Go Virtual! CHAUMET's Tipping Point in China

The world-renowned French jewelry and watch designer, CHAUMET, which was established in 1780 and entered the Chinese market 13 years ago, is ushering in an important "tipping point" for its next development which involves presenting the brand’s historical accumulation, beauty, and connotation via a digital platform.

CHAUMET recently passed a new "milestone" on the road to exploring digital innovation: the launch of an online flagship store, which is the first full-range online shopping platform in the world, including WeChat mini-program and H5.

This is not only a collection of the brand's full range of jewelry and watches, but it also presents different sides of the brand's artistic and aesthetic concept. Being imbued with the deep feelings of the brand and Chinese consumers, it can be called a "City of the Clouds", carefully created by CHAUMET.

History, Art, and Love: The Eternal Weapons Against " Black Swan Events "

“Wandering” around the “City of the Clouds” and exploring by sliding your fingertips, you can "touch" each CHAUMET piece and understand the cutting and mosaic techniques behind it. This "wandering" experience becomes more real and has a special aesthetic feeling with the help of the short videos, sound effects, and pictures on the online platform; meanwhile, the rich emotional core, historical value, and artistic innovation of the CHAUMET brand itself make this experience more wonderful. Visitors can get a glimpse of the 240 years of the romance of France, the fashion capital of the world, through this “City of the Clouds.”

Over the past 240 years, CHAUMET has witnessed major historical moments, such as the French Revolution, the grandest coronation of the emperors, and the wedding of Napoleon to his queen, and has created countless works of art throughout the world. CHAUMET is also the only jewelry brand that can be displayed in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

"Love" has become the eternal core of CHAUMET due to the unprecedented love between Napoleon and Queen Josephine. CHAUMET has written the chapter of "love" uninterrupted and given “love” a contemporary interpretation in line with the times. The new generation of women is materially independent and pays more attention to the inner self. Therefore, the brand encourages all women to grow into “Lady Chaumet” with a multi-faceted appeal to love others and love themselves. CHAUMET creates dreams for consumers and believes that love will triumph over everything.

The historical witness and inheritance, the transmission and interpretation of eternal love, coupled with exquisite craftsmanship, make CHAUMET's jewelry "hard currency" with unique artistic and aesthetic facets in the new era. In this era of "black swan events" which is full of "uncertainty", CHAUMET can be said to be a fairly "definite" choice for "long-term investment".

The Joséphine series, Liens series, and Bee My Love series are among the most eye-catching flowers in the colorful garden CHAUMET has elaborately created in the “City of the Clouds”:

• Joséphine series: CHAUMET turned the former crown of Napoleon into a beautiful finger ring, necklace, dangling earrings, and a treasure on the wrist to honor Queen Joséphine, as a recognizable masterpiece of the "Crown Master".
• Liens series: CHAUMET's most classic, best-selling, and recognizable jewelry. It refined the "link" logo that frequently appears in historical works into a brand signature aesthetic symbol, expressing rich meaning: "the connection of human beings, the fate of feelings, and the embedding of lives".
• Bee My Love series: CHAUMET’s representation of a naturalistic style based on inspiration drawn from a hive and the use of a gold color and paving crafts. As a symbol of Napoleon's imperial power and lucky totem, the bee has been CHAUMET's inspiration and brand identity for more than two centuries.

Click Here to Explore CHAUMET’s Official Online Flagship Store

Digitization: Opening the Door to the World of Fine Jewelry for More People

Although high-end jewelry brands seem to be far away from the general public, CHAUMET has always hoped to digitally open the door to the high-end jewelry world to more people. In 2015, it began to explore the use of digital innovation to provide young users with better services, give them new experiences and interact with them. CHAUMET has always maintained its sense of rhythm in the balance of inheritance and innovation from "Try Wedding Rings Online", the 2016 H5 game, "Hack Your Phone for 2 Minutes Wanna Play", the 2017 online VR movie "What's past is prologue" to an immersive jewelry matching experience H5 mini-game in 2018.

CHAUMET's time-limited WeChat store was officially tested for online sales in 2019. Two days after the limited-time store went online, it had already received positive feedback from the market, and some models had even sold out by January 16.

Before the official flagship store was launched online, almost the only channel for Chinese consumers to purchase genuine CHAUMET products was from premium offline boutiques. Although the brand has actively expanded its footprint in China in recent years, the boutiques are currently concentrated in first- and second-tier cities, which makes it difficult for consumers in third- and fourth-tier cities to reach CHAUMET. Therefore, the launch of the official online flagship store allows consumers to be fully connected to this top hidden luxury brand, regardless of time and location.

People can reach the same rich product line in the online store as in the offline flagship store. This time, the official flagship store includes more than 100 full-series works, including diamond rings, wedding rings, necklaces, bracelets, wrist jewels, etc. The price range is also broader, since accessible entry-level models and personalized models are involved to meet consumers' multiple needs for jewelry selection.

To overcome the inability to try products on, CHAUMET's online flagship store innovatively provides intelligent hand measurement functions, including online measurement and manual measurement, to recommend the suitable ring size more accurately for customers, which eliminates their main concern. Besides, CHAUMET also provides customized ring measurement tools when customers buy rings online.

To experience the "City of the Clouds", users need to log in to the personal center through their mobile phone number, and the purchase order will also be reserved by the brand in different online and offline channels. The brand’s official website is currently registered using a customer’s email address, and the WeChat official account is used to reserve offline store services based on mobile phone numbers or WeChat ID. Consumers cannot log in to all platforms through a unified member account. CHAUMET may also be able to explore how to establish an omnichannel membership system and strengthen the private traffic of the brand with the help of the "City of the Clouds."

Conclusion

New trends bring new opportunities, but long-established luxury brands have maintained a curious and puzzled complex attitude toward digitalization. The historical tradition of luxury brands, the focus on continuous communication, brand identity and genes, and the targeting of high-net-worth individuals and strict content control all seem to contradict digitalization.

Nevertheless, the need to embrace digitization seems inevitable because the the post-1980s and 1990s generation of the mainstream Chinese consumers  grew up in a digital world. They are digital aborigines, who are always online. Brands can keep pace with them, enter their social circles, understand their real needs, and generate spiritual resonance and connection by embracing digitalization.

Luxury brands need higher requisites to balance this natural contradiction and the needs of the times, for example, how to maintain a sense of luxury in e-commerce and consumer communication. For the first time, CHAUMET has launched a full range of online shopping platforms globally, displaying the historical accumulation of the brand through videos and pictures, and providing online consumers with luxury services that can only be enjoyed offline through hand measurement, exclusive customer service, etc. CHAUMET is gradually feeling its way toward digitization so that the charm and glory that it has accumulated for 240 years will continue to shine from the depths of history into the future.

| Photo Credit: CHAUMET

| Chinese Author: Jiaqi Wang

| Editor: Elisa