E-commerce provides opportunities and challenges for jewellers, regardless of their scales. A recent research by Accenture, a global management consulting and professional services firm, estimated that almost one in four online purchases were made on smartphones and 65 percent of all transactions will be carried out online by 2020. China is now the world’s biggest e-commerce market with a 35-percent annual growth, followed by the United States, the UK and Japan.
Pioneer of interactive trading software
Dominic Hill, founder and managing director of Atelier Technology stepped into the jewellery industry when Google was just born and has witnessed how the internet has evolved and changed customer behaviour. As an expert who has worked in the industry for two decades, he wishes to provide a solution for jewellery companies to save costs, explore new markets and drive productivity. Then, he spotted the untapped opportunity of an online platform for diverse jewellery stakeholders including retailers, brands, wholesalers and manufacturers to connect with potential customers around the globe and therefore established Atelier Technology, a cloud-based interactive trading software delivered on a per-user per-month subscription basis in 2014.
“Atelier wants to make life simple for people in the jewellery industry. Our purpose runs deeper than simplification, it is also about survival. The internet changed retail forever,” Hill said. “Wherever your company sits between traditional and digital business models, we believe there has been a fundamental shift in consumer behaviour driven by the internet. The result is that vertical volume has gone forever and horizontal volume is here to stay. Companies using our software will be able to evolve their operations to optimise for the digital economy,” he added.
The multilingual and multi-currency system offers a cloud-based platform for companies from various regions and countries to display their collections and interact with interested buyers without walking out of their offices. “Good design is when there is nothing left to remove,” Hill said. Therefore, the interface design is plain and user-friendly. Companies are able to present their jewellery pieces elegantly in clean compositions on the Pinboards even if they are unfamiliar with design software like Adobe Photoshop, while Hotspots allows them to provide detailed information and explanation of ideas nearby the Pinboards. Interested party can add comments or ask questions below and comparison can be done in real-time through the system. Vendors can see which potential buyers are paying attention to their items in order to learn what styles are going well. The function stands companies apart from competitors who still use Excel or PDF quotations. A new function Open-to-Buy has launched this year. By building an Order Book, all discussions related to orders and payments will automatically be listed out.
Without an actual product in hand, an appealing and authentic product visual is essential to overcome the innate physical restrictions of e-commerce in order to deliver a trustworthy and pleasing experience to buyers. To address the cost and photo quality concerns of the company’s members, Atelier Technology provides access to jewellery photographic service in every country for them, which costs US$2.5 per shot including image editing. All photos are on a white background to ensure style consistency.
There are over 100 registered members now. “Atelier is powerful and easy to learn. We hope that Atelier Technology can be more widely adopted across the industry as this will enable you to use a single system for uploading data to multiple customers without any additional cost per customer,” said Andrew Hinds of multiple jeweller F Hinds and president of the National Association of Jewellers in the UK.
Hill indicated the major challenge is that people lack confidence in technology when it comes to luxury goods purchasing. However, he believes trust can be built over time and has invested in financial-grade encryption and secure cloud server architecture to gain trust from large jewellers. Atelier’s vision is to provide business intelligence services with intelligence, elegance and efficiency. “Today we provide software as a service to enable our customers to harvest their trading data. Tomorrow this data will enable us to uncover previously lost data to help these companies make right decisions faster,” the founder said. He referred to a social science theory, Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) and said he targets to be among the early adopters or early majority in the business intelligence industry. Heedful human resource management will be the key to his aim.
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