Earlier in Back Row:

In this issue of Back Row:

In 2021, LVMH acquired Tiffany for around $16 billion. “Old Tiffany was really like, ‘Do what's right for the customer, the customer is always right’” said someone who has worked at Tiffany in North America since before the acquisition. “With LVMH, there's all the money in the world, but I find there's a lot less focus on, do what's right for the customer. It's a lot more, do what's right to protect the business.”

At Tiffany, client advisors work to curate relationships with ultra-wealthy clients in hopes of getting them to spend big at a Blue Book event. At this invite-only shopping experience, the wealthy are pampered in hopes they’ll drop six figures — if not more — on the brand’s most exclusive pieces. If they don’t sell, they may just end up on a common jewel-borrowing celebrity at an award show. The employee talks about those events and so much more ahead.

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What was different after LVMH took over Tiffany?

Pre-takeover with repairs, there was a lot more conversation about keeping clients happy regarding how their pieces get repaired. Whereas now, if I want to get a repair fee waived or do something complimentary, I have to get it approved by not even my own team manager, but the store director. And then sometimes, depending on the price, that store director has to get it approved by a retail director.

Did the pieces break a lot?

I wouldn’t say so. I do find that especially with the aspirational luxury customer, they think that because they bought a $500 silver piece — and $500 is a lot of money for a lot of people — they should be allowed to be as hard on it as they want and that it'll never break. Those are the ones that break the product. The true luxury customer, and especially the high-jewelry customer, they understand, I spent a million dollars on that and I was rough on it and I broke it, and it's going to cost me $2,000 to repair. And that makes sense.

How do you sell a million-dollar piece of jewelry?

There's a number of ways of going about it. I know we once had a client looking at a high-jewelry piece from another brand, and we caught wind of it. One of our client advisors had a relationship with that person, so they reached out with a similar high-jewelry piece from us. The customer listened, hemmed and hawed between the two of them, and then ended up going with our piece. That might be more of an exception than the rule.

A lot of those very large sales happen during a Blue Book event. It is wild how much money flies around at those. I think we did around $150 million in sales in two weeks at the Miami one. One of these events could be 3 percent in annual sales.

Wait — how much money does fly around?

In 2022, we had Blue Book event in Miami. Frequently when we do high-jewelry events, a lot of the selling ceremony and a lot of the appointments are done in really small intimate rooms. But here, they used a space where they had small intimate booths set up, but there weren't quite walls in between. So people could kind of see what other people were buying.

There was a level of privacy still, because that kind of customer expects a lot of privacy, but there was this frenzy in the air where people were like, Oh my God, look at what they're buying. We have to buy something. It was a lot of trying to keep up with the Joneses, but when you're looking at pieces that start at $100,000, it's crazy.

Does Tiffany pay for clients to go to this event?

They'll fly in, say, on the Thursday and then have their appointment on Friday. Tiffany will do something to entertain them on the Friday night, and then they'll fly home, say, Saturday afternoon. So maybe they're there for 48 hours or so, but they're only actually shopping for two or three.

They have to fly themselves there, but then Tiffany will put them up somewhere nice, send them to dinner at a top restaurant. Some customers get, as part of their experience, tickets to a Miami Heat game. Tiffany actually makes sporting event trophies. Because we're a major sponsor of things like the U.S. Open – we make the trophy – we'll bring some of our high-jewelry and luxury clients. Obviously there are conversations like, “Hey, I'm looking at this million-dollar necklace, and also I would really like to go to the US Open. I love tennis.” We know if we entertain that client at the U.S. Open, they're more likely to purchase that necklace.

How do you get invited to a Blue Book event?

I've seen customers start their relationship with Tiffany where they're buying $200, $300 pieces of jewelry, and they slowly start building larger collections where they're spending $10,000 or $50,000 on pieces. Our big thing is a bird on a rock, which we call Tiffany’s Birkin. The opening price point is $100,000. Sometimes we'll take them to a Blue Book to entertain them, and they purchase the bird on a rock at the Blue Book.

I've seen clients who their total lifetime spend with Tiffany was $2,000, but they were Googleable and we were able to see that they had wealth that they weren't spending with us. And so we kind of just take a risk.

Do people come and not buy anything?

It’s about a 60 percent conversion. A day-to-day store goal is 20 percent conversion, so 60 percent is really, really good. If we've brought a customer multiple times to a Blue Book and they haven't purchased anything, we stop bringing them. If they say, “When's Blue Book this year? I'd love to go again,” the conversation tactfully happens around “You can't go until you spend more money with us.”

All of the high-jewelry sales happen with relationships. It is very, very rare that a customer just phones us and is like, “Hey, I'm looking at a $100,000 piece. Do you have it? I'll buy it over the phone.”

When I moved to Tiffany, I reached out to clients from my last job, women who fly all over the world buying Louis Vuitton and Dior. They’re wearing Cartier and Bulgari. Tiffany is trying to upscale the name more. We make product that competes with Cartier and Bulgari, but we’re known for our silver product. One client was wearing Cartier and didn’t think Tiffany was good enough. I would take her for dinner and try to figure out what she's looking for in jewelry, and she just never came.

What was the biggest sale you ever did?

Around $45,000.

What sells the best? What’s a typical day in the store like?

The silver pieces. The majority of our days are spent with the aspirational customers and the $10,000 customer. When we’re not with them we’re trying to grow the HENRY (high earner not rich yet) shopper into a high-jewelry customer or cultivate our high-jewelry customers.

With fashion, you have collections drop four times a year, you have sales, so you have a lot of reasons to reach out to clients. With jewelry, nothing is discounted. So you have to know your customers so you can find reasons to talk to them. You're their best friend. You have to know their birthday, their husband's birthday, their kids' birthdays, their anniversary, their mom's birthday, what they like doing in their spare time. So if they're a big foodie that you can be reaching out to talk to them about the new restaurant that's opened in town.

What are these customers like as people?

HENRYs are kind of awful to deal with. The ultra-wealthy tend to be the nicest people on the planet, in my experience. They're just buying the things that they really like. They're not buying it because it's a million dollars. They're buying it because they recognize it as an investment.

Do the HENRYs ask for food and drinks?

it's a baseline expectation when you're shopping luxury that you get served drinks. They don't usually have to ask for water or champagne or coffee or whatever. Rarely do they ask for food. Usually any client advisor worth their weight in salt should be able to look at an experience and be like, Hmm, I've been in this room shopping jewelry with this client for two hours now. I should probably see if they want a snack. Or, They've already had a bottle of water, but maybe I should double check if they want another. And if a client advisor isn't doing that, frankly, I don't think they should be in that line of work.

Two hours? That sounds exhausting.

Sometimes clients will have multiple two-hour appointments. So it is exhausting, but for client advisors, to have an uninterrupted two hours with this ultra-wealthy person is brilliant, because you get to know so much about them that then informs your next strategy for closing your next sale.

Do you have men shopping for mistresses?

There’s a big rodeo nearby that’s basically one big party. Sales at our Tiffany locations seriously uptick afterward, because a lot of husbands are coming in to buy, “Oops, I made mistakes” gifts or quiet-the-mistress gifts. We once had one guy who bought two of everything so he could give it to his wife and the mistress. Then if we ever mentioned a piece of jewelry, the wife always owned it too.

Do customers ever give you a hard time?

The most demanding folks off the street are the ones who can't actually afford to shop at Tiffany. I think this goes for all luxury brands. They're really hardcore aspirational and pretending that they’re a HENRY, and then their $10,000 piece breaks. We're going to charge them $800 to repair it, and they're like, “I paid $10,000 for this. I'm not paying $800 to repair it. That's insane.” Because $10,000 was a lot of money for them, but so is $800.

Do you know anything about celebrities borrowing jewelry?

Gabrielle Union, the necklace she was wearing with that large marine stone to the Oscars – that is actually the same necklace that Celine Dion was wearing at the Grammys when she presented album of the year. But that necklace is actually, like, a five-piece interchangeable necklace where you can put that aquamarine on it, you can put this dandelion style on it, and there's a choker version and a diamond-pendant strand version. Of course, the regular lay person isn't going to notice that, but it was the first thing I noticed. There was only one of those necklaces and it's, like, $5 million.

So these necklaces just get passed around.

Until somebody buys them. I'm like, does that not kind of make it a used necklace?

Do the super-rich customers who would buy it not care that a celebrity has worn it?

A lot of the super-rich don't. At the upcoming spring Blue Book, there will be a lot of pieces designed for that Blue Book that will be purchased immediately and will never be on a celebrity. The necklace that Celine and Gabrielle were wearing is actually from the spring 2022 Blue Book collection. So it went to the people who would buy it, they got first dibs on it, and then they didn't buy it. It's a very expensive piece, so it’s not necessarily going to sell right away. So until somebody does buy it, it ends up being part of, essentially, our PR package.