PS: Do you have a dream celebrity or a place where if you saw your jewelry, you’d know you made it?
SK: I don't really know celebrities that well, to be honest. A woman we really admire is Amal Clooney. She looks really good and elegant, but she's her own woman. She's a power woman. She studied, teaches at Columbia, and is this really renowned lawyer. That's how we really see AUrate. It's empowerment, because you're enabling yourself to wear real gold. And that's why we care about women in empowerment. The fact that we give a book to a kid, obviously it's about empowerment. Education is about empowering yourself. And we feel the same for being able to wear real gold. As for the women who we really would like to be wearing us, most are women who have their own businesses, like an Amal, or Jessica Alba. That's the most interesting for us.
PS: What's next for you guys? What do you see for the brand coming up?
SK: We're very happy with the progress we've made, but we're still growing. We've grown since last year like 400 percent. We want to keep that growth rate. I think two things are on our horizon. One is continuing with our pop-ups, maybe even at some point having our own retail store. It turns out that that really works. We're able to do our own retail, and we can keep our prices low, and we can pay for our rent. It's a concept that we just tried, but it's working. We've only done pop-ups in New York now, but I'd love to do them in LA and expand the pop-ups. We hired someone who is really our retail manager to focus on that, who is examining our online presence. As you know, it's hard to be found online, if you think about it. There are so many brands, so much going on. Articles and press helps a lot, but still, if somebody is living in a town in the middle of the US looking for jewelry, how do they find us? Thinking about that, and digital marketing strategy. If there is no pop-up around and nothing going on, then how do they find us? That's the other piece. Investing in digital marketing. We're hoping that in five years, 10 years, we're much bigger than we are, and when somebody thinks about getting a piece of jewelry, we're one of the brand names they think about.
Asymmetrical Pearl Ear Jacket ($850)
