The Most Copied Ring on TikTok: How Real Fine Built a $10 Million Business Around It

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0:27Jasmine:Welcome back to Female Founder World. Today I'm chatting with Eliza O 'Connor. I've actually had her on the show before almost exactly a year ago to today and we both thought, oh, it's been like at least three years. It's been one year. Crazy. Times are crazy. So Eliza is the founder of Real Fine Studio. It's an LA-based jewelry brand. We're chatting in Sydney today. And the reason I wanted to have her back on the show is to talk about basically all the traction that's happened in the last year. We crowdsourced a bunch of questions from the community in the Female Founder World group chat on my Instagram stories.

1:01Jasmine:And I'm going to bring some of those to you that we didn't get the chance to cover last time. And we're going to talk about some of the milestones that you've hit in the last year and the things that have shifted to be able to get you to that point. But first I want to cover a bit of history and guys go back and listen to the first episode. I'm going to link it in the show notes. So it's really easy for everyone to find, but go back and listen to that first if you haven't, because I think it'll give you a lot of context that's super important about Eliza's story. Real Fine isn't her first business.

1:29Jasmine:It is her most successful business and it is definitely the one that she's going to be known for. I'll give you the background of the brand. You went from selling a single vintage ring on Instagram to building a multi million dollar business. You're five years in, is that right? Yeah, 2021, like mid 2021. Yeah. Okay. So about five years in and you have been growing through a few different channels. You've partnered with group you do trunk shows tiktok and instagram are really big sources of sales for you you've kind of become this like cool gen z jewelry brand and i think the one that all of the all of the girls in my team and like in my gen z world want for milestones whether it's their engagement or college graduation and you have this product called the heirloom signet can you just like put it up Also, lol, everyone was looking at that engagement ring.

2:23Jasmine:You got the heirloom signet and you also made your own engagement ring too, right? Yeah. That's a product that you're really well known for, this heirloom signet. It's gone really viral. It has spurred so many copycats and so we're going to talk about that as well. But backing up a little bit, in the last year or so since we last spoke, what's changed? I feel like everything's changed. when I found out it was a year ago. I feel like a hand on my heart, four years since we last spoke. The business has changed. Our team has changed. Our office has changed. Our workshop has changed. Our whole entire business, really.

3:00We expanded from a team of two to seven. We are looking to expand more. We also moved from our beautiful, tiny little studio in downtown LA into a 2 ,500 square foot showroom. office and workshop wow which was a huge leap and so we moved in there two months ago so that has been a massive game changer and then just in terms of like us partnering with more retailers we're starting to kind of dip our toes in we're really doubling down on trunk shows uh doing them monthly now and just like our revenue just how much we're kind of doing every month what how how many engagement rings, et cetera. Like everything is different from last year.

3:47Can you share any revenue milestones? Yes. We are on track to hit 10 to 15 million this year, which was great because I think last time we spoke the year before we'd hit a million, which is obviously incredible. So that was 2024.

4:03Jasmine:Yes. You hit your first million and 2026 for talking 10 to 15. Yeah. How are you feeling? It's honestly a big blur. Like I hear those numbers and I'm like, who me? Like, no. But obviously in the day-to-day and seeing how everything's going, I'm like, okay, let's keep doing this. This is working. So there's a few things we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about hiring and team building. We're going to talk about mindset and how you hold yourself differently. Maybe in this business compared to previous businesses that didn't work out in the same way and advice that you had. That's a big question that came through when I was asking, you know, the female founder of a group chat for things they wanted to learn from you.

4:41Jasmine:We're going to talk about marketing and what you've changed or doubled down on to get to this next level of growth. And I want to talk about Cloppycats and how you're handling that. And also product assortment because you're really well known for this kind of one product. And I'm curious about how that has shaped your growth or if it's different kind of products that are shaping the growth. So let's start with team. You said you went from two to seven. Is that right? Yeah. Okay. What are those early hires and how have you made that switch or like what's switched as you've built out the team? Because I think a lot of us are kind of, you can get to that early point where you get a few people who can get the traction going.

5:16Jasmine:And then it's a very different thing once you've proven out what you're doing to figure out who are those long-term hires that you need to get to the next stage. Absolutely. I never understood that saying that like the people that get you from, get you to 1 million are very different to the people that get you to 5 million to 10 million. But I feel like early on we had people that just were eager and hungry to get on board, not necessarily coming from like a jewelry background. But obviously that was great. We needed people. So we're now kind of in a position which I'm so excited about is to hire people with industry experience.

5:52Not that I think it's like crucial, but I think it's really, really aided in our growth. Like our head of production has 10 years jewelry experience. our studio director also has nearly 10 years of fine jewelry experience and you just can't teach those things so having those people sprinkled in the biggest in the business is like game game changing uh obviously you don't need to have experience like before I started real fine I had no jewelry experience but what we look for if you don't have experience is you need to be like super eager in the world. You can't kind of be like, oh yeah, like I'm going to try that and maybe I want to do this.

6:37I really look for people who have a passion for jewelry and like want to immerse themselves. Also that who believe in like the real fine world and also problem solving. I feel like as we expand and I tell this to all my girls like I you're here because I trust you you make the hard decisions as well obviously bring to me anything that you need help with but I want to like empower them to like act as if I would and we have those conversations all the time when you're making those kind of bigger more senior

7:11Jasmine:hires and this is something that I'm thinking about now where we are trying to bring in someone who is more of a specialist less of a journalist like we've got yeah you know it's been like generalists who have gotten us to where, um, to where we are so far, but the next stage is like, I really need a specialist who has done experiential at a really large scale for us. And how do you, how do you balance like teaching someone the real fine way and the reason why you have been able to cut through across all of these different jewelry brands in like quite a saturated space versus them bringing you the experience and telling you actually this is what works and this is how the industry does it?

7:50That's such a good question. On day one of them, both starting, both like our head of production and our studio director, I was like, I do not know everything. If you have a way and you see whether that's how we're doing production, whether that's how we're recording sales or whatever, tell me. I'm like, if your way's better, let's do it. Yeah. And I think that's like made our work environment and also the girls like more excited to be there. There's nothing worse than when you've worked for a company and you have a really exciting, you know, idea or way of doing something and they shut you down.

8:27So I'm not, I don't claim to know everything. Uh, Nicole has implemented our head of production, so many incredible production, like basically like a whole production timeline. That wasn't me, but I lent on her for her expertise. At the end of the day, that's what she owns. So she works best that way. So it's kind of trusting those people, I guess, in those decisions and also just like taking your ego out of it. If they have a better idea, I'm like, let's do it.

8:55Jasmine:Are you all in the office every day together? Yeah. Yeah. Every day. I'm jealous. I'm jealous. I miss having everyone together. The remote thing like really bums me out. I don't know if we could do remote. And we have girls applying remotely. mainly because I also don't work if if you're not in front of me and we can't like go through things I find it really difficult to focus and also jewelry you have to feel it touch it it's a hard thing to do remote your brand is fully self-funded and bootstrapped is it still that way okay talk to me about how you are building a brand that can be self-sufficient in that way and what are some of the things that you're focusing on to be able that allowing it to work good question one of the things like we were dming about this before and one of the things you said that stood out to me is um being like best in product yeah like our product obviously you said it before it's a saturated market so we in scaling it would be a lot easier to send things offshore and a lot of jewelry businesses do that and I never understood it till we're now at we're doing the we have so much in production that I'm like there has to be an easier way to do this but the easier way is is generally going offshore which then I don't have eyes we're not seeing things I check in on every step of the way and I think that's what makes our product kind of stand out and people that are spending a lot of money on fine jewelry they really care about where it's made so just like listening to our clients as well like there was not a world in which I was going to ever take money from anyone.

10:32And it was just a slow build, you know, like in the first year, we maybe started to be able to have some gold chains and inventory. And then now year five, we have a lot of infantry and it's just been because we've kind of done it slowly. I don't think, you know, overnight I was like, I'm going to start a jewelry brand. And that means I need to have all 10 pieces, all 10 rings in stock. I need to have every chain, every charm. It was made to order for a long time. And that was that we were able to manage cash flow. And then we finally got to a position where we were doing enough online sales. Online's really big for us.

11:10We were at Goop and stocked in all their stores. And then we're also stocked at Four Seasons in Hawaii and then doing motor operandi. So we had all these different avenues of revenue that kind Kind of, you know, retailers take a while to pay. So the online could like kind of float while we wait for that. So it was just diversifying and also on that diversifying our production.

11:37Jasmine:Is your background in the marketing side of things or business finance? Like where do you sit? Marketing. Yeah. But I also think I have just like a strong intuition for business and like I have like a gut reaction to things that hasn't let me down. so far. In what way? I just, I feel like I wasn't the smartest person at school. I did well, but I was very street smart. And I think street smart in business and like having a gut check or, you know, looking at like cashflow and being like, okay, well, if we, if we push online this week, this is a few years ago, if we push online this week and then that's okay if this retailer doesn't pay for a while.

12:22Like I just had a good all round view on things. And I don't know how, it's probably not the answer. I don't know how you get that. But maybe the thing is, if you don't think like that, maybe hire people that do think like that.

12:36Jasmine:How did you learn some of those like business finance skills? I feel like that's the kind of stuff that is a little bit harder to figure out, like projecting cashflow and managing cashflow, project inventory planning I lean on a lease for a lot of that who else is our COO she's much more operational finance so we do uh check finance check-ins weekly yep um and what are you looking at we are looking at who owes us money yeah who do we owe money to where are all the accounts sitting um just overall like health of where we are and we have been really lucky that I don't think ever since starting Real Fun we've ever been in a position where we've like, oh shit, we can't.

13:20Yeah, touch wood. I know. Don't worry, I have nightmares about it too. But we haven't really been in that position. And I think that's because we've been smart about it. I think we run the business pretty conservatively in areas we need to, and then we spend where we do.

13:40Jasmine:Do you have a paid strategy or is it all organic? We never paid. Okay. Okay. Let's, let's cover that because getting enough sales organically versus to get hit 1 million in revenue versus 10 million in revenue is a very different game. What are you doing? Have you, has anything changed since the first time we spoke? Is it still that organic TikTok content? Yeah. Really? It really is. And I, we need to do some paid ads. Like that's the next step, but we actually can't take any more volume at the moment. So it's kind of Like I just want to be in a position where if the demand comes, we can sustain and the standard doesn't drop.

14:21So we're getting there slowly. Like we've just built a workshop in our office. So our jewelers will be coming in-house, some of them. And what's interesting is those jewelers that are in-house will not be our only jewelers. We will still maintain our other jewelers that aren't in-house. So they have their own studios. They've been in the industry for 30, 40 years. And you kind of contract them. Yeah. Yeah. Just because life happens. If our head craftsman has to go for a family emergency, for like, what do we do? And that's something that I, you know, when we first moved into our new office, I was like, no, it's just going to be our jewels in house.

14:59And then I realized that that's probably dangerous waters. And just to keep like the production open and have and not rely on one person.

15:11Jasmine:Okay, so if TikTok and organic content is driving the bulk of your sales, I'm guessing also word of mouth and referrals is going to be, and that just comes from having really great product, I think. You can get that word of mouth. What is your strategy? What are you posting? How often? Who is doing it? Talk me through the magic here. You're looking at it? Yeah. I do all of our social media. How much time? How do you split your time then? I'm going to be honest. It usually is me working in the office all day and getting to 4 p.m. being like, shit, I have to post, which that is my goal to not do that.

15:47I did plan some posts before I even came to Australia and that has just changed my life because it's just kind of posts when I'm like doing something and I feel really on top of it. but right now honestly it's when I get time which isn't great and I really want to change that but I think what's helped is I am like so laser focused on like Real Fine's vision so even when we don't have like a solid marketing strategy or deck the content naturally all or feels real fine and the same because of the vision. Yes.

16:27Jasmine:I also think, I often think back to when I was early in my career as an editor and journalist, and there's a saying, I can teach you how to write, but I can't give you something to say. And I think the same thing goes with brands and content where I can teach you how to create content, but if you're not actually doing other things in the business aside from content, you won't have anything to say. And the fact that you're so busy building the business gives you the content. Absolutely. And it's like, it's very natural. So like we get an engagement ring back and if I have time to talk on it and the client doesn't need it like straight away, then I'll do a video on it.

17:02So it's never, it's always really natural and organic and people ultimately can feel that.

17:08Jasmine:And you have a separate account for you and for the brand, but you're on, you're forward facing on the brand account. Yeah. I'm not on the Instagram, I would say. Yeah. Often people come to the trunk show and they'll be like, I'll be talking to them and they'll be like, hang on, the way you're talking. And I'm like, yeah, this is my brand. Right. And they're always really shocked, which I love that. Yeah. Because it means that it's just like not me. Obviously, I'm really heavily on it on TikTok, but I don't want, the brand is so much bigger than just me. And I really want that to be like, that's intentional.

17:40so when people come to trunk shows and they are talking to me and they don't realize I'm like yes yeah why is your face not on Instagram I think Instagram is more of like I treat it more of like a portfolio and like a website almost yeah it's you've got 15 seconds usually people clicking on it and having a glance and I don't think necessarily just seeing my face everywhere is gonna cut through. Yep. Whereas TikTok, people want to see faces. So I think it's just like knowing your platform. Also, if people want to see my face on Instagram, they can go onto my Instagram. Yeah.

18:18Jasmine:How do you think about splitting the type of content that you're posting to your personal versus what's on the brand? The brand is much more, I would say like luxury, but fun, fun luxury. And it's more, it is more curated, but still not too curated. Uh, and then my personal is really just like bringing down the walls and me speaking to you. Like I'm just telling my friend about an engagement ring I just did. And in this industry, it's so buttoned up. It's so, you don't like, you don't see behind the scenes. And so I think people really appreciate that. Um, well, that's what I've been told. How do you feel about, um, I guess the, I think a lot of people hesitate, especially if they've got like a high ticket purchase, they hesitate.

19:04Jasmine:about having that human kind of, not scrappy is not the right word, but just like more raw content and being able to retain, I guess, like trust in that sense of brand and that sense of, you know, being able to like justify that higher ticket price. What would you say to people that are having that hesitation? In producing content? Yeah. I'm very particular about what I post still. Like I know it's raw, but I still am not doing like mukbangs on my TikTok or like I'm still very on brand, which I think helps. Like, unfortunately, I can't post everything on my TikTok. There's so many things I would love to post, but I ultimately need to keep it in line of like real fine in that lens.

19:54And your personal one too, right? Yeah. And I'm talking about my personal one as well. So just kind of be aware that even if my content feels like raw and organic, it's still in line with the brand. It's still curated. And I'm always thinking of the brand. And that, yeah, it shows.

20:13Jasmine:So this year you've moved into this beautiful office space and I've been watching you build it out because I've been also furnishing my house at the same time. Yes. So I've been messaging Elise, who's your CEO, who I'm also friends with. and basically just getting all your mood boards and copying and pasting into my house, which has been great. But that's a pretty big, how big did you say the space was? 2 ,500 square foot. Yeah, massive. That's a really big move. And I'm curious about that decision and why now was the time and how you think about making that decision and what other people can take from your experience as they're trying to decide where to bet big in their own businesses.

20:54I think every decision we have made, we've made before we've been ready, but the momentum that has come from that decision has changed the business. So each time like we're faced with, you know, hiring people that maybe we don't have the budget for, but we can stretch for, I go back on the fact that I'm like, if we don't do this, what's opportunity cost? And the opportunity cost is large. It's like stalling the business. Yep. So basically we were in a beautiful little studio. We lasted a few months in there and we needed to hire more people. So we moved into an office a few doors down. The pain point of that is running between offices and studios, needing things in the studio that's in the office, et cetera.

21:42And I try and like attack the pain point directly. And I was like, okay, we need to be in one space. The showroom needs to be there. The office needs to be there and our workshop. And so this studio space came up. It was obviously like 10 times the rent we'd been paying, but it was kind of like it's now or never. Yeah, and also are we doing this or are we not doing this? And that's what it comes down to. Obviously, like I would still lie in bed being like or wake up at 4 a.m. being like, what am I doing? What if this doesn't work? Oh, my God, this is so much money. But the alternative is the business slowing down.

22:19So you kind of have to have guts and it's scary and you have to just lean in. But every big decision has always paid off. And knowing that it's easier to make them.

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