I Grew My Jewelry Business Despite Challenging Economic Times [Update]
This is a follow up story for Vivalatina Jewelry. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 3 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
I am Nicolas, I am French and live in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. In 2012 I left France to follow my Mexican wife back to Mexico. There, I started my first business reselling cheap silver jewelry online. Now, I run an online jewelry business that sells high-end jewelry worldwide, you will find the details of my story here.
We focus on 18k gold jewelry, 24k jewelry, platinum jewelry and custom made jewelry, we do not have any flagship product.
We mainly sell to France that represents 80% of our sales and we are growing our sales to the US.
I have increased sales by 11% from 2022 to 2023, but for now we have no growth in 2024 for the first 4 months compared to the same period in 2023.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
Although I have been able to grow sales year to year, we had no benefit from this as we are facing a challenging time. Last year in 2023, we reached $200,000 USD in sales and it seems we will be doing the same in 2024. In the context of the current economy I do not expect to reach much growth in 2024.
The principal challenges we have faced since 2022 are:
- Difficult economic situation in France which is our main market, this slower our growth in terms of sales
- The rise of the Mexican pesos currency in comparison to Euro and USD that challenges our margin, we make less benefit from each sale with a Euro at 18 pesos while it was rated at 21 pesos 2 years ago, that’s 14% difference.
To face the economic situation in France, I am working on increasing our sales from our English online boutique. As I do not have much time available, I started to work with freelancers to speed up our SEO efforts. This is new to me as I was used to doing this task, but I do not have any more time to spend on this now.
My goal for 2024 is to delegate SEO marketing so I can lead our growth on the US market without having to do everything myself.
One of the most difficult parts of managing a business is to learn how to sell. If you delegate too much of the sales process of your business, someone else owns your business. But if you do not delegate, you will be limited in your ability to grow your business.
As for the change rate between Mexican pesos and the Dollar/Euro, I am waiting to see the end of the Mexican Presidential election in June 2024 to see if there is any change. The Mexican pesos is the only currency that has appreciated in comparison to the USD since the Covid crisis and I suspect this should change by the end of 2024.
Because of the change rate, I have considered selling jewelry in Mexico (which I was not doing up to now) and we launched our Spanish online boutique in summer 2023. The long term goal is to be less dependent on the exchange rate between Euro/Dollar and Mexican peso.
In my team, the main change I made was to hire a new assistant back in March 2023 (my previous assistant had quit and I had no one to help me during 2022). This has been the best change I could make. I had to teach her a lot of things but there are so many tasks I can delegate now to focus more on managing my business. Thanks to this change I am able to have time for myself, do more marketing tasks and feel less stressed.
About the marketing aspect of the business, some changes occurred. Between Google updates and the rise of AI content online, we lose online traffic on our blog while gaining traffic on our product pages, which causes an increase in sales.
I obtained such a result by focusing on SEO audits, to monitor the health of our main online boutique:
- Deleting low value pages (product and blog pages)
- Improving pages with potential
- Creating new product pages with better focus on our customers’ needs
This result is interesting as I was able to work on 40% of our product pages only. So I am still working on that to improve the direct traffic on our product pages in spite of trying to create new product pages.
Since the Helpful Content Update from Google, we are asked as webmasters to provide helpful content to the users so google has less crappy and useless content to crawl and index. I plan to update my whole online boutique to keep only the helpful content and be on good terms with Google, so I can benefit from this update (which is not the case up to now).
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
The main lesson I learned last year was about time management. I got exhausted with 10 years working almost alone on and in my business and the reality struck me, I will not be able to keep going alone.
I need to save time for myself, which means to have more employees and delegate more tasks. My main goal is to create a team of freelancers able to manage my marketing efforts so my business growth will not be dependent on my available time. This has been the biggest constraint to my growth up to now.
Another big lesson is about volume of sales. Up to now, I have been focusing on high-end products with high sale prices but with on demand manufacturing. I want to focus more on selling profitable silver jewelry with decent margins that can be sold in high volume in our own jewelry workshop. This will simplify the marketing and production process.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
My goal for the next year is to improve my sales in the US to depend less from the Euro.
In the next 5 years, I plan to sell in Europe, the US and Mexico. I will need a team of 3 or 4 jewelers working full time in my workshop.
I will have a team of SEO freelancers able to set up the SEO task required to sustain our growth.
I will have a team of Mexican employees able to manage the sales in Mexico and the US to deal with clients in Mexico and overseas while I will still be dealing with our French clients.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
One of the most difficult parts of managing a business is to learn how to sell. If you delegate too much of the sales process of your business, someone else owns your business. But if you do not delegate, you will be limited in your ability to grow your business.
One as a business owner has to learn how to set up the sales process and delegate just enough.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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