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The Largest Online Personalized Jewelry Company To Date
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The success of Mark Shami’s personalized online jewelry brand M Jewelers didn’t come overnight. After working with his family in New York’s diamond district for years, Shami decided to test his knowledge and experience by launching his own digital brand in 2014. Shortly after starting his own business, his friend Anthony Frisina joined as a partner and partner at Zwei, who decided to take advantage of what was then the golden age of Instagram. With that in mind, they invested their money heavily in Instagram ads and influencer gifts. It wasn’t until the 2016 holiday season that they saw the impact of their investments, and sales hit record levels. Today, M Jewelers is the largest online personalized jewelry company to date, loved by celebrities and consumers of the Instagram generation. As their sales continue to multiply, we sat down with founder Mark Shami to discuss the evolution of the brand’s continued success.To get more news about Personalized Jewelry, you can visit koalaprint.com official website.
I grew up around jewelry. My father and two uncles were all involved in jewelry in different ways. Growing up, my father owned a corner shop in NYC’s Diamond District, and my two uncles are deeply involved in the world of department store jewelry. I was able to learn all of the different aspects of the retail, wholesale, sourcing, development and manufacturing business from the three, which led to my love of custom and personalized jewelry. I always made name tag chains and rings growing up in my dad’s business for clients and friends. I started building TheMJewelersNY.com in the summer of 2013 while working in NYC’s Diamond District. I created our original website, designed our first collection of 25 items, photographed all of our products, and started TheMJewelersNY.com. As excited as I was when I officially launched the website in 2014, a week went by and my sales stopped coming in. Then I spent the next 6-12 months, day and night, direct messaging on Instagram asking, “Hey, I would love to make you a custom name tag necklace. ‘I remember spending everything on these gift items for months. Everyone replied, I was shocked and addicted. The timing was perfect, we were still in the golden age of Instagram and the playing field was completely open. My best friend Anthony Frisina loved my job and wanted to join the business in 2016. He asked to buy into the store with a small amount of money, so I made him an affiliate. Neither of us knew at the time what to do with the money. We thought about buying inventory, opening locations and hiring more employees. Instead, we took the money he brought in with what the company had and put it all in Instagram ads, which at that point had only launched a few years earlier in November 2013. We spent every penny we had on ads and nothing happened. It wasn’t until our first big Christmas season in December 2016 that we discovered that the entire reach of the influencers and the advertising expenditure had actually worked and that the orders were coming in every second. It was time to expand.
It all felt surreal when we rented our first NYC office and hired our first employees. It was just an 8,000-square-foot office in the clothing district, and we outgrew it quickly. We moved to larger floors of the building every few months because we ran out of space. We recently rented a 4,000-square-foot office in SoHo, NY and started building an entirely new manufacturing space, which was always our dream in the beginning.
We always try to align with brands and partners we believe in and fit in with our NYC ethos. We’ve been working on a license with the MLB for the past 2 years, which we’re finally launching this year, as well as an activation with programming to follow, where we’ll be highlighting NYC creatives.
The celebrity aspect of the brand happened very organically. We get a lot of styling requests and pulls for shoots. We have had great relationships and friendships with the stylists and editors we work with. We are able to make our pieces in-house, which allows us to flip a custom item over for an overnight shoot.
Our process is very unique and each piece is completely custom and hand made so Covid really shook us. It really forced us to get more distant overall and get creative with our rollouts of new styles and collaborations. Our sales soared during the Covid, so we even had to have some of our jewelry equipment work from home. We kept it up [and] it made us stronger than ever.