33 RETAILER INTERVIEW Independent design E-commerce jewellery marketplace Pearls & Pomegranates offers a curated experience for customers and jewellers that focuses on sustainability, ethics, quality, and independent design. Founder Natalia Kübler tells us more… Tell us a bit about your online store and how you came to open the business. Pearls & Pomegranates is an e-commerce jewellery marketplace for ethical and sustainability-focused independent jewellery designers and makers. With Pearls & Pomegranates, my focus is to empower independent design and craftsmanship while giving consumers a centralised place to shop from small business jewellers, who otherwise can be difficult to find. I came up with the concept five years ago when I was working part time at jewellery boutiques and luxury department stores in London alongside studying for my degree. I realised that there wasn’t really a single destination for customers to connect with independent jewellery designers and makers and thought that creating something like this would be an amazing idea. During the summer of 2021, when we all had a lot of time on our hands because of COVID lockdowns, I began thinking about the idea again. I reached out to independent jewellers to ask them about their challenges and what they’d want from a sales platform. I decided to build something that would work for them and so Pearls & Pomegranates became more than just a sales platform. I provide holistic services to independent jewellers focusing on PR, data analytics, business strategy, and access to market-leading third-party services. What challenges were overcome when the company was starting out? Pearls & Pomegranates is about working with jewellers for jewellers. Listening to independent jewellers’ needs and ideas and using them to build the website was always important to me. However, when I was first starting and I had no website or brand, it was difficult to persuade people to chat with me. I contacted over 200 jewellers in the beginning but just a handful initially responded. It’s their ideas that led to Pearls & Pomegranates working as it does today – factors like flexible payment terms
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