Member Profile

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 nonbricks 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

thrilled to be shortlisted along with 32 other businesses for an eBay Small Business Award (the IRL to URL category), especially considering the many thousands of entrants. The coverage boosted sales and generated organic content on other sites – it really boosted our eBay sales and traffic to our social and website, too.

I also spent the months of lockdown getting to grips with optimising supplier contracts, negotiating overdue renewals, understanding our stock holding, stock movement, strategising stock optimisation to promote turn and reducing old lines!

My husband, Chris, and I are both directors of Jessop Jewellers; his father, Paul, retired and passed the business to us in 2020. Paul joined in 1978 to allow his father to retire and ran the business in partnership with (now ex-) wife Elaine. I’ve been part of the Jessop family for 13 years, so Paul had seen my career grow and was confident that I had the skill set needed to take the business forwards at the coal face. Chris handles all our invoices, payments, wages, reconciliation as well as being a tech guru for The&Partnership agency.

What changes have you made since you started running the business?

There have been a few, including overhauling service suppliers with whom contracts had renewed without reviewing market options; discontinuing underperforming brands; investing into growth brands; offering customers a genuine Black Friday experience (to also drive sell through); upskilling the team to be cross functional and allocating clear roles and responsibilities.

Our windows and jewellery cases had been lined with teal water silk, so last autumn, we recovered them in a lovely neutral soft grey. Our stunning jewellery collection now stands out elegantly against this understated colour while also brightening up the store and making colour merchandising much easier. In the new year, we’ll change our teal carpet to a dark grey. To celebrate our 50th anniversary, we had a sophisticated, eyecatching shop-front installation completed by Gill Segar of iCatcha Displays.

We’ve generated lots of organic press coverage, too. I’m so thrilled to welcome new customers who remark “we didn’t even know you were here until we saw X or Y article.” Another development is a significant shift in social media execution. Our Twelve Days of Christmas was a real win for us last year, generating thousands of interactions – more than local paid advertising could achieve. We’ve moved away from paid advertising – we were struggling to get bang for buck, but we’ll review our options in 2022.

I’m now creating an always in stock fine jewellery collection – almost treating it like a brand. Core pieces will cover all bases, and more exciting one-off pieces will excite the customer who often browses and notices new.

Prince Philip and Chris Jessop's grandfather George Jessop in Jessop Jewellers 1976 Services are clearly very important to Jessop. Is everything done in-house?

Services are a significant proportion of our business. We complete all the basic repairs possible in-house, but our risk-averse landlord forbids the use any extreme heat or flame on the premises. Instead, local workshops with whom we have worked for decades do the vast majority of our repairs. In our workshop we restring and do watch and jewellery repairs, buffing, engraving and basic ring sizing.

What sets Jessop Jewellers apart from other jewellers in the area?

We’re the independent jeweller of choice in our peninsula county of Fife – right in the heart of the county. Until the Forth Road Bridge was built in 1958, there was no direct road link between Fife and Edinburgh; Glenrothes was built in the ‘60s as a relocation town of new opportunities for many from Glasgow, and we opened in 1971. The other jewellers in our county are very small, have a niche offering or are high street multiples.

We’re proud to stock the largest selection of diamond and gem set fine jewellery in Fife; we have relationships with some of the premier jewellery suppliers and manufacturers that date back to the business’s early years. We also stock global jewellery brands, including Pandora, Swarovski and Nomination, and Boss, Emporio Armani and Tissot watches among many others – all exclusive to us in Fife. We have a long and happy relationship with Ti Sento Milano, also exclusive to us, whose customers are some of the most brand loyal. We formerly stocked Rolex plus other premium brands, but our local shoppers’ buying habits have changed over the decades, and we must embrace this to continue to succeed. When we noticed watch sales dropping 2017 to 2019, I discontinued the three brands that weren’t paying their way in space-to-sales ratios, and introduced BOSS watches and jewellery and Emporio Armani watches. I was initially sceptical about BOSS jewellery, but hot tip – it moves fast! Brands account for around a third of our retail jewellery sales.

What sets us apart? Offering what others cannot, continuous review, improvement and staff training, having one of the best teams in the business and our reputation for quality.

Tell us about the Jessop's team

It’s incredible. The best. We’re a team of eight (two recent hires) and each (aside from the lovely newbies) has a business responsibility. While everyone is well trained and confident in talking to customers about watches, Anita, our repairs manager, looks after the watch department.

Liz, our incredible in-house jewellery designer, has been busier than ever this year with bespoke work. The majority involves reimagining old or inherited pieces and transforming them into one or multiple pieces that are more current/modern/ wearable, while maintaining the sentiment that the stones hold. We reuse sentimental gold in the process, too, where possible.

You have a very impressive, informative website!

Thank you! That means a lot and makes the late nights of coding, initial stock take and troubleshooting totally worthwhile! Chris and I rebuilt our website earlier this year. We scoured some of the best jewellery websites, from UK to Australia, for inspiration and picked our favourite features, menu styles, info pages, best practice, etc. to bring it all together into what we think is a pretty great looking site.

It was a learning experience, but Shopify’s platform is so intuitive. Today, there’s a YouTube video to help with almost any problem – true for Shopify, too. When we started designing, building and launching our new site, it wasn’t with the intention to become the next e-com giant (though that would be nice!). A website, in my opinion, is one of the facets that forms a customer’s opinion of your business. A professional, slick, easy-to-navigate website, with all the information and stock holding, is likely to draw a customer back. We’re driving considerable web sales (from where we’ve been in the past), but our website acts as a showcase for our stock, our services and the experience that a customer can expect in store.