Jewelry brand sees huge 40% lockdown sales spike

Founded in 2008 by a husband-and-wife duo, Jenny Bird is fast becoming a household name within the fashion world and a cult-favorite among IT girls and celebrity stylists.

Focused on creating modern design-led jewelry for style-conscious women, the brand has seen explosive growth across its wholesale and ecommerce channels and is a desired brand within luxury fashion stores including Nordstrom, Fenwick and Harvey Nichols.

However, when stores around the world closed due to Covid-19, the future of the business was  threatened. Jenny Bird, CEO and Creative Director explains: “When lockdown hit, our biggest panic was that all our wholesale stores had to close. That was 50% of our revenue gone overnight. It was a major concern.”

The modern jewelry brand sells its pieces via two Shopify websites and 80 wholesale clients, as well as in its own retail store, which was opened in the fashion district of Toronto last fall, and, like other bricks and mortar stores, had to close when lockdown hit.

In a surprising twist though the brand saw a 40% increase in sales overnight, as shoppers rushed online to buy their favorite pieces.

Jenny explains: “Our ecommerce sales more than made up for the lost revenue. The first few weeks of lockdown was like a Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend combined, we’ve never seen sales quite like it.”
Managing such rapid spikes in demand is no easy feat, and the brand needed to adjust its online strategy to support the digital growth. The brand credits its ability to manage the surge in sales to its tech partner, Brightpearl, a popular digital operations solution.

“As our channel demand shifted unpredictability, we really relied on Brightpearl to help us manage our inventory throughout the lockdown.”

Without Brightpearl in place, Jenny Bird may have struggled to soar during the pandemic.

“Before we had Brightpearl, it was insane”, says Jenny. “We had to manage inventory, demand and forecasting for separate locations and it became far too complicated, and there was a lot of guesswork involved – which could have been a disaster for us during the pandemic.

“Fortunately, with Brightpearl, we have proper planning and forecast capabilities. Not to mention all our platforms – Shopify, our 3PL  – it’s all fully integrated. Brightpearl created a single source of truth for us that helped us beat the pandemic .”

www.jenny-bird.com