, instead of giving a discount, we run everything at full price, but because we are so personal, and people are behind the scenes with Camille, she designs a limited edition piece of jewelry that you’ll only get on Black Friday, and you’ll only get it if you buy something else at full price, and this piece of jewelry, we have to make it as good as another piece of jewelry at a value of like a hundred dollars. So people are actually getting much higher value than a 20% discount, and to us it costs about the same.

But what happened was that when we did this, the first year, back in 2017, we had 400 of these pieces of jewelry and we launched the website on Black Friday. So we shut down the entire website, with just a big timer. And you can only come in when the timer hits zero, if you have a secret password. And this password is only given to you, if you are on our messenger list or on our text list. So you have to interact with us, one-on-one, to get this code.

And what happened back in 2017 was that when we launched a website at seven o’clock in the evening, on Thursday, we sold out in seven minutes, 400 of these pieces. And we were blown away. It was one month’s worth of sales in seven minutes. And we’ve just built on top of that for the last few years. And last year we did $600,000 in sales in 10 minutes. So that was pretty cool. Thousands of orders in just 10 minutes. And we sold out, we had 5,500 of these pieces last year, and we sold out within the hour.

The realities of expanding your team and letting go of control 

Shuang:  I wanted to ask you, Camille, about expanding the team and actually allowing other employees to be a part of the brand because you’re so used to making everything yourself. How was that process of finding the right talents, letting go of some of the control, and allowing some other people to help you make the pieces?

Camille:  I take a deep breath because it has been hard. Also because I did everything myself for the first two years. So of course you should allow others in and make stuff for you, it was difficult. I knew I had to have some employees and I wanted to, I also badly wanted to have someone to share it with, to share all the ups and downs with them. But it was more difficult than I had ever thought, because also when I started the process of having employees, I was like, “Okay, where to start? Where should the employee work? What should the employee work with?” And also I was just in my parents’ backyard. So I had to rent a place. It’s actually where our office is right now, as well, because it was really big when I rented it myself. I think it has six big rooms. So I was just all by myself in there, but Daniel told me I had to rent a big room because otherwise, I had to move again. But then I hired the first one, and she was doing everything like me. She could also make jewelry. She could talk to customers. So I just took her right in, and she got all the information, and here is something I actually haven’t told anyone before. Because it has been a really hard time for me to trust employees. When you have been in the company for three months, it’s not that easy to get fired and stuff like that. But after three months, exactly, she called in sick and it was the 1st of December. So we were really busy at that time, but she said that she was sick, but then I found out that she started her own jewelry company just two months before that. Camille Brinch jewelry was my baby, or it is my baby. So it was just like, “So now what? Do I just go out and have a new employee? And what if she does the same?”

 

It was really difficult, but I had to move forward. I think the good thing about our parents is that they always told us to just move forward. So they had my back, they helped me get through it. And then I hired some more people, and of course, it went well.I think I had to check all the things they did. So I was the annoying leader because I was like, “Oh, can I just see what you did before we send it?” Because I want to have my fingers on everything. And also, I guess that’s why I didn’t feel that I was the perfect leader because, I just think that some people are born maybe to be leaders and some aren’t, and I think I am better at being creative. So at that point, it was so good that Daniel came in because he’s really good at it. And also I guess that I have all these imaginations of a perfect leader. I want to be the leader who comes in every morning, give high fives to everybody, just has good energy, and have the energy to talk to everybody every day, and remember what have they done on the weekends, and stuff like that, and still be able to answer all their questions and solve all the problems, and still be able to design and have my own work. But I couldn’t be that leader. But yeah, it’s good that Daniel is the leader now, I guess. It has been a hard time also. Yeah, because I think it has caused some unnecessary stress for my own brain to have all these things I wanted to do.

Finding inspiration by not seeking it 

Shuang: Especially with your story, opening back up again, trusting different people, after what you’ve gone through, I think those are all qualities that are great for whatever kind of leader you want to be. I do want to ask about the design process, how do you stay inspired, creative, and come up with new designs?

Camille:  So I actually try not to think that much of getting inspired the whole time, because I find myself the most inspiring when I’m not thinking about how to be inspired. So it’s a bit weird, but I think I have a brain that sees a lot of things. So all the time, I see something that maybe other people don’t see. It’s sometimes difficult to explain where my ideas and inspiration come from, but I think that I have always used Instagram a lot for inspiration, and Pinterest as well. It can be like, I see maybe a couch, with its smooth surface. Maybe I can see like, “Okay, maybe I can put this surface onto this type of jewelry,” and maybe I need some more inspiration and I can go on Pinterest and find, “Okay, there are these types of rings, or earrings,” or stuff like that. I think that it’s actually really important for me to stay tuned into what people like. But I think when I started, and what I am trying to hold onto, is to make something I want.

 

Camille:  Normally before I started making jewelry, I actually didn’t wear that much jewelry because I’m more of a boyish girl. I like big baggy pants and a sweatshirt and stuff like that. So I didn’t think there was that much jewelry in that style. So I’m creating a chunky, raw, kind of jewelry, with a more sporty vibe. I just think I use myself as a reference. Also, our segment is young girls my own age, I’m 26. I started when I was 21 years old. So I just use Instagram to see, “What does my segment like? Do they like this as well?” Yeah. I’ve always just followed the feeling I have in my stomach. 

Daniel:  What I’ve learned is that sometimes we just have to trust Camille’s stomach, because she has this intuitive way to see things before they start getting popular. So the first piece of jewelry Camille really designed was this curb chainring, the Panzer ring, is what we call it. And it wasn’t popular at the time, it was this old hip-hop chain that suddenly Camille high-polished into feminine kind of jewelry suddenly, but it just became immensely popular. And now you see it everywhere, all over the world. And I’m sure we didn’t inspire people in the US to start creating this type of jewelry, but it’s just super popular now, but it wasn’t five years ago. So some of these things that Camille will come up with, whereas some people would be like, “Na, not my type,” but then one or two years later, you see people wearing this. 

Shuang:  I do want to ask about operating a site that is catered to the EU with different languages, different currencies involved. Logistically, how is everything set up?

Daniel:  So I could say that in one word, [“Lessor.”] So we have this guy as our head of eCommerce, he was a guy I knew before Camille Brinch, and I’ve been planting seeds in his mind the whole time. And now he’s been a part of the company for two years, and he’s just a genius behind the scenes. But right now we do have our Danish site, and we recently launched a .com site, to just test the waters, running all English ads, to all countries in the EU, and to see which countries pick up on just our style, without changing much. And we are right now translating into French, German and Swedish, and we are swapping warehouses now, so that, from a month from now, we can ship worldwide in one to two days, all from Denmark, and that’s the start of our globalization.

The way we run it is obviously through Shopify Plus. And because Lessor is such a tech genius, we have basically the way our front end is coded into our backend is basically everything runs through Google Sheets. So everything is placed in one place. So if we start having different languages, it all just goes into the same sheet, and they all just automatically populate it onto the websites. So it’s French, German, and Swedish, and then we try to localize those languages through ads as well. So we’ll keep having a global campaign running. The US is a really big market for us that we will start selling soon, because we can ship to the east coast in one day, and the west coast in two days. And then we’ll just start localizing whatever countries that we might pick up that we see some traction in.

Shuang:  So I did want to ask about data predicting sales against the gut feeling, because especially, I guess, with rings, there is sizing involved, and with your designs, there’s different styles. So how much of the gut feeling do you rely on to say, “This type of style in this sizing would do well,” versus using past data and projecting and seeing, and hopefully understanding what you can expect of different sales?

Daniel:  It’s funny that you ask. So we are coming up with the largest collection that Camille has ever done, and obviously buying for the launch, we can waste a lot of money buying the wrong stuff. So what we did this time was that Camille invited, I think, 10 or 15 people in for a more qualitative, just try and test to see what people liked. And then they ranked all of the new pieces from one to 10, or, “What is in your top 10? What’s in your top five? And what’s your favorite one?” So we populated half of our purchase off that. And then the second half of our purchase, we populated on past sales.

So the way that Camille designs jewelry, it’s always in a small, medium and a large. So let’s say we have a small ring and medium ring and a large ring. And each of those come in 13 sizes, and this is where it gets complicated, because one ring size differs one millimeter in circumference, and on one finger you can fit, at max, two different sizes. So it’s very complex to actually find the right ring, but because we’ve sold 50,000 rings in the past, we have a good overview of what sizes people are buying. And so we basically populated our purchase off of 50% qualitative data and 50% of what has worked in the past. And then we’ve auto-populated it throughout what sizes people usually buy. And this is our best bet for the launch of this new product, but we are lucky that Camille’s design DNA is that we don’t do quarterly collections. We don’t just design and throw out. Camille wants to design something she wants to wear for a long time, and that we know that our customers are going to wear for a long time. So even if we don’t hit it just right, we’ll still have this piece of jewelry on our website in two years, because we slowly build it into the DNA of the website. So not buying the correct stock is not really hurtful for us, because we will sell it eventually.

Shuang:  Are there any Shopify apps or tools that have helped you guys while you are scaling and growing?

Daniel: We’re using Shopify Flows to do a lot of the tagging on the orders. And then we are using this software called Integromat. It’s the same as Zapier, it’s just much cooler and can do a lot more things, and we’ve basically built our entire backend on Integromat. As Camille said, she’s very perfectionistic, that’s why she had to move a little bit outside of the office to let people do what they need to do, we always work with the last 5% or 10%. That’s what we are passionate about. A lot of companies, work with 80% and that’s good enough, but we really nerd into the last 20%. So our return process is actually not a Shopify app, but we completely built it ourselves. And because we do have around 20% of all rings that are getting sent back for an exchange, and when you’re selling 40,000 rings in a year, that’s a lot of the rings coming back into the office for an exchange. And that’s a lot of hours, just sitting there, “Is this ring correct?” Shipping a new ring, stuff like that. So we completely built our own automated return system, where you go into our website and you basically do the return yourself. You log into your order, you have this ring, you want to exchange it for this piece of jewelry, and you’re actually able to buy more pieces of jewelry in the exchange process. So we are actually making an upsell while people are exchanging, and then the back-end system does the whole thing by itself. So when we receive the orders, we just open the package, look at the iPad, and, “Are these pieces of jewelry in the box? Yes.” And then it reships the order automatically. So we’ve cut that down from five minutes per order to 20 seconds per order, saving us hundreds of hours. But that’s not a Shopify app. I know you asked about a Shopify app. Maybe one day we’ll make it into a Shopify app, but right now we’re keeping it as our secret sauce.

Shuang: So what are some plans for the future? 

Daniel:  So we are moving into a new office, 1st of October (2021). The place Camille rented, it’s just too small. And because last year, we won the prize for Denmark’s best new eCommerce company, and this year we came second in, best ecommerce company with less than 16 million in revenue. So we’ve had a lot of noise around us. So we’ve been able to hire some really talented people who are starting in the next few months. So we’re really gearing up internally right now. And then we were starting our international global launch with the new warehouse so that we can ship one to two days worldwide. And then Camille is coming out with this huge new collection that, I can’t wait to show it to the world because it’s pretty damn good. And I have really huge expectations of how it’s going to go with this one.

Shuang:  Tell us a little bit more about the new collection, if you can?

Camille: So the new collection is something I’ve been working on for a lot of time, now. The whole collection is coming to life in the workshop. So every piece I made by hand, it’s called 

“silicium” and in English, it’s silicon. It’s from this weird kind of metal, it’s not a metal and it’s not a crystal. It was my inspiration, so it’s really raw and organic. And also the designs are raw, organic, of course, they tap into my design DNA, so they are still also, chunky, shiny. I just look so forward to launch this collection.

Daniel:  Yeah. August 31st is the launch date. So we have a huge launch period, one month before we started hyping it, having these blurred images, we want it to feel like you’re a part of this. So the entire website gets inspired by this entire silicon universe, for one month prior to the launch.

Camille:  And I will make a lot of cool videos where I show all the jewelry. And I think also this time, I have never done it before, but I think I will make a full video of me making one of the jewelry, one of the samples, myself. So I hope people would love to watch that. 

Shuang: Because you guys happen to be direct to consumer, in a sense you guys were a bit COVID-proof in that way, but have there been struggles that you had to deal with in the past year?

Daniel: I know a lot of fashion brands, they saw a huge growth spurt after COVID started, but we had to ask ourselves, because Camille designs jewelry for people to wear, and style, and show off to people. And why would you buy expensive jewelry if you can’t be with people? So we took a spin on that and doubled down on creating a story around people being able to express themselves with the jewelry, diving even deeper into Camille’s DNA and just doubled down. When people left the advertising platforms, we spent more. So we grew 70% last year, actually throughout COVID, it wasn’t all profitable, but we were just out buying market shares in Denmark when this happened, and there were no real problems logistically at all. So we went through this pretty pain-free. It was hard. It’s tough. I think the last year has been extra tough mentally for everyone, and for us, too, when the whole thing happened and Denmark shut down, me and Lessor were at a conference in Spain. So we flew home into a vacation house for two weeks with our girlfriends, and that was just before a big launch. And we were just working day and night to get this done, and those things are draining and, but it’s been a crazy year. But business-wise, we did really well, and so no problems there.

So retail-wise, we are actually looking into going retail eventually, but in our own stores, because like I said, every ring has 13 sizes, and more than 20% of all ring purchases do require an exchange. So rings are the things that are the hardest to buy, but we sell most rings. That’s the category that we sell the most. So what that says is, “What if we actually had a store where people could come in and try the jewelry?” I don’t see a shop as a bad thing for us, retail-wise. We could create a completely new experience, imagine coming into a store and getting the Camille Brinch experience in real life, and also trying the jewelry on. So probably within the next six months, we’ll open a store in Denmark, to try this out, and I just see a store more of a marketing expense than anything. And I think we will see a huge growth spurt coming from being offline as well.

Source