4
ACCESSORIES
John Hardy: Tracing the Jewelry
Brand’s Revamped Strategy
● The handcrafted Balinese
brand has changed direction
in the last five years while
maintaining the DNA set
by founders John and
Cynthia Hardy.
BY THOMAS WALLER
John Hardy, the luxury jewelry brand
known for its Balinese designs using
sustainable materials, has gone through a
transformation over the past five years.
In 2014, the brand, founded by John
Hardy and his wife Cynthia, was acquired
by U.S. private equity firm Catterton
Partners (now called L Catterton), which
put in place a plan to transform the house
— primarily known as a maker of bracelets
and silver — from a contemporary brand
sold through department stores and some
of its own stores into a luxury jewelry
house with a global omnichannel reach.
“It was a brand that had essentially
not delivered any transformation in
performance from the prerecession period
from 2008 through to 2014,” said Robert
Hanson, who post-acquisition was brought
in by Catterton as John Hardy’s chief
executive officer to reinvent the company’s
strategy. As reported, Hanson recently has
transitioned to the role of non-executive
chairman of the board, with Kareem Gahed,
who previously served as chief revenue
officer, assuming the role of Hardy’s ceo.
“It wasn’t like we acquired an asset
that had a few things that needed to be
tweaked,” Hanson said of the early days
of his tenure, adding that absolutely
everything in the company needed to
be touched “in order for the brand to
compete as a modern artisan handcrafted
luxury jeweler.”
In recent years, the luxury jewelry space
has become highly competitive. No more
are customers buying pieces for special
occasions only; in fact, today’s consumers,
most often women, are buying for
themselves and wearing pieces made from
precious stones and metals in their day-to-
day lives. On the retail front, the stigma of
buying high-priced pieces online has faded
and both major brands and retailers must
have established presences in e-commerce.
Under Hanson’s watch, the John Hardy
brand’s DNA was redefined by adding Hollie
Bonneville Barden, formerly of De Beers,
as creative director. “She modernized the
The John Hardy
“Lahar collection”
campaign with
Adwoa Aboah.
The John Hardy store in
Westfield Century City.
collections from top to bottom,” Hanson
explained, setting the tonal expression
creatively for how the core collections
— Classic Chain, Dot, Naga and Bamboo —
“would evolve moving forward.”
While Barden has honed the design
point of view, the price structure was
maintained, with Gahed saying the goal
is to provide a well-balanced pricing
architecture with a range of entry-level-
through-pinnacle price points.
Previously the brand’s sales were
primarily through wholesale channels. But
that, too, has been reorganized, and while
the company still has the same number of
partners as it did in 2014, the brand has 10
to 15 percent fewer doors “in an effort to be
more impactful,” the executive explained.
A major focus was expanding the
company’s direct-to-consumer channels,
Gahed said, especially with boutiques that
help “translate a physical expression of the
workshop in Bali that embodies the brand at
the highest level, directly to the customer.”
Hardy opened its first U.S. store in
2016 in Houston, and has continued to
substantially grow its brick-and-mortar
footprint, with six full-price stores now
in the U.S., three off-price units and six
international locations. More are in the
works, with a full price pop-up shop at K11
in Hong Kong to open this fall, and an off-
price location opening at Sawgrass Mills in
Sunrise, Fla., in December.
“We want to be able to elevate the
expression and experience of the brand
through our strong partnerships that we
have, while also driving growth with our own
new channels,” Gahed said of the strategy.
Along with reshaping its distribution
channels to compete in the fine-jewelry
space, the brand also pivoted with a new
digital-first strategy.
Johnhardy.com was reimagined, with
Gahed explaining, “We are seeing the fruit of
the focus with the performance of year-over-
year growth rate of low double-digits and we
think there are still additional opportunities.”
Gahed said 30 to 35 percent of the
total turnover of the company includes
e-commerce, North America retail stores
and the brand’s international boutiques,
all of which it owns and operates.
The goal, he said, is to continue to
evolve the business to be a balanced
composition of about a 40 to 45 percent
split between its direct-to-consumer and
international businesses, while continuing
its wholesale partnerships.
“We were disciplined enough to define
what was authentic about the brand
then modernize it,” Hanson said of the
transformation. “And [we] put forward an
understandable point of view that gave our
core customer a new reason to engage with
the brand, but broadened the aperture
of the brand with collections that would
appeal to a new jewelry consumer, as well.”
OCTOBER 10, 2019
The brand has seen the demographic
of its customer widen. At its core she is
still an affluent Baby Boomer, but a new
customer, skewing about 10 years younger,
has discovered the brand. “[The new
customer] is gravitating toward smaller
gauges of our modernized heritage, classic
chains, bamboo collection, the Naga
Dragon collection,” the ceo said.
“Over the last few months we’ve been
able to unify our global database, and
it allows us to shape and personalize an
omichannel journey that engages our
audience throughout each step,” said
Gahed of the brand’s customer data,
adding, “We think that is a key result of the
overall growth we are seeing.”
The recently launched Lahar collection,
developed by Bonneville Barden and
priced from $695 to $25,000, is one
example of how the house is developing
ideas to speak to its new clients. The
collection of rings, necklaces and cuff
bracelets uses wild diamonds, cut in a
variety of unique shapes and focuses on
each stone’s individual inclusions set in
sterling silver and 18-karat gold.
For the brand’s fall campaign, Penélope
Cruz and Adwoa Aboah each wear pieces
from the new offering.
Cruz became a brand ambassador at the
beginning of 2019, taking part in the ongoing
Made for Legends campaign, a creative
platform launched in 2017 with Julianne
Moore and Aboah, which helped elevate
John Hardy’s marketing to a global scale.
The men’s category has begun to also
drive new business.
“It’s a very interesting category for us,”
Gahed said, adding that the brand has seen
strong double-digit growth in the men’s
category over the past three to four years.
“There has been an appetite of male
shoppers who are more comfortable wearing
jewelry,” Gahed said. “Globally we’ve
naturally seen that, but in the U.S., I don’t
think you’ve seen that till the last few years.
“In terms of our direct-to-consumer
channels and our digital business globally,
the penetration of men’s is higher than the
balance of the business,” the ceo said.
Seeing the trend take shape early on,
the brand has dedicated design and
merchandising capabilities under a chief
merchant specifically for the men’s category.
Sustainability is a hot topic in the jewelry
market and it has historically been a core
part of the John Hardy business and brand
story. Hardy uses reclaimed gold and silver
as well as ethically vetted stones, but the
philosophy is also “integrated into the
construction and operation of our workshop
in Bali and boutiques,” Gahed noted.
The brand’s sustainability commitment
extends through its “Wear Bamboo, Plant
Bamboo” initiative, where the company
plants a number of seedlings in Indonesia for
each purchase of a piece from its Bamboo
Collection. “Through this program we
provide local communities with training on
the benefits of growing bamboo and correct
bamboo forestry, which we further evolved
through our partnership with nonprofit
1,000 Bamboo Villages to ensure that these
communities are able to build a sustainable,
profitable future through bamboo cultivation
and harvesting,” Gahed said.
“All of this helps set John Hardy apart
from the competition,” he said — the overall
goal of the strategy put into place following
Catterton’s acquisition of the brand.
“It was a highly transformational and
dynamic challenge; it’s rare that you have
to come in and either build or rebuild,”
Hanson said of the brand’s evolution.
“We have really put a strong emphasis
on becoming a jeweler, from being an
opening-price-point silversmith that made
bracelets and generally was direct price
promoted in North America through
wholesale, to becoming a high-quality
luxury jeweler brand that works to develop
compelling product for women and men.”
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