Why you can't build a £500m brand on ads alone | D.Louise founder Jack Zambakides

What has worked over the past, say, year or two to go to the next level?

Yeah, I think there's a, there's a few things. It's sort of like a— 2026, we, we have seen strong growth. I think it, it naturally is just a case of we— the— if you just look at like Google search terms, waterproof tarnish-free jewelry is growing up quite considerably every single year. So steel is being used more and more in jewelry. It was brass and other metals. Um, what's happening like macro jewelry industry is that most— so A Monica Vinader brand like that will use silver in their jewelry. Silver prices have gone really, really choppy lately, gone up massively. What we're seeing is those brands are rising in their prices, so our competition having to rise prices because of margin, um, their margins getting eaten. So we're occupying that space quite well. So we do have like the headwinds are definitely in our favor. So I think we've, you know, we're naturally seeing that more people are obviously buying into, you know, you know, fashion jewelry and waterproof jewelry. And it does feel like we are leading that trend, at least in the UK.

Is that just stainless steel?

Stainless steel, yeah. Because, yeah, that's sort of only in the last sort of like 5 to 6 years, at least in women's jewelry, that it's been done. Like, we go to the jewelry shows, we go to Hong Kong twice a year. When we first started and we first started suppliers, basically the, the material, the machinery you need for steel to make jewelry is very different to what you need for brass because steel is so much harder.

Still more expensive.

No, not more expensive, but it will mean it doesn't tarnish. But the hard part about steel is it's very hard as a metal, so you can't bend it in certain ways. But what's happened is machinery's got more sophisticated in the last 5 years. You can start to do more with, more with it. So you can make a nice-looking tennis bracelet which is thin. You know, 6, 7 years ago they'd be like, oh, it's too hard, you can't do that. But they've developed machinery which has made it possible. So we've, we've definitely got, you know, the macro conditions have helped us. I think we've been operating in the UK, like doing a lot of brand work, which does start to pay off. Do you think that means moves the needle?

Because that's an area—

Our UK does, yeah.

Every investor says, well, my investors included, invest in brand. I think it's fair now, but then I still just know so many Chad scalers.

Yeah.

Well, not so many, a handful that are doing like £10 to £20 million a month. And if you said brand to them, they'd probably just fucking laugh.

I think the, the lens I try to think through is 2 things. I think you have— every industry I think has like a natural CAC.

Um, yeah.

So I think, say if you're selling ice baths in lockdown, you probably can't get to like £10 million a month. Like, fuck brand, like that should not be a priority. Like, let's find that. I think for us we were sort of, you know, yeah, we have to be break-even or first-order profitable. So you start to reach out. So then, you know, of your marketing mix, you know, effectively every single year we spent less on performance marketing as a percentage, slightly more on brand marketing, but our marketing efficiency has got more efficient, which has just obviously meant that your, your bottom line's improved and your top line can keep growing. Um, but yeah, if we turned our ads off in the UK, we have still got a business. If we turned our ads off in, you know, a smaller territory where we are, you know, more meta-focused and more direct response, we wouldn't. So I think it does compound in the right way. But I think, you know, probably similar to what you're doing in your business, like just being out in person, I think can definitely help becoming more recognizable within retail or just more of a household name.

How big is retail now as a percentage?

Oh, next year In terms of units, it will probably be 40% of units, but in terms of revenue, because you're obviously selling it at a discount, yeah, it'll probably end up being a pretty good number. Maybe 20% of revenue, 25% of revenue.

Do you think that's definitely a better play just to get bigger versus D2C, or do you think that's more like you're trying to diversify and build more of a brand, as you said?

Yeah, more of that. I think so. Effectively, I think to build like a maybe a £500 million jewelry business, I think D2C isn't actually the right channel. I think, you know, maybe I'll be wrong because I was wrong about everything I said 4 and a half years ago.

But you were young and dumb then.

I still am. Um, but I think I say in 10 years' time, I reckon we'll be doing as much sales offline as we will online. Um, just, I think the category suits in person. You know, we could open up a— the Pandora model is they can open up a shop in Cardiff shopping center, pay 50 grand, or maybe a bit more, 100 grand a year on your lease, but it can probably do 700K in top line. Um, so, you know, you don't have the same level of marketing spend like you do online. So as long as you can brand build in that way and have desirability for people to come through the door and buy, you can build a great business. Um, so I think wholesale's sort of our step there.

Who's your main competitor, do you think? Would you say it's like Monica Vinader, Astrid Mio, Misoma? Abbott Lyon, all these brands I used to obsess over when I was in the space.

Yeah, all, all of them are, you know—

Or do you see more of like an even smaller brand as a bigger threat?

No, I wouldn't say smaller. There's obviously loads of, loads of small brands who are probably doing $100K a month or something like that. Um, I think Monica Vinader are an amazing business. Like, they're definitely like probably the— from what the outside in, like, we've hired a couple people from there, they're all like super sophisticated. Like, they are very, very well run. They're like sort of have been private equity run for the last 7, 8 years or had a huge amount of equity and they've been very, very well run. Um, so yeah, I'd love to— they're far bigger than us, um, far bigger team, far bigger sort of distribution. But yeah, they're, they're a very well-run business. I look at them, you know, it's hard not to look at them. They're leading the category.

What's your main angle on ads? Because obviously for like supplements and sort of stuff I do is Kind of like problem solution, lifestyle, comparison, whatever.

This is where jewelry is a hard category. It's good up until this point.

How do you think of winning an ad in jewelry? Is it just a good-looking lady with a necklace on? I imagine not. Or is it more functional?

Storytelling. So I think, again, from an ad point of view at the minute, what we see is that it is important to have what I would consider top of funnel— middle of funnel is a bit wishy-washy— but say top of funnel and bottom of funnel. So top of funnel being more like storytelling, so explaining why do other jewelry brands tarnish, what are— explain the founding story, just all of those things where to try to get people to understand the brand and, and we are what we sell and the solution we solve for, like your jewelry tarnishing or beautiful designs at an accessible price. Those are the sort of 2 sort of main areas. And then bottom of the funnel is more just like conversion-led, like how can we get these people, how can we overcome objections and buy. Um, but yeah, it's definitely no— it's frustratingly not just like a pure problem solution.

What's your best ad ever, if there is one?

Be a founder ad, 100%.

Of Liv?

Yeah, 100%.

Just like talking about the story?

Yeah.

Are you in any of the ads? Are you like intentionally stealth?

None.

But yeah, founder ads and even podcast ads like this are like just easy top of funnel.

Yeah.

Because it's authentic. Even just getting other people in podcasts that aren't the founder, it's just like, what are they using it for, etc.?

Yeah, no, 100%. I think, yeah, we've had some founder ads which have just been— we had a Before Andromeda, we had like, you know, we would just make slight variations and we had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of founder ads and a few of those—

Is that just like UGC iPhone spec or is that high prod, like cinematic?

Bit of both, but mainly just probably a little bit of both. We would just do like a founder shoot day, probably similar to you. And then it would just be like, right, here are 50 hooks, record all these, record like script, script, script. You say it, I say it, like just go at it and then just keep editing up, chopping up that content.

How do you think about SKU expansion? I think you said 4 years ago, this is very much the help of AI, that you had 80% of revenue from 2 SKUs. Is that still the case?

No, I wish it was the case. That'd make life easier.

Um, because you must have hundreds of SKUs at this point.

Yeah, about 1,000 SKUs.

Wow. I used to fucking hate that when I ran jewelry.

Yeah, it makes, makes life difficult. Um, for us, our approach is effectively there's, there's a couple things. There's firstly There definitely are trends within the jewelry industry similar to fashion, which, you know, jewelry's probably maybe potentially even move faster. You have less design element from like a logo. So like there might be a trend in fashion of like people all want this logoed brand, so they buy into that. I think for jewelry it might be a shape of earring. So we definitely have spent the last sort of probably 18 months building out the muscle. Obviously AI has come in to help that, but where effectively we can go from like product to like idea. So like we've come up with, within a meeting, this idea we should jump on this trend. We've seen it, Hailey Bieber wore it on TikTok. You know, for us now at the minute, a trend is like a pear diamond earring. So we've seen that trend. Well, then we've got a good supplier base. We'll buy into that product if we have to design it, but there's minimal design. But we'll buy into it, we'll get that on site, and we'll effectively test it. We'll know from sell-through within the first like few weeks, like where is benchmark. If it's above that, then we lean into it.

Is that also on your new-in section?

It probably will be somewhere in new-in, exactly. Then we'll create— so we sort of like a few-step process. So we sort of combine that with like more seasonal drops. So like having a summer collection, a winter collection and going down that. But yeah, I think we leaned into the trend. If you read like the ASOS model was, you know, the fast fashion was that they can come up with an idea and have it on the site in 2 weeks. We're definitely nowhere near that. But I think being able to—

How has AI helped with that process though? Is it images?

Images, yeah. 'Cause some of those images—

I used to fucking spend weeks doing these images back in 2018, '19, way pre-AI.

Or you have to get a render, which is super expensive as well.

Super expensive.

Like your gold ring I'm on here, that could be Molten Shield ring, £45. Is that AI?

I can't tell you that specific one because I didn't—

But is that possible with AI?

Probably, right? Yeah. So a lot of it will just be, you know, similar to what a lot of people are doing that will have, you know, even a supplier sends you 10 photos, you have all the measurements, and then obviously you've got— we've got bundles of product e-com shoots which we do, I don't know, 8 times a year, I think.

Yeah.

And then we can just obviously move, put the images on. I know there's regulation in EU now on AI imagery. Have you seen all this? But yeah, so then we can use that to jump into trends. And then the benefit of brand marketing is that you have that brand and, you know, we always have nice packaging, good service, all that sort of stuff. I think what's interesting, we were talking about it at an offsite the other day, is that, you know, the biggest thing with this AI movement is that trust is going to come down because people are going to, you know, we had it, I'm sure you've had it. Someone's just ripped our store, changed all the model imagery, changed the name.

Especially single SKU or, you know, sorry, not single SKU, less SKUs, easy to rip. Yeah, somewhat.

someone's gone through the time of doing basically our whole site and all the model images. That's taken them ages, or they're smarter than me.

You should hire them.

Yeah, a couple of Dutch kids. Yeah, um, effectively they, they, they've gone and, uh, gone and done that process. But it just, yeah, it means you can obviously move so much faster. But trust is going to become the biggest thing because everyone's going to get stung by these stores, or the product's going to turn up and it's going to be crap.

I guess that's where Trustpilot and stuff comes in, right?

Yeah, Trustpilot. We're actually going to— well, we're We're running the numbers now on if we could have a phone number where people can call. So we'll just have UK, or maybe we can move overseas, South Africa or somewhere like that. But just have a number so like the average, you know, 50-year-old mum who's buying for their daughter actually can call.

And get an AI person on the end. Yeah, exactly. That sounds real.

Yeah.

There's going to be levels to this.

Exactly. But yeah, it feels like leaning into the building trust is, you know, going to be important in brand building for the next 2 to 3 years, of course.

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