My biggest mistake: Samantha Wills, founder of Samantha Wills Jewellery

Moving too far away from your brand identity too quickly can cause a disconnect between how you see your business, and how your customers perceive it.

For creative designer and entrepreneur Samantha Wills, the biggest mistake she made while running her self-titled jewellery business was an attempt to mimic the design of the higher-end brands being stocked by luxury, tier-one retailers.

Wills closed her $10 million business in 2018, and released a memoir on her experiences early this year.

The mistake

Wills made a bold design change from one season to another in 2011, removing the bohemian turquoise and statement stones that were synonymous with her brand. In came polished metals and minimal designs, which were on trend at the time.

The core placement for her self-titled brand was around $120 for a necklace. Suddenly, she was selling $500+ necklaces, with no design elements that their customers were familiar with.

Sales were incredibly poor, and they were left with a lot of stock to move.

“I nearly bankrupted the company in one season”, Wills tells SmartCompany Plus.

The context

Wills was undertaking market research in Barneys New York and got caught up in the magic of the city. She was compelled by the idea of having her jewellery in a tier-one marketplace, next to the most well-known brands in the world.

Ignoring her internalised imposter syndrome that told her, “you’re not a real designer, you started on your dining table”, she went home that day and turned her brand’s design language on its head.

The retailers she worked with were confident after her jewellery had performed well in the past, and ordered stock accordingly. But customers did not buy the new designs once they hit the stores.

The impact

“We tied up all our cash flow in this one collection”, says Wills.

After a big investment to produce all the pieces, Wills had to buy the stock back from retailers who couldn’t sell it, and resell it at clearance prices in obsolete stores.

It was a cascade of issues — she had all the costs involved with the increased logistics of moving the jewellery, along with no profits, and a customer base that had disconnected from the brand.

“It was a disaster zone. It still gives me anxiety to think about”, says Wills.

The fix

Her turnover at the time was $9 million, and it took six months to get back on track with its sales figures, or two seasons in fashion.

“I had to sit in the destruction of that, put the pieces back together and evolve the brand forward,” says Wills.

This time, she set out to honour the brand’s origins instead of trying to be something that it wasn’t.

The first step was recovering some of the costs. The jewellery was sold to TK Maxx in the US, and Click Frenzy in Australia.

The harder part came next: rebuilding the trust of her consumers.

This involved apologising for the divergence, and letting customers know that her company was listening to their concerns.

“It was only by the grace of our loyal collector-consumer that they got back on board with us. I spent the next 18 months to two years speaking with them and gaining their trust back,” says Wills.

“We returned to what was authentic to us, re-introduced the bohemian aesthetic but evolved it. Following the disastrous season where I flipped everything on its head, we then used that as a new starting point to evolve the brand, while still honouring our origins. So we reversed the language from bohemian luxe to luxe bohemian, adding a new layer of polish and refinement but still keeping our bohemian roots.”