How I Built One Of The Top Jewelry Brands In Australia
My name is Albert Bensimon and I am the owner of Shiels Jewellers. The company was founded by Jack Shiels, who ran the family-owned business with his wife for over 32 years from their Central Market Arcade store in Adelaide, South Australia. Originally, Mr Shiels sold jewellery, giftware, and silver-plated merchandise.
When Jack Shiels died in 1977, his widow, Jeanne, sold the company to my wife, Nyra, and me. The business turnover was about $100,000 per year at this time. I had a degree in marketing and experience selling pharmaceuticals and computer software so we quickly expanded the product range to include more precious jewellery, including gold, silver, and diamonds. The gift lines were dropped, to establish a reputation for quality, value, and range in the jewellery sector; especially in diamond jewellery.
I kept the name “Shiels” to nurture the trust that already existed between the consumer and the business. I then led Shiels into being the first company to introduce “genuine discounting” in the Australian jewellery industry with my notorious advertising slogan, “No Hoo-Haa”. I was also the “first jeweller in Australia to sell gold by the gram”.
This reputation has helped Shiels expand from one small shop in Adelaide to all the major shopping centers in metropolitan Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, and most recently Sydney.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
In 1969, I married my lovely wife Nyra and took off on a working holiday to Europe. We traveled on a motorbike for one year then decided to come home via Canada. The intended month in Canada ended up being 7 years and my first child was born there. In 1977, after extensive work experience and marketing studies, we decided to return home to Australia. I decided that I would put my newly acquired marketing skills and my hobby of jewellery making together to open a jewellery store. As luck would have it, the recent widowed Mrs Shiels, of Shiels jewellers had decided to sell their store. I immediately saw an opportunity and bought it. I employed Mrs Shiels for several years until she retired.
On my travels, in particular to Montreal and Toronto in Canada, I noticed the success of suburban malls. I took a gamble that the same thing would happen in Australia and opened my first suburban store in Marion, the Westfield Group’s first shopping center in South Australia. After that, we followed wherever Westfield went until we had approximately 10 stores.
Alongside the expansion and my new brand of marketing, which had never been employed by jewellers, business began to flourish. I had a dream to establish a reputation for quality, and value, and with a lot of hard work, we managed to achieve it.
From one store in Adelaide, Shiels has expanded into major shopping centers in metropolitan Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, and Sydney, and has become a leading online jewellery retailer in Australia and beyond. Shiels has become a global brand with strong relationships across the world, including North America, Europe, and parts of Asia whilst still maintaining a family-owned feel.
In addition to Shiels Jewellers, we also run a second jewellery retail business known as Grahams Jewellers which we purchased from the Grahams brothers.
Take us through the process of designing and sourcing your products.
With a desire to provide our customers with innovative designs, my team of in-house expert jewellery hunters scours the globe for the latest and most beautifully crafted designs that you won’t find elsewhere. Shiels Jewellers oversees a significant Australian manufacturing base, with jewellery produced across Europe, while lab-grown diamonds are sourced from Asia.
Our buying team and directors regularly travel in search of new suppliers that can offer innovative designs at the right price and a great reflection of the latest Hollywood trends. Our Flawless Cut and Luminesce Lab Grown diamond range is a testament to the hard work of our buyers in selecting only the best diamonds for a range that continually stands above the offerings of our competitors.
Whether it’s a shimmering diamond ring, a beautiful 9 Carat gold necklace, or a chic silver pair of stylish earrings, we have something for everyone. In the words of our Managing Director, “Seeing a customer’s face light up when they try on one of our diamond rings, really confirms why we work as hard as we do in finding only the best jewellery for our customers. It makes all the long hours completely worth it.” - Toby Bensimon.
Describe the process of launching the business.
After 36 years in charge, I thought it was time to step aside and hand the managing director reins to my son, Toby Bensimon. He took over the managing director role in 2013 and since then, he has guided the business through the recent retail downturn and has ensured that the company continued to grow during the current period of digital growth in the retail landscape.
During the initial lockdown period, we made huge changes to the Shiels operation. Toby implemented a regimented cleaning program across all of our stores and ramped up our online capacity. For Toby, communicating with the team that the company always had their health concerns as their number one priority was of the utmost importance.
Over the next five years, Toby and his team are hoping for online sales to contribute to 50% of the company’s revenue. To do this, the company has invested heavily in our digital, e-commerce, and content strategy. Part of this strategy involved the launch of imprint specialty sites, such as Watch Depot, Luminesce Lab Grown Diamonds and Silver Chic.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
With a new e-commerce website to attract customers and generate sales as the foundation of their digital transformation, Shiels was ready to grow.
But to attract more of the right customers and help more of them to buy, we needed to understand our target audience better. To do this, we gathered information on demographics, psychographics – their interests, personality traits and affinities, key motivations – and how to emotionally connect with them, and online behaviors. The Australian jewellery market is crowded, highly segmented, and extremely competitive. To be able to market directly to our ideal customers and differentiate themselves from the competition, we needed a much clearer and data-backed understanding of them. With a growing emphasis on eCommerce and reaching new audiences online, the information gathered provided accurate insights into our customers’ online behaviors, preferences, and motivations which were particularly vital to our growth.
From this data, we assembled a Digital Persona and mapped out a Customer Journey. Starting from Awareness, when the persona first starts to think about jewellery, we identified all the potential customer touchpoints leading up to a purchase decision. With this information, we also developed a paid social media advertising strategy built around ads that are targeted to audiences created with a profile of the persona’s demographic, psychographic,s and motivations. We also conducted a content audit to understand how well it aligned with our ideal customer and what improvements could be made.
We assembled an audience for Facebook ads that targeted the ideal demographics, jewellery and watch interests, and several other attributes that aligned with our services and unique selling points. With audiences set up, we developed creativity that would resonate with the interests and attributes we were targeting. We also created several versions of the ads in different formats to trial in line with a test plan.
We use this information to guide our online and in-store strategies. With this approach, a huge offering of products, and a competitive pricing structure, Shiels customers always come back for more. Our prices are so competitive they enable us to maintain our reputation as the leading jewellery retailer in Australia and the perfect destination for engagement rings. We challenge our customers to find solid gold jewellery or a 1 carat diamond ring at a better price and product standard than found in our stores.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Today, Shiels Jewellers is a highly successful and profitable company. While we are trying to increase our online sales, brick-and-mortar stores still make up the majority of our revenue. Despite the pandemic putting a halt on our physical footprint, we still have a plan to open up a store in every state. It just won't be at the volume that they had previously forecast. While this will pose its challenges, landlords have been much easier to deal with since the pandemic. I remember one conversation I overheard with two leasing managers saying that to rent a store corner to a jeweller was like shooting ducks. They said they would just play one against the other. The super high rents are a thing of the past and the consumer will benefit. We know that we can negotiate very reasonable deals. In the past, they negotiated unreasonable deals. Shopping centers are getting back to their real value because they were over-inflated for a while.
In this day and age, everyone is moving to the digital revolution and we are no different. In the future, we will be investing more than ever in our digital footprint. Because of the emergence of influencer culture, social media now serves as a primary search tool for people in the market for an engagement ring. It is also a bottomless source of information and inspiration for potential buyers and we want to tap into that.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Over the years, the jewellery industry has evolved, and jewellers have started talking to each other more. One thing that Toby has instigated is to get all of the jewellers together, 20 years ago, this is something I couldn't have dreamt of. When times are really good, there's no need to discuss things, but when things start to get difficult and profitability drops, people start to look at things that they can change. We would always be open to discussions with other jewellers about how to improve, it's not spying on a hyper-competitive area, it's an area we all need to improve.
Don't be afraid to make mistakes. They're part of the learning curve.
There was a transition period of about a year when I first handed the business over to Toby and it was difficult for him. He had to come to terms with it and try to work out the rhythm. It did take about a year for us to figure that out, and that wasn't stressful, but it was just a learning curve where we were stepping on each other's toes. It's like a couple of bad dancers learning how to dance, but we figured out that rhythm pretty quickly, and I enjoy working with my son. It's really good to have someone with new ideas to bounce heavy ideas off my experience and wisdom. Although, we don't bounce all our ideas off each other because we would drive each other nuts.
In terms of jewellery, you would think that after 40 years in the industry I had seen it all, but just yesterday I saw a diamond that excited me so much. I took it to show Toby because it was just so radiant and beautifully cut. It was just like we had seen a fantastic movie or read a great book on something. While some may think that it would be hard to find staff who share the same passion as me, it's quite the opposite. It's easy because people are attracted to this industry because they already like it. People usually come on board because they're into the industry already, so trying to get excited about jewellery is an easy battle to win.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
In terms of our digital footprint, our e-commerce website is powered by Magento but in the future, we will be shifting to Shopify. The main reason for this change is the simplicity that Shopify provides. There is minimal coding required and it’s easy to scale which means more people can work on the site who are not trained, web developers. Shopify recently introduced a few new features that they working on— 3D images and AI-enabled fulfillment networks. That’s something we are interested in exploring. After all, product images are everything when it comes to e-commerce and that’s particularly the case with jewellery.
We use Klayvio for our email marketing and Preezie to help create extraordinary customer experiences by bringing the in-store shopping experience online. It helps us to drive more revenue with guided journeys, lead capture, exit intents, pop-ups, data analytics, and insights.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
If you want to be successful, you should always be reading and consuming other resources. It’s a great way to learn and pick up new tips. I don’t have any specific examples but my advice would be to read as much as you can. Whether you’re camped out on the beach or curled up on the couch on a rainy day, there's nothing quite like sitting down with a great book.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
For me, the most important thing when starting out was to make sure that I knew what problems my business would solve for customers. Once you know that, making decisions is easy. We saw an opportunity to provide the biggest range of jewellery at unbeatable prices and we went for it.
Don't be afraid to make mistakes. They're part of the learning curve, but try not to make the same mistake twice. Be patient. If you have a good idea, it may take some time for it to come to fruition. It's important to stay focused and persevere: keep working on your business even when you don't see immediate results.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We are always looking for vibrant, sparkling people to join our team and help achieve this goal. If you have a love for jewellery, a passion for customer service, and a desire to progress in the fashion industry, we encourage you to apply for a position at Shiels. You can find out more here.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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