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Member Profile
The Jeweller
What makes a strong, successful jewellery retail business? We think Sophie Jessop, director of Jessop Jewellers in Glenrothes, can supply some insights.
Standing out from the Crowd When did you join Jessop Jewellers, and what did you do before? It was October 2019. I’ve always been in or close to the retail industry. After university I joined Abercrombie & Fitch where I completed their graduate scheme, focusing on store and operational management. After three years, I moved to the Fossil Group to look after their visual merchandising in multiples before leading operations and project management in Australia and New Zealand for three years. When I returned to Scotland in 2017, I became a shopper analyst, developing brand strategies using multiple sources of data, including loyalty
card data. Very interesting stuff! In my earlier roles, I looked to gain board position as my career end goal in the corporate world – little did I expect to inherit and run a business and be board level age 32!
Describe your progression through the business I joined Jessop Jewellers as the heat was dialling up ahead of Christmas; we saved a proper handover until that was out of the way. Then the coronavirus struck, and we entered nearly four months of lockdown, so the handover didn’t really come! Instead, I threw myself into developing our non-
bricks and mortar offering to maintain a revenue stream while the shop was closed. I started with eBay. Our existing website wasn’t optimised and didn’t generate any sales, but I knew that optimisation would take time and expense. eBay was a quick and easy solution for generating instant revenue from our not-unsubstantial volume of older or discontinued branded stock, which our customers had seen on sale time and time again. Soon after launching our eBay store, the eBay PR team identified us as a PR collaboration opportunity, and we featured in their Small Business Campaign on their Facebook page and MailOnline. We were
