5 Jewelry Retail Trends to Watch This 2024

New year, new sales goals! Let’s uncover the latest jewelry retail trends to watch out for this year to fuel your sales growth.

But first, how’s the jewelry industry this year?

The global size of gems and jewelry is expected to grow with a CAGR of 1.9% over the forecast period of 2020-2025. Further, the outlook for the diamond industry remains positive despite the ongoing challenges of geopolitical instability and the lack of support for lower-end brands, among many others. Despite a rocky 2020 due to covid 19, the industry has once again proved its resilience as it bounced well-positioned for future growth. This expected continued rebound was predicted to drive demands for the following year, with Bain & Company predicting 2023-2024 to return to a historic growth pace.

Nonetheless, online sales channels are continuously growing. Jewelry e-commerce is moving quickly, especially in China and the USA, and marketing spending is dramatically increasing. But are jewelers spending on the right investments?

This year, spending on business infrastructure that does not support the company sales goal should be eliminated so you can divert the finances and energy toward decisions and strategies that do. Adapt or die, they say.

One of the ways of ensuring this alignment is keeping up with the jewelry retail trends. Shift away from what’s out and embrace what’s in to keep your products and brand the center of your customer’s attention. The jewelry retail trends may change annually or get modified as innovations and technology as well as your customers’ preferences are never stagnant. Let’s see what 2024 has in store for jewelers like yourself!

5 Jewelry Retail Trends to Watch This 2024

1. Hyper-personalized shopping experience

The year 2024 is the year of hyper-personalization in luxury retail. The year ahead is heavily data-driven and requires more than just remembering your customers’ names and birthdates. Think about customizing every step of your customer’s shopping journey, making sure that you know their needs, and meeting them at specific stages of their journey with personalized recommendations that truly represent their tastes and styles.

This is where AI in jewelry retail will come in. AI can process vast amounts of data and transform them into insightful knowledge that will help you pinpoint customer’s shopping decisions, tastes, styles, and lifestyles. For instance, having a real-time digital shopping assistant can do a lot for you and your customers such as providing accurate product recommendations, helping with product selections, answering queries, and more.

Investing in AI to enable a hyper-personalized shopping experience for your customers is crucial especially if you’re in the luxury industry. Based on De Beers’ Diamond Industry Report 2023, one in four affluent customers did not buy diamond jewelry in 2022 because they couldn’t find a design they liked. This 2024, ensure your sales by making sure that you not only have the design but that it’s also easy to find and is recommended to them without them having to ask.

2. A heightened focus on sustainability, transparency, and the environment

The issues of transparency, environment, and sustainability have been circulating for some time now and you should pay critical attention to them this year as shoppers have not only become more socially aware but also demand actions from retailers. In a report by Boston Consulting Group, 65% of shoppers consider brands’ commitment to sustainable development before purchasing while 80% believe that luxury brands have a responsibility in the full cycles of their products.

As a natural diamond jeweler, you probably already know the impacts of lab-grown diamonds on your sales, but if you’re still wondering if it would hit you, yes it will, as younger jewelry consumers have long been demanding ethically sourced, environmentally responsible, and transparent trade practices. It’s not true that millennials killed the demand for diamonds. They are still buying; they’re just not buying the way you expected them to. A 2019 Lab-Grown Diamond Consumer Research by MVI Marketing revealed that 70% of 1,000 polled consumers said they would consider buying lab-grown diamonds not only because of the cost but also because they believed that by doing so, they are helping save the earth and advocate social justice for indigenous laborers.

As a response to this trend, jewelers can adopt practices that promote transparency and traceability. For example, acquiring traceability programs or technology to express and evidence efforts to be transparent.

The blockchain system is the gold industry’s solution to this demand for transparency. It works with strict supply chain cooperation, which when done procedurally would allow traceability of supply from the mine to the consumer. The challenge here lies in the simplification of the process to make it efficient and less time-consuming.

Overall, transparency could increase the confidence of your consumers, especially those who are willing to invest in the value of natural diamonds but are put off by the possibility of unethical practices.

3. The introduction of intimate jewelry shopping experiences

While digital shopping experiences are still a hit, don’t be surprised if you hear about special intimate events such as piercing parties, in-store masterclasses, gastronomy experiences, or even an introduction of intimate spaces like customer comfort diamond rooms and lounges.

For your luxury shoppers, shopping doesn’t only have to be about purchasing as money is of no issue to them. They demand a more intimate shopping experience to differentiate you from other brands. For example, a dining experience for your VIP clients communicates how highly engaged and valued they are to your brand.

Intimate curated experiences don’t always have to be grandiose. Oftentimes, the presence of a personal stylist in-store would suffice. Think of unique elements that could delight your shoppers and implement them.

4. A new era for retail clienteling

Just because in-store intimate experiences are in doesn’t mean online clienteling is out. Don’t be too quick to dismiss the power of digital interaction just yet. In fact, while other digital experiences may have seen a decline, digital clienteling, either through Whatsapp or other platforms, has remained strong.

But the year 2024 will propel a new era for clienteling with AI at the center of it all. The popularity of software like virtual try-ons, RFID-based multimedia content, and other smart apps will be stronger this year. When thinking of clienteling approaches, don’t forget to include user-generated content in your strategy. In fact, 78% of polled shoppers feel more confident in their purchases when they view user-generated content. Similarly, Burberry integrated RFID chips into their product to easily provide content to their shoppers in-store.

Clienteling, whether in-store or online, is another form of providing the hyper-personalized jewelry shopping experience that we mentioned above. Investing in personalization software, which is predicted to grow at a CAGR of 23.67% by 2030, is critical this year as the competition blurs the line between physical and digital experiences.

If RFID and other advanced software are too costly for your small business, don’t worry. Clienteling doesn’t always have to be expensive. You can provide the same personalized jewelry shopping experience through platforms like Whatsapp, which we do, by the way.

5. The continuous rise of self-purchasing females

We’re all for girl power!

Long before this trend arrived, Beyonce (and the rest of Destiny’s Child!) had been singing about women’s economic independence, so this trend is very much welcomed.

Question: tell me what you think about me? I buy my own diamond and I buy my own rings…

Independent Women, Destiny’s Child

Yes, more and more women are buying their own diamond and jewelry pieces. MVI Marketing’s Luxury Self Purchasing Female (SPF) Study Report 2020 revealed that 14% of high-income self-purchasing females (1/3 of 1,011 polled participants) spend more than $6K on jewelry or watches while only 13% of them buy rings for themselves. This figure is considerably low compared to the 25% of the other SPFs from different income brackets who spend on rings for themselves. Overall, the study showed that the majority of the SPFs spend over $400 on jewelry.

There are different reasons why these women buy jewelry for themselves. See below.

1. To reward themselves for achieving a goal
2. Self-love
3. Just because
4. It’s their birthday
5. A holiday present

What this trend shows us is a major shift in motivations for jewelry purchases. Right now, it’s not only solely focused on relationship milestones, but it is also evidence of stronger female economic independence. Such a trend could be attributed to other factors like late marriages and the reverberating theme of self-love and women empowerment.

6. Frictionless shopping experiences across social, digital, and in-store channels

A buzzword for quite some time now, but this 2024, the demand for a seamless omnichannel experience is going to be stronger.

Having just an online presence is no longer enough in this phygital (physical-digital) era. As discovered, jewelry consumers still prefer tactile experiences when shopping for jewelry due to unresolved trust issues. However, incorporating digital media into their shopping experience gives more edge to jewelers. After all, consumers are, first and foremost, turning to the internet to research the product. McKinsey reported that two-thirds of their polled participants admittedly resort to online research before heading to the store while two-thirds use social media for advice and information. Indeed, the online world has become their primary source of information and it’s your responsibility as a jeweler to ensure that their shopping history is reflected across all channels and that all information is readily available for them to make an informed decision regardless of which channel they choose to interact with you.

Reconfiguring the way you approach social, digital, and physical channels is critical to the success of your sales and marketing team. This is because, to bring foot traffic to your jewelry store, you must first romance consumers online. Woo them with your studio-quality jewelry images and videos so they feel compelled to see the piece in the flesh. Showing them poor-quality jewelry images and videos would make you lose shoppers in a matter of seconds, especially when options abound online.

Cheers to a fruitful 2024!

Despite these jewelry retail trends that shopping experts have assessed, the truth remains that nobody can really predict the future. All you can do is rely on your experiences as business owners, know your customers, analyze their shopping behaviors, and create a strategy based on these data. One thing is clear, for sure— technological advancements play a big role in changing the jewelry retail landscape. Learn to adapt and future-proof your jewelry business.

What other jewelry retail trends have you observed? Let us know in the comment section below!