Strategy · Jewelry
Verne Jewels
Beautiful images where you could not see the jewellery.
- Relationship
- Fractional CMO
- Years
- 2025 – 2026
- With
- VERNE JEWELS
- My role
- Fractional CMO · April 2025–August 2026, completed
Sources
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The situation
Verne Jewels makes fine jewellery to order. 18k reawakened gold, D-F diamonds, natural stones, six collections.
They came asking for content, social and growth.
The store was running. The Instagram grid was irregular. Content calendars were approved and then missed. A quiz funnel had never been walked end to end. Product errors sat live on the site: a collection spelled three ways across the title, the URL and the image filenames, a misspelling in a ring name, delivery promises that contradicted each other between the piece and the generic shipping copy. And the brand search competed with a nineteenth-century novelist.
What I saw
Two things under the request.
The atmosphere was eating the product. Very beautiful images where the piece was unreadable. On a fine jewellery feed, if the viewer does not understand within three seconds that a piece is for sale, the image becomes decoration.
And my availability set the production rhythm. While the rhythm is a person, consistency is impossible, and without consistency there is no momentum and no usable data.
The founder saw it before I did. She was asking for reliability at this stage of the company.
The decision
Move from a weekly grid to a monthly grid, prepared and scheduled ahead, with a written line of intent for every post before any image is produced. The schedule becomes the system.
Three directions went out. Staying weekly, which was more responsive and produced inconsistency and work under stress. Keeping the secondary channels, which went back to the founder so production could concentrate on Instagram and Facebook. Keeping the poetic brand voice on Instagram, replaced by direct copy aimed at a sale.
The cost was real. A monthly grid removes same-day reactivity. Direct copy on Instagram creates a deliberate gap with the rest of the brand, which stays slow and poetic everywhere else. It is a trade.
She decided the creative direction, always. I decided the diagnosis and the production system. The move from a rhythm to a system was hers, and she was right.
What was built
Newsletters on a house HTML template, locked after verification, two files per send.
An SEO plan of twenty articles sequenced across four months: educational, then conversion, then brand depth, then comparative.
Instagram and Facebook grids, structured captions, an arc format for product drops.
The Verne Style Oracle: a style quiz on the brand subdomain, deployed and wired to the email platform and a model API.
A Reels and Stories campaign driving the quiz, with UTM tracking in place. SEO and digital surface audits. CEO-level decks. Art direction for photography and video. Scheduling infrastructure through the Meta Graph API.
What changed
Production cadence moved from weekly to monthly, scheduled ahead.
Channels narrowed to Instagram and Facebook. The rest went back to the founder.
The email template was locked against the emails actually sent. Sentence case in the body. An underlined serif call to action. Prices kept out of the body. Emerald reserved for the footer.
The vocabulary was locked. Brass was banned in favour of warm gold tones. Any framing of a discount was banned, including when the value is bundled. And a factual error was corrected: the workshop and the photography location are distinct.
The Instagram voice moved from poetic to direct.
The most important change is a process rule, and it came from a failure. No campaign launches now without walking the customer journey end to end first. An ad ran, someone saw it, wanted the quiz, went to the profile, and the link was not there. None of us had walked the funnel as a customer before launching it. That mistake gets repaired once and never repeats.
One exchange changed the level of the engagement. She asked me to remove the words quiet and slow from a collection. I did, then told her that vocabulary lived across the rest of the site, so the real question was whether the house was changing its voice. She had not framed it that way. It is the one moment in the engagement where an execution decision became a positioning decision.
April 2025–August 2026. Completed engagement, including handover.
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