They started selling lab grown diamonds in 2015. Now the industry's worth $30 billion

0:00Sara and Maddy, welcome to Female Founder World. Thank you for having me here.

0:03Jasmine:Can you, first of all, introduce yourselves so that people know which voice belongs to which founder? I'm Sara, co-founder and design director, managing director. I'm Maddy, I'm co-founder and creative director. For people that don't know Kate and Cole, tell us what you've felt. We are essentially a jewellery brand. We're 10 years old now, just over 10 years old. But we like to think of ourselves as, you know, a brand that's really about community driven activity. We love engaging with our customers. We work with lab grown diamonds and we have since the beginning. And we work with fine jewelry, engagement, wedding bands, and we do a lot of bespoke pieces as well.

0:41Jasmine:I have a quick recommendation for you before we get into the show. If you're not on video, can you please switch to video? Jump over to Spotify or YouTube because can you guys see this necklace? Okay, this is a white gold lab diamond tennis necklace and it was a gift to myself. I hit a milestone in the business, big one, and secret one, but a big one. And I had my second baby and I was really feeling myself and I wanted a gift. And this is what we got. I am obsessed with it every single day. I want to tell you very quickly about the brand you're going to hear from the founders on the show today.

1:16Jasmine:It's an Australian brand called Kate and Cole. they make the most beautiful lab diamond jewelry just like so elevated so chic they do engagement rings as well in case you're in that you know life era but for the rest of us they have this kind of like tennis collection you can do this one in yellow gold or white gold or rose gold and they also have you know earrings other pieces of jewelry it's just such an amazing way to celebrate a milestone it's a true heirloom like i will keep this forever i'm going to give it to my baby girl that's why I wanted to get jewelry something I could pass down to her and I have a little discount code for you as well I'm going to put it in the show notes if you are in the market for something special I'll put the link to the website it's like I said two women they're based out of Australia the business has blown up recently we're going to talk about that on the show today and you actually see the pieces they make and the quality of what they make you'll understand why they're blowing up it's just stunning and I honestly I'm just like staring at myself all through this video.

2:15Jasmine:All right, let's get into the show. You started back in 2015 and you've been doing lab diamonds since the beginning. And this is something I'm super curious about because lab diamonds obviously have had this just huge upswing lately. I'm wearing one of your beautiful necklaces for anyone who's watching. I'm watching this on Spotify or YouTube. And I'm not someone I think who would have necessarily thought of myself as a lab diamond girl up until a few years ago, but now I'm all about it. I've got the lab diamond earrings, everything except my engagement ring, but I know that engagement rings are also now becoming hugely popular for people to source from Lab Diamond.

2:48Jasmine:Talk me through when you noticed that shift and how you kind of capitalised on that momentum. Let's start there. I think it got really comfortable for our customers maybe four years ago. I think up until that point we were definitely having more conversations around educating the customer or explaining, I guess, why they were appealing for us. And I think that's probably part of what's made it I guess easy for us is that for us it was also an easy choice. So we love them, we wear them, our engagement rings, our lab-grown diamonds. So I think because we were so comfortable with them and were so content with our decision to base our business around that, then when we're talking to customers, it was very much like our personal journey and the reasons that we chose it for sustainable reasons, ethical reasons.

3:35And also because we were so new to the jewellery industry, navigating lab-grown diamonds felt a lot easier than navigating the world of natural diamonds. It kind of was a decision that was just very comfortable. So I think that up until then, we're definitely having conversations like, oh, you know, this is our thoughts and feelings around it. This is why we think you should consider it. And it's a personal choice. And as you say, a lot of people maybe like start with like dabble with a pair of earrings or a tennis necklace because, yeah, it just feels like an easy transition. But, yeah, for us it's engagement rings.

4:09And, yeah, there's always a few mums that we, like, have to talk around and explain. Like Mothers of the Bride, yeah. Yeah. But now I think, you know, for a long time now people have come to us because of that rather than in spite of it. Because you're known for this place to get great live diamond jewelry. Yeah, I think so.

4:29Jasmine:Okay, let's go back to the founding story. Actually, before I ask that question, let's go to Milestones. Let's talk about some of the stuff that you guys have achieved and hit in the recent years, particularly since we've had this lab diamond boom on momentum. I was speaking with a friend of mine, Liv. She's a founder of a brand called Maison Essential. And I think you guys partnered with her recently. And I was having brunch with her and she was like, do you know the brand Kate and Cole? Because I was talking about how we wanted to buy this piece of jewelry to mark a significant like personal milestone.

4:58Jasmine:And I said, yeah, I remember them from when I used to live in Australia and blah, blah, blah. and she's like, I feel like they're doing really well and you should interview them and have them on the show. We've just partnered with them. And so that's why I wanted to have you on because you stood out to, I guess, another founder in the community as just a jewellery brand that was doing something really, really right. So tell us some of those milestones that you've been hitting. Working with Liv was amazing and those are some of the, I think, cool things that we've been doing in the last few years.

5:24I think, yeah, we sort of had a shift in the business from about 2020, which we'll probably talk to in a little bit but that allowed us to open up these possibilities to do things beyond I guess like just running the business so we're collaborating for events and things like that one of the big kind of milestone moments we had was when we collaborated with an artist called Nikki Cruz and we basically used her artwork on a pendant and a ring and that piece we sold in a limited edition run and that sold out and so for us that was the first time And we were sort of like, wow, this is actually of interest to our customers.

6:03We have a demand. Prior to that, we would sort of launch pieces and sales would trickle through and we would sort of like watch them come in in the days or weeks after. And this was like the day of. And so that was really exciting for us. So I think that that led to a few more artist collaborations, which were really exciting. Why did that work so well? Why did that one sell out? I think it was the first time we'd done something like that. It was the first time I'd seen a brand do something like that in our space, especially. Nikki Cruz, she had a bit of a following at the time, but I wouldn't say she was like a huge person at the time.

6:38We just loved her work. We loved her art. And I was actually gifted one of her art pieces and that sort of inspired it all. And I think it was such a cool ring. Yeah, it was just beautiful. It was like a female form. So I think it just resonated with a lot of people. We had one customer who she was a surgeon and she worked on women who had breast cancer and she did reconstructive surgery for them. So she bought the piece and it's really sentimental and personal for her. So I think it just connected with a lot of our customers. They found it to be really beautiful. And I guess that limited edition moment gave it a lot of momentum as well.

7:15And that created that demand around the piece as well. And I'm pretty sure we sold a few pieces to the US as well.

7:21Jasmine:That was like the first time we kind of like tickled an audience overseas. And that was like, yeah, that was cool. Okay, let's talk some other milestones. Can you tell us about growth percentages or anything like that? I know we're not going to go into revenue numbers, but anything that can help us understand some more of the momentum that you've had as a business? 22-23 was like a thousand percent growth. Wow. So that was down to we'd first started advertising. So we hadn't advertised up until that point. As in Meta, Google. anything so we relied on organic completely up until that point um so that was that was a shift and like we were spending such small budgets but because we hadn't done anything it did give us really nice uptick um and we started building our team like from then so I think that was definitely the year where we were both like this is this is working now um I think before that we were like hopeful and excited but I think probably we could say that that was a bit of a bit of a year where we were like okay we're now pulling levers and we're seeing things change rather than being like why is it working yeah what are we what are we doing that's creating this it was like we've always been sort of like on demand manufacturing so while we'll make a sample and prototype um that's kind of all we'll have until we get orders so it means that we can be like you know quite quick we always like love a launch on a whim like Friday afternoon or just send the team into a spiral but um I think that that has meant that we can we can be quite experimental and playful we can listen to our customers we can infinitely customize personalize and then that launched uh they kind of fed into our jewelry builder which was a piece of like custom technology that we built in-house we had complete creative control over it we drew the components rather than like rendering them so it was meant to feel really like sketchy and involve the customer and I do think that's been a real pivotal part of our brand story and how the customer you know just watch we can you can see every time someone like designs something in the builder you get a little render of it.

9:25Jasmine:So it's a tool on your website essentially that allows people to design their own pieces. Yes yeah and you can watch in real time how decisions impact pricing so you know jewelry has I think quite an opaque pricing calculator or yeah way that way that people price their products is a little bit secretive which is obviously fair but you know the we wanted to sort of guide the customer say okay this is your budget you can do this or you could do this or maybe if you did this you might be able to change this. Something that I think is one of the reasons why I really wanted to speak to you and I think is going to really resonate and connect with a lot of women who are listening and who are in our community is the idea that you were building a business for multiple years before you had the big unlock and before that moment happened.

10:11Jasmine:And I actually hear this quite a lot. And another example is Cindy Ramirez, who is the founder of a brand called Chill House. They started off as like a local kind of like nail spa cafe hybrid in York. And then she started making press on nails and they came out in 2020. Yeah. Bingo, off they go. and now then Walmart came, Target, all of the big mass retailers. And that was kind of the unlock that she had years and years into the business. And so I always loved to kind of drill down on these moments when I speak to founders who have had them because some of us, I think, who are building, we can kind of be thinking, am I nearly about to have that unlock or is this thing not working?

10:54Jasmine:Like what was, reflecting back, what do you think were some of those signs that that moment was coming that people can apply to their own stories and their own businesses. Yeah, we were talking about this earlier and I think we were saying it's either moments of traction or moments of financial, I guess, validation. And for a long time, the financial validation didn't come for us. It was moments of traction. So we kind of had to push through for a long time. And obviously it was very much a side thing for a period of time until we both consciously decided to kind of have a real shot at it um but it was like those key moments like the nikki cruz collab we launched a birth strain collection um quite early on and we again used 12 micro influencers to shoot the piece and that was like again a moment that gave us traction as the brand it was something different we could see that our kind of audience was engaging with that They're excited by it.

11:53Didn't necessarily sell out or have this insane financial impact for the business. But we were like, there's something here. We want to kind of keep building on these sort of key moments. So I think that's what kept us going. And it was like attaching to these little moments in time that eventually did become something that was financially validating for us. But that did take a long time. And it was, I think, again, well, I think we were so lucky in that we had each other. and that we kind of kept each other in it. We were both really motivated by it. And to have that second person there who's like just as willing and able and wanting to be in it kind of keeps you in it as well.

12:33I think it would, you know, be really hard. And we always say if one of us wanted out or had decided to take a step back, I don't think, you know, the other would have continued.

12:45Jasmine:I remember reading something, a quote from someone a while ago, and it was about marriage and divorce. and they said basically how our marriage lasted so long is that neither one of us wanted to get divorced at the same time. Who was that? Yeah, that's it. Someone, someone, very famous. Even in a day. Like not an Obama but someone like that. Anyway, and I just wonder when I look at a co-founder relationship if it's literally that. Neither one of us wanted to quit on the same day. They're like running down the hallway. You're like, come back, shutting doors. It's like we're doing this one more week.

13:13Jasmine:Let's see how we go. That's so funny. Okay, talk to me about building the team because you guys were full-time in the beginning. So how did you make that decision that you were both going to go full time in the business? And then how did you start bringing people into the team? So, yeah, I had a mat leave with my son, Harry. So he's almost seven now. And I had that time and I was like, right, well, I'll give it like a real, a real shot. And if in that time we can make it like a viable, like we can start to take a salary and I can say, yes, this is. During your maternity leave. Yeah. So I had like six months.

13:46Jasmine:I hear this so much from women where they go on maternity leave and decide to take themselves a job that's harder than their actual normal job. And it was literally like every moment he was sleeping, I was working. Yes. Because, yeah, I had six months to sort of prove it to myself, my husband, to Mads. Like, you know, like because Mads was in Sydney. I was in Newcastle. I was literally like luring her to Newcastle being like, please come and do this with me. so we yeah we we over that time um this I think we will talk about this maybe later as well but we started paying ourselves like 50 a week because I was like there's no way we're going to have a full-time salary for both of us to just like walk in and pick up in a suitcase and be on our way to to leave our jobs um I'd been in my job as a art director for like seven years before that and I it wasn't that I was over it or that I was done but I just I've always wanted to have my own my own project so I was like this is a pretty finite time where I've got an opportunity and like if it'll work and you know I can convince me to move to Newcastle maybe maybe we could do this so um yeah we started paying ourselves$50 and we moved from a contract jeweler to our first team member Leah who's still with us today um and so she was our first hire and it meant that we had someone who was in the business making jewellery alongside with us because neither of us are bench jewellers.

15:09I studied jewellery at university, but it was from very much a design conceptual point of view, not a technical point of view. So I think we were so fortunate with her as our first hire because she basically was able to guide us through that process of starting to make really really high quality jewelry and we've always leaned on technology kind of as much as we can without getting in the way of like traditional and like handmade practices so anywhere where it makes sense for us to use technology we do and anywhere it doesn't we still we have so much um artisan you know manual craft that goes into our pieces um and almost everything like to such a high degree is still made in newcastle um or brisbane is our two sort of working studios.

15:57Amazing. So what does the team look like today? 30 women in our Newcastle studio. And then we have, I guess, a wonderful team of contractors around us, which we sort of started to put in place in the last few years. I think that period that Sarah was talking to when she sort of like made that leap into the business, we, you know, because we were such a young business at the time a lot of the hires we made were on a junior level um which was amazing because we could you know train these beautiful women to work alongside us and they were excited by the brand and they were really keen to absorb the knowledge and um kind of come along on the journey with us but we got to a point where we both fell pregnant at the same time and it was in that kind of insane growth period.

16:47And so we had this moment of like, oh, my God, we are like the senior leadership team. We are the managers. We are everything. We don't have a buffer between us and the rest of the team to help sort of step in when we're both actually going to have to step back a little bit. So that allowed us to look at consultants, look at like more experienced people that we could bring in. And like areas of focus. Yeah. So we would be like, all right, we're going to really hone in on like Klaviyo and like electronic, like, sort of strategy and we would pick pick a zone be like right now it's we're into web world and

17:19Jasmine:we're going to really focus on conversion so so you basically had a list of things that you wanted to develop within the business and you brought in expertise yeah through consultants and freelancers at different points in time and a lot of them still work with us what were some of those things that you're focusing on during that area of hyper growth definitely yeah like the email marketing it was the digital marketing we kind of like really ramped as in like the paid strategy Yeah, we did a revamp completely, which was a big project. Crazy at the time. And then sort of started to bring in some of those top level kind of managers from like a marketing perspective because that was sort of like my area.

17:59So I was stepping out of that. We hired our accidental GM who is still with us today and he helped a lot of the operational side and the technology stacking and things like that. So that kind of allowed us to take a little bit of a step back. but we also made a hire at the time which was not right for the business and we basically brought in an operations manager full-time who we kind of you know sold to the team as this stand-in person for us so that we would be able to have a proper break and we basically had a team intervention weeks after hiring her where they were all just like not the right this is not the right fit it's you know they were terrified about us both stepping back right and this person being there for us so we had to kind of make the call quite quickly to you know let her go and figure out what we were going to do and and it did mean you know relying on those consultants we restructured a little bit we kind of up leveled people throughout the team to become on that managerial level and kind of bring kind of smaller teams in beneath them and we both kind of sort of forgotten about that We created these like silos and we basically picked like our people that we thought we like really saw a lot of potential in and kind of were like, we need to take a chance on you.

19:14Like here's the. And did they all step up? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They did. And I mean, we both came back earlier than we probably anticipated, but I don't know if there's a world which we wouldn't have as well. So it was, it all worked out, but it was, it was a huge time of growth and a huge time of learning for us as well.

19:31Jasmine:What's the lesson there for somebody who's thinking about making those hiring decisions that they can avoid? Yeah, they can avoid bringing in the wrong person. Yeah, I think it's, I think there's, you know, I think the nice thing about, I think the nice thing is when you get to hiring, you're writing an ad for the person that you want. And as long as you get people that respond to that ad, you will be able to choose from skill sets mostly. And I think that's where we, you know, we were both nervous about going on leave and we really wanted to make the right call for the business and that possibly overrode our instinct.

20:05So I think that, you know, culture, when you meet someone and you get along with them and you can see how they'll fit into your team and lift your team up, I think that is probably something to really listen to. And I think when you're like new to hiring, which we were, you know, you can get carried away with the hiring process. And it's, you know, you've got someone's livelihood in your hands. You've got someone's future. You know, it's not a thing to take lightly. And we were hiring quite, you know, rapidly at that point. So I think that taking your time and possibly extending your interview panel a little bit.

20:37Like, you know, the nice thing about having the two of us is we can kind of look at each other and be like, oh, I don't think so. Like, yeah, we, you know, maybe they don't tick every single box, but like we can imagine working with them. I think listening, like, you know, we lean on each other so much for those types of decisions. And now we lean on the team a lot as well. Yeah.

20:55Jasmine:So you bring them into that interview process. Yeah. If it's like the right time, because, yeah, I think with that particular situation, we did sort of go against, I think, what the team was sort of responding to us. Because of the skill set, you thought this person's got the skills. It was literally the experience on paper. Yeah. We kind of, we had no one applying that was in that realm. So it was really hard to overlook. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But now we, we kind of a lot more, um, hyper aware of that stuff and know that we've got like a really strong team around us that can help fill knowledge gaps.

21:30If we find the person that we, as Sarah said, feel like we can work side by side and is passionate about the business, feels like we can teach them and they can bring a new level of expertise or you know observation to the brand is kind of more important now I think. And if you get someone great and they can take the place of someone that may not have been the right fit like I think that is the it's not it's not what you're it's not what you're not getting it's like what what could you get if you get someone who really like wants to be there and is like interested and enthusiastic and skilled is like a bonus.

22:03Jasmine:We've talked a little bit about product assortment and partnerships and collaboration we've talked about team building But I want to get your thoughts on when you look back at the last 10 years on some of the very tactical things that you've done in your marketing strategy that have been working. You talked about collaborations and partnerships. We talked about how you started investing in paid a few years ago. What else, when you look back and think, hey, this is definitely something that has helped fuel the growth, what stands out? I think a big thing was the residency concept, which we introduced in 2023.

22:39just after um yeah we both had bubs we being in Newcastle we're a little bit remote um you know it's not far from Sydney and a lot of our couples travel to see us we have people come and they're like we've flown over from Perth or we've flown up from Tassie yeah so that's so amazing that we can be sort of a destination for people but that was the first time that we decided to sort of take our brand out there and kind of meet with people where they were at so we introduced the concept of residencies where we would essentially find a place that we thought was really beautiful, represented the brand in a really cool way.

23:14It didn't necessarily look like our current space, but had a really lovely feel to it. And we would like activate in that space for a period of time, really short windows of time. So again, creating a bit of demand, be like three days in Melbourne and it would be, you know, meet with us, the founders. We would do events. So we would invite influencers, media into the space and create a bit of hype and then have people through the space and that was like a really lovely way for us to connect with our customers for people to see the pieces in real life and be like oh you know I was looking at your brand but we just haven't found the time to come and meet with you and so to create that ease and then that's just a concept that we kind of continue to build on and it kind of becomes embedded in our strategy now like we did six last year I think for our we call it our 10-year tour which is a lot so we're sort of looking at what that looks like now, where are the, you know, the peak places, where is really there a demand for us to come and potentially overseas as well.

24:11And now looking at international markets and things like that. So I think that's been a huge milestone from a marketing perspective, which has been such a beautifully received thing from our customers and people know us for it now. Like, you know, they'll reach out to us and be like, do you have any residencies in Brisbane coming up? When are you coming to Sydney next? So I think to be, you know, having people wait for that now is really lovely to see.

24:34Jasmine:As a predominantly e-commerce brand, you spoke about the residencies, but predominantly you're an online brand. You're pretty high ticket price for purchases that are happening over a website. What are some of those things that brands need to think about if they want to be selling into like a luxury category? I think like that customer journey and how many touch points you sometimes need, like it still blows my mind that someone in the States in the dead of the night with no email contact will buy an engagement ring and just like go good for you but for most the most customers they need like a little bit more nurturing than that and i think you know for us like customer service like we take it so seriously like it's that along with personally yes can you say it's such a miss these luxury brands that are using ai in their customer service and like hotels boutique hotels who are doing this and luxury hotels that are using i am like yeah if i'm spending this much money i would just like to speak to a person humans humans are important yeah and we so we try and keep the same team member through the entire journey with that customer so even if they've started with us and they've bought uh you know a pair of earrings or something a little bit smaller we you know quite we want to see that journey continue and like we sort of always say like lots of people have multiple brands for you know maybe clothing or footwear but for jewelry if you have a really good experience They're probably not that, it's not that big a drive to have lots of different companies and especially for men.

26:03So they might, if they pick someone and they have a good experience, we sort of tend to be able to like retain that customer. So having that one person reach back out and for us to be able to go back to them and be like, you know, what do you think about that? So I guess that all kind of links back to trust and whether it's trust on your website because they've been able to access the information about where the piece is made, where the stone comes from, those sorts of questions, you know, warranties, like those things that are, I guess, top of mind when you're purchasing. And also I think the price, like web that you're creating have been like, all right, I can see how different pieces fit in.