Retail Confessions: Tiffany, Part II
"It was a lot of trying to keep up with the Joneses, but when you're looking at pieces that start at $100,000, it's crazy."
Earlier in Back Row:
In this issue of Back Row:
A Tiffany retail employee talks about what it’s really like to sell in the store.
All the tea on Tiffany’s exclusive private “Blue Book” shopping events for ultra-rich customers.
How to predict when Tiffany stores will get a big uptick in orders for mistresses.
“Loose Threads,” including the shorts you can’t unsee from Coachella, brands pulling back on influencer trips, and more.
In 2021, LVMH acquired Tiffany for around $16 billion. “Old Tiffany was really like, ‘Do what's right for the customer, the customer is always right’” said someone who has worked at Tiffany in North America since before the acquisition. “With LVMH, there's all the money in the world, but I find there's a lot less focus on, do what's right for the customer. It's a lot more, do what's right to protect the business.”
At Tiffany, client advisors work to curate relationships with ultra-wealthy clients in hopes of getting them to spend big at a Blue Book event. At this invite-only shopping experience, the wealthy are pampered in hopes they’ll drop six figures — if not more — on the brand’s most exclusive pieces. If they don’t sell, they may just end up on a common jewel-borrowing celebrity at an award show. The employee talks about those events and so much more ahead.
If you are a luxury retail worker who wants to confess for a future column, please drop me a note by replying to this email. You can always reply with general tips, too.
What was different after LVMH took over Tiffany?
Pre-takeover with repairs, there was a lot more conversation about keeping clients happy regarding how their pieces get repaired. Whereas now, if I want to get a repair fee waived or do something complimentary, I have to get it approved by not even my own team manager, but the store director. And then sometimes, depending on the price, that store director has to get it approved by a retail director.
Did the pieces break a lot?
I wouldn’t say so. I do find that especially with the aspirational luxury customer, they think that because they bought a $500 silver piece — and $500 is a lot of money for a lot of people — they should be allowed to be as hard on it as they want and that it'll never break. Those are the ones that break the product. The true luxury customer, and especially the high-jewelry customer, they understand, I spent a million dollars on that and I was rough on it and I broke it, and it's going to cost me $2,000 to repair. And that makes sense.
How do you sell a million-dollar piece of jewelry?
There's a number of ways of going about it. I know we once had a client looking at a high-jewelry piece from another brand, and we caught wind of it. One of our client advisors had a relationship with that person, so they reached out with a similar high-jewelry piece from us. The customer listened, hemmed and hawed between the two of them, and then ended up going with our piece. That might be more of an exception than the rule.
A lot of those very large sales happen during a Blue Book event. It is wild how much money flies around at those. I think we did around $150 million in sales in two weeks at the Miami one. One of these events could be 3 percent in annual sales.
Wait — how much money does fly around?
In 2022, we had Blue Book event in Miami. Frequently when we do high-jewelry events, a lot of the selling ceremony and a lot of the appointments are done in really small intimate rooms. But here, they used a space where they had small intimate booths set up, but there weren't quite walls in between. So people could kind of see what other people were buying.
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