Gucci moves its fine jewellery upmarket
The luxury brand styles an elaborate, high-end jewellery line and offers it through private sales channels to buyers in Japan, China and USA
Marco Bizzarri, the chief executive of Gucci, wears a woven gold bracelet with black diamonds that is embossed with the phrase “Blind for Love” in capital letters across the top. Michele himself has a gold ring with a fox’s head, a large brown diamond set between its ears. Though the pieces look like styles that, in their antique forms, were made for women, in the Gucci context, anyone can wear them.
“Clothes, like jewellery, don’t have very revolutionary roots, meaning that what’s revolutionary is the way you wear a piece of jewellery,” the designer said. So far the collection, with prices that mostly range from ^15,000 to ^70,000 ($17,900 to $83,500), has been offered only to favourite clients through private sales in Japan, China and the United States and private appointments that began in July.
Gucci refers to the pieces, which are not high jewellery (typically starting in the $100,000 range and going into the millions), as “medium-high,” or as “unique pieces” when it repeats designs using different gems. However, the brand says it is considering a move into the bigger stones and larger price tags of true high jewellery for its next collection.
Gucci is not the first fashion house to enter the upper echelons of jewellery. Chanel, Dior and Louis Vuitton have all made it big business, as the high jewellery market has flourished through and beyond the economic downturn of the last decade.
And the brand’s fortunes have been growing at a clip that has shocked industry watchers. Kering, its parent group, reported that Gucci’s revenue soared 42 per cent to 1.5 billion in the three months to the end of September. And its biggest boost has been coming from millennials, who, Kering says, account for at least half of its 2017 sales thus far.
“The new generation is going to want a more modern jeweller,” said Maurizio Pisanu, the house’s director of jewellery merchandising. Gucci has hired its first staff gemologist to search for stones worldwide and maintains a jewellery workshop with about 30 goldsmiths and stone-setters near Milan. According to the brand, sales of the initial pieces have been brisk (although it won’t provide specifics). So if the collection does expand, Michele’s antique-tinged, everything-isprecious aesthetic might disrupt the higher stratospheres of the jewellery sector in the way that he has already reset Gucci and the fashion desires of a vast public.
The collection has arrived at a moment when the codes of high jewellery are in flux– important stones are becoming more difficult to find, and a new generation of customers is more interested in showing off wearable (and possibly recognisably branded) design than owning the special occasion gemencrusted parures of the past. Pisanu said design- driven jewellery customers “benefit a brand like Gucci, where jewellery isn’t our core business but we have the ability to make high-quality jewelllery like the other brands–and with a different aesthetic that’s much more innovative than what a classic brand would ever dare to make.”
Gucci is not the first fashion house to enter the upper echelons of jewellery. Chanel, Dior and Louis Vuitton have all made it big business