Marketplace Visibility in Fine Jewelry: How Haus of Brilliance Thrives by Being Everywhere | EP 208

Monil Kothari 00:00
And for us, the whole crux of the business model is offer as much as possible, as in many spots as possible. Together, a big part of our businesses that were very multi channel and have been since day one.

Narrator 00:14
Welcome to the E comm Show podcast. I am your host. Andrew Maff, owner and founder of BlueTusker, from groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies. Get to know the ins and outs of the e Commerce Industry, from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it.

Andrew Maff 00:29
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the E comm show as usual. I'm your host, Andrew Maff, and today I'm joined by the amazing Monil Kothari, who is a founder and President over at Haus of Brilliance. Monil, how you doing, buddy? You ready for a good show?

Monil Kothari 00:41
I am. I'm good. How are you?

Andrew Maff 00:43
Doing good! I appreciate you doing this with us. I am super excited to talk to you about your brand, because obviously Haus of Brilliance being in the jewelry space, wildly competitive and difficult space, but once you break through, it can be fantastic. Hence why we're having you on the show right now. So really appreciate you being here with us. I always like to start these off kind of stereotypically and just kind of give you the floor. Tell us a little bit about your background, like where you got started, how you got in Haus of Brilliance, and we'll take it from there,

Monil Kothari 01:11
Sure. So if I go really far back, I think it started when at the age of one, I swallowed a diamond and had to be rushed to the hospital to have it pumped out of my stomach. So, you know,

Andrew Maff 01:21
Jeez, that is way far back. Yeah!

Monil Kothari 01:24
Cool story though, you know, wild as it sounds, but yes, family business, kind of, I'm a third generation jeweler. My grandfather started out in India, and this was around the time that India started producing finished diamonds. You know, it was more of that mid market, commercial goods, and that labor arbitrage model basically opened up India for trade. He started. Then my father joined. And then in the late 80s, they moved here. And, you know, it was the late 80s, early 90s, when the entire middle class blew up. And so they built a pretty strong business here there were wholesalers and manufacturers to many of the major retailers, although many of their customers are, unfortunately, no longer in business. But, you know, talking about the service, merchandise, the Sears, those retailers were the ones we were working with. But then post 2007 when the, you know, when the financial crisis hit, you know, we got hit in like a triple whammy. Our big retailers, a lot of them, started going under, or were financially very unstable. Then our business just happened to shrink here. And then the third factor was, whichever retailer was still standing around, started going directly to India for sourcing from the manufacturers. And so eventually we were squeezed out. And, you know, for a couple years, it was just kind of this holding pattern. And then I joined in 2014 I had one year of startup experience, not a lot of, you know, education outside of school, otherwise. And I didn't have much work to do. I had trained in India for 18 months, came back and was like, Well, cool, let's do something big. And then the business was dead again. And so my father made an offhand comment about having all this sample jewelry, why don't you sell it online? And I took that as a Go ahead. And I think our first customer was overstock.com I even emailed them from my personal email, because I didn't even have a company email address at that point. So what started as a diversion really has blown up into this sort of multi channel fine jewelry business. Covid was a huge accelerant for us, and the momentum has not actually slowed down as much as we thought it would, and the business continues to grow. And, yeah, and that brings me here, I guess, with you!

Andrew Maff 03:48
You made it. You This is it. This is how you know you made it. I've had people mentioned that before, and they do the story, and they're like, and now I'm here with you, like, this is the peak. Like this is you shouldn't tell anyone about this. Tell some people, otherwise I got to stop doing it. But interesting, it's crazy that you know that all that story and it basically came from, like, let's just get rid of some of this stuff. And now, now it's turned into this multi million dollar business, which is crazy. So tell me a little bit about like, the product line and the differentiator, because jewelry space is wildly competitive and standing out is difficult. So what's kind of your differentiator in your approach?

Monil Kothari 04:28
Yeah, you're actually, you really hit the nail on the head about competitiveness. We're probably one of the only categories, and I'm excluding, like, you know, the branded Tiffany and Harry Winston products from this. But fine jewelry is really a lot of it is purchased on price. To a certain extent. That's one of the biggest factors that go into this. But you know, we do primarily fine jewelry. We don't do anything cost that's a whole different ball game than you're competing with everyone from China. We are a diamond house at core, historically. So we started off with a lot of diamond jewelry, you know, fashion pieces, a lot of bracelets. My father was a very big bracelet manufacturer in the 90s. But once we had gotten past the diamond stuff, we wanted to expand. You know, we can't do everything. We don't know everything. But jewelry isn't just diamond jewelry, so we started expanding and looking for partners in other categories. So gemstone, pearl, chain, men's jewelry, super high end, unique pieces that just happen to be sitting in someone's office and trying to build a massive assortment where think we're at like, 4000 5000 SKUs. I lose track of this number very often. My goal is to get to 10,000 by the end of next year. And it all boils down to, you know, we carry something for everyone. Fine Jewelry is a highly considered personal choice for many people online and having even like 10 variations of the same item, which you wouldn't do in any other category, can actually drive more volume. So for us, the whole crux of the business model is offer as much as possible, as in many spots as possible. So the other big part of our businesses that were very multi channel and have been since day one.

Andrew Maff 06:20
So where else are you selling besides your own website right now?.

Monil Kothari 06:23
I mean, you name it, we're most likely there, or we're in talks. Overstock was the first one, although now we're not with them anymore, but Amazon was our biggest, and is still our biggest, but we are on first dibs. Cherish QVC, Kohl's, drama shop, boscos, I'm like, missing out, like, another five. We're in TSC, Canada. We're in, oh yeah, we just launched on Target marketplace last week.

Andrew Maff 06:50
Congratulations.

Danan Coleman 7:50
Totally—you get the party-hoppers. What was the name of your party?

Andrew Maff 8:06
Oh man, what did we call it… It was in a speakeasy, so I think we ran with that. It was more with ShopTalk than Prosper because it was in the hotel at ShopTalk, but we were actually at both

Monil Kothari 06:51
Thank you. That was a big win for us. We're in more sites than I can, like, think of off the top of my head. But that's the whole point. Is Belk, that's a bit another big partner this year that we've, like, started working with. So we love our partners. I think a big piece of or a big our success, a lot of it has been driven by having strong partnerships at the end of the day.

Andrew Maff 07:13
Yeah, you mentioned Amazon's your biggest one

Monil Kothari 07:17
By volume. Yeah.

Andrew Maff 07:19
Interesting by volume. Naturally. What I When? When you say Amazon in the same sentence as fine jewelry, it's always like, what, like, how? So, how are you because if someone's searching like, bracelet, diamond bracelet, like, there's billions of things that could show up. Costume jewelry can show up. Like, it's a nightmare, and Amazon is obviously traditionally a race to the bottom, for the part, in terms of price point. So how are you, how are you able to kind of drive that volume on Amazon?

Monil Kothari 07:51
I have so many thoughts on Amazon just because I've been on there for almost nine years. I think when people started selling jewelry online, there was way less, there were way less channels to begin with. First of all, most of the retailers weren't even looking at drop ship D to C was just emerging, and that wasn't for high value items. It was, I don't know, sunglasses like a Warby Parker. So Amazon really was actually Amazon, eBay were actually, like, the only channels to sell jewelry without having to focus on brand building. It was just a place to move diamond studs, tennis bracelets, generic stuff. And that's sort of how we started. I think our first listings didn't even have a brand on it. But in the first couple years of Amazon, the business was really good. But then once Covid hit, everyone and their mom wanted to start selling on Amazon, not just in our category. I'm sure you remember, everyone was trying to be an Amazon seller, and so a lot of people in India, for example, manufacturers were Direct Shipping inventory to FBA. So it became a very challenging spot. But I think at this point, Amazon has so much trust with its customer base. It is why they're the biggest marketplace. People actually have a lot more confidence than you think about buying jewelry on Amazon. I think last year, our biggest ticket item was $10,000 like, a pair of earrings, and it didn't even come back. And it wasn't fraud, which I thought all of those things were going to happen. Yeah, I think people have a lot of trust in Amazon, and it did bring out a lot of those race to the bottom vendors. But you know what this year, one of the silver linings of the tariff, one of the very few silver let me really reinforce that use silver linings is people realize Amazon is not a profitable business if you're just competing on price between PPC returns. Ours is a high return category, fulfillment cost, holding costs. This is a very difficult business to make money on, if you're just competing on price, no matter how much volume. So we've staked out our place on Amazon. You know, we're not the cheapest, but we also have high quality product, good service. We've been around long enough our listings, our top selling listings. Have hundreds of reviews, which is a lot for fine jewelry, and I think that's why this year, I have actually seen our Amazon business grow more than the last couple of years.

Andrew Maff 10:09
Wow. How about we don't have to get into specifics, but in terms of your margins on Amazon, have they also grown? Or are you seeing because of the increase in competition, in CPCs and FBA fees and all that fun stuff that you're it's kind of shrinking a little bit

Monil Kothari 10:24
So I would say the margins were not healthy, or as healthy as I'd have liked them to be the last three years, because I think we were facing an uphill battle. I would have said the same the first couple of months of this year, but we've been checking our numbers the last three to six months, we've actually seen margins slowly, slowly, like go upwards, not huge leaps by any means, but even a couple of percent points on Amazon is a big deal. So we are seeing that we're also being way more disciplined about the costs as well. And we're doing the reverse of what other people are doing. We're keeping less in FBA, except our best sellers and keeping more in house here. So also our operational costs and like storage costs have come down. So yeah, yeah, things seem to finally be getting better. On Amazon, after a couple of years of stagnation.

Narrator 11:12
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Andrew Maff 11:45
How are you how are you marketing it? Because jewelry is, it's such a challenging thing to, you know, to market, just because, similar to anything really design related, it's the beauties in the eye of the beholder, right? Like you could run the perfect ad in front of the perfect person with the perfect messaging, but if they just don't like the way it looks, they're not going to even click, let alone buy. So how are you kind of getting the messaging out there and driving the traffic to these different channels?

Monil Kothari 12:16
So I we have two ways of approaching it, you know, the company, HubSpot?

Andrew Maff 12:21
Yeah.

Monil Kothari 12:23
Co founders wrote a book years ago. I think it was called, like, inbound marketing or something, and nothing to do with jewelry, but I had read it, and for me, it comes down to two, inbound marketing and outbound. The outbound is what we do on Amazon, which is a lot of that is the PPC stuff, right? Like just advertising, and our catalog is massive, but one of the very interesting parts of our business that almost no other category can touch is because we have so much product, and all these products have keywords and pictures, and there's just so much variety, we get this halo effect of people just finding the products because we're the only one who happens to be carrying them. And a great example I have is last year I sold three fish brooches and two frog brooches. It is the most absurd product to be selling online, but I think it really hammers in my example of that, like inbound stuff, where, if someone really wants this, odds are there's only a few brands who carry it, even if there's 1000 fine jewelry brands, and we're going to get that business, whether it be through Amazon, direct to consumer, or any of our other partnerships that we have, and that is like a big part of our business that I think will only continue to get bigger and keep our profitability high, because we won't have to rely on advertising as much.

Andrew Maff 13:41
Yeah, interesting. So you're basically playing the real estate game, right? Like you're like, get in as many places as physically possible, have as many SKUs as possible. Eventually someone will come across us, then they're our customer, and obviously we work on retaining them, so probably heavy and email marketing and things like that. But from an operational standpoint, having, you know, the goal of 10,000 SKUs. Are they all custom built? So it's kind of like, hey, we designed one, take some pictures of it, put it on the site, and then we just make them as needed. Or do you have these all in stock, ready to go?

Monil Kothari 14:15
In stock, ready to go. Our business is built off, you know, two day handling SLAs, not just for Amazon, but for every channel that we sell on. And I think that's one of our winning sort of competitive edges that we have.

Andrew Maff 14:30
Yeah

Monil Kothari 14:31
Which also means, from a systems and operation standpoint, we have a very complex like stack in house to manage so many SKUs, making sure inventory is flowing in real time, and being able to fulfill all orders in like less than two days.

Andrew Maff 14:48
Wow. So like the frog brooches. How many of those do you have locked and loaded to be shipped out?

Monil Kothari 14:55
So, those are all one of a kind pieces. So whatever we. Have two left. So our catalog, again, very different from other categories. We have bread and butter pieces, we have sort of closeouts that other people want us to move for them. And then we have unique one of a kind product that once it's sold, it will almost never come back unless someone custom commissions it, and I'm assuming they'll be also be more expensive at that point. So, yeah, that's sort of the mix of product that we have.

Andrew Maff 15:23
Interesting. Okay, so one of the things I I've actually, for all the listeners that usually listen to show, it's something I've recently started asking. I used to say, like, here's something I always love asking, and I never asked it. Now I'm trying to do a more regular basis. Every time I have someone on the show. It's, you know, we're growing. Things are going great. We're doing this next we're doing that. Here's what's working for us, blah, blah. One thing I'm always curious about is the negative side. What's what currently isn't working that you're focused on?

Monil Kothari 15:55
Oh, that's so easy. I think the biggest because we've always been multi channel and less just DTC focused. Our biggest struggle is DTC. We get a good amount of organic but I think our growth has plateaued because we are not mastering the advertising and marketing side of it. We don't have a, you know, strong, cohesive playbook, and that's kind of a fault of mine, in that I'm so focused on, like the other channels, plus the merchandise, plus the operations, I sometimes feel like I'm treating the marketing playbook for DTC as an afterthought, which is not good. I will be the first to admit that. And so actually, one of our first big projects, once we get past Black Friday Cyber Monday, is to start putting together a much stronger, cohesive marketing plan for 2026 for DTC

Andrew Maff 16:45
Nice, yeah. I mean, I could see that definitely being a good area to focus on, especially when you're in all these different marketplaces, right? Like we always preach omni channel marketing, which you know, when you're in a multi channel seller and you're all these different sales channels having a really strong DTC marketing presence. It's kind of like, I always forget what this say rising, rising tides, lift all boats. So you start to look at like, Okay, you're doing all these marketing efforts. And it's a common issue that we see with a lot of brands, is they do all these DTC marketing efforts, they drive the traffic to the website, and they're like, it's just, you know, maybe they're not seeing the return that they expected, or they, you know, we thought it would be better and blah, blah. But then when they stopped doing it, all of a sudden, they see all the different sales channels start to come down as well. And so it's kind of that bleed over where it becomes a difficult kind of thing to manage. So what's your what's any thoughts on how you're thinking you may approach it. Are you thinking more like, you know, typically with jewelry, influencers, social media is usually the stronger way to go, because you're kind of presenting like the different esthetic and the different guy designs to people. Are you thinking because you have all this real estate, you're going to lean in more in like SEO and Google and that type of thing?

Monil Kothari 18:01
A mix of both, although I do you actually mentioned a very good point about what we're doing. One of the things I think we're doing maybe wrong is we do like, a PNL thing on every channel as a standalone and so, like, when we look at Shopify on its own, it's like, oh, man, the margins aren't that great because we're over investing in ads and they're not performing. But actually, that's a good point that you have brought up, is that I think if I just slice and dice it like that, I'll never see that spillover effect on the other channels. And so, yeah, just wanted to give you that sort of credit, I guess, for I didn't think of it like that. So one thing I probably should change is look at it as a more holistic approach. Yeah, I think for us, what we really want to do is just build more legitimacy. I mean, I know we're legitimate, but to your earlier point, fine jewelry is a tough sell, especially when it's not on a retailer site or a marketplace, like, who are, who is Haus of Brilliance? Who are these guys? Are they a fly by night, like sketch company? I know those exist. So, you know, I don't blame customers for having apprehension about, you know, not being so quick to convert on our on our site. So I think doing a marketing campaign, at least for next year that helps establish us as a legitimate brand that you can trust and rely on. And we have great product, and we have something for everyone, and doing that storytelling is going to be a big unlock for us. And I think again, compounds and what you said about having that spillover effect on the rest of our channels. Yeah, we'd love to see search results on Amazon for Haus of Brilliance spike because of that. So I think the storytelling is a big part of it. We've started to slowly do it these past couple of months. But I think having a really good, structured playbook and, like, being disciplined about it, will be the big, big, like exercise for next year.

Andrew Maff 19:52
Yeah, and that omnichannel thing, like, it's, it's what we preach, it's, it. Everyone takes it differently, right? Like my thought is always my thought is always that, if you look at everything holistically first, right? How much are you spending across all of your channels? How much are you making across all of your channels? Because your business isn't just Amazon, and that you're not running 18 businesses, or however many different channels you have, you're running one users on different channels, so it'd be no different than if a franchise just looked at individual store sales, but they're running ads across the entire nation. It makes no sense, right? But then you do have to look at it on a per channel basis, and it's the same thing with your marketing, right? Like Google SEO, retention marketing, all are going to have wildly higher returns than something that's more exploratory, like meta or doing influencer marketing, but getting that word out there. The goal is, everyone's always fighting over those keywords on Amazon, the broad terms and the long tail terms, and they get more and more expensive. So if you do more D to C marketing, you start to see your brand name get searched more, and you don't have to spend as much. But I love it. I think that I could see how, like, an influencer approach would be really cool for you guys, especially if you're doing, like, custom commission stuff, if that's not obnoxiously expensive, I know there's a ton of influencers out there they Yeah, I'll take one of those for free and post a bunch of times. I know, but if it's really expensive, then ignore me. What's okay? So that's obviously your goal going into 2026, anything else? What's the growth plan? Just kind of extension of the product line.

Monil Kothari 21:31
I think compounding on building a stronger brand also means that there are other retailer channels that we can start opening up. I don't think we're ever going to be a brand you're going to see in store, at least in the next year or two. I'm actually somewhat opposed to having brick and mortar business. I'd rather have like drop ship relationships with retailers so I can keep all the inventory here. So opening, you know, new channels in 2026 that are more of the well established platforms. You know, I'd love to open Macy's actually their marketplace, and then I want to just see, I think the interesting thing for us is, unlike every other brand, we've not we've not hit the ceiling on how much business we can do direct to consumer, since it's not our biggest channel. So I'd love to pump out more growth there in sales as well. Yeah, because we've I think the whole gist of this is I started the exact opposite of everyone else. Everyone started Shopify. First I did marketplaces. So now we're hitting that convergence point where we're all looking at the exact opposite thing to focus on.

Andrew Maff 22:38
Yeah, grass is always greener.

Monil Kothari 22:39
Yeah, exactly. A lot of those people have a lot more of that awareness of these different marketing strategies and tools, like you've mentioned, and I'm just getting into that side of the business years into the game, at least from when House of Brilliance came out.

Andrew Maff 22:55
Yeah, awesome. Sounds like you got a lot of plans 2026 it's going to be a good time. I wish you the best of luck. It was a great having on the show. I really appreciate it. I love to give the opportunity let everyone know what they can find out more about you, and, of course, more about Haus of Brilliance.

Monil Kothari 23:09
No, I appreciate it. Thank you for reaching out and giving me the opportunity to talk about Haus of Brilliance. Normally, I never talk about it. So this has been good for me.

Andrew Maff 23:18
Happy to have you on. Appreciate it. Obviously, everyone that tuned in. Thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual. You do the usual thing, rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff and whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the Ecomm show.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you for joining us. See you next time. Have a good one!

Narrator 23:36
Thank you for tuning in to the E comm show. Head over to Ecom show.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the bluetuskr YouTube channel. The E comm show is brought to you by BlueTuskr, a full service digital marketing company specifically for E commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com now for more information, make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E comm show.