e Retail: For the most part, Georg Jensen seems to fly under the radar from a media perspective. It seems like the brand wants to let the products speak for themselves. Anne Sullivan: Totally. We have such a loyal, strong following that is generational, and I think that speaks to something as well. When we took over [local management of] Georg Jensen in 2000, we started advertising it for the first time in its history in Australia, and we actually had complaints. Customers were saying, “No, no. That’s not what Jensen does. Jensen is a best-kept secret. Do not amplify the brand.’  It’s true that we don’t see ourselves as a fashion brand. We have an internal mindset that we are the thinking woman’s jewelry. It’s strong women who buy our pieces; they’re addicted to Georg Jensen. It’s got kudos because it’s got heritage – it’s been around for 119 years, 120 years next year. It has consistency. We take from the past to develop the future, because we’ve got it all. We’ve got the archives and we build on it. That’s who we are.  IR: Can you tell me about the history of the brand, and how it started in Denmark? AS: There was a man called Georg Jensen, and he was a jeweler, a silversmith. He saw that there was a need for women to wear jewelry. And Denmark is a fairly egalitarian country. You don’t see big diamonds, or big gems. But he decided to make some pieces of jewelry. He had a little cabinet outside his house where he put everything that he made that day, and people would walk past and say, ‘Oh, I’ll buy that.’ It was really popular, and then got bigger and bigger. Because it was humble. Everything was based on silver, he didn’t deal with gold. He started with jewelry and then started developing hammered pieces of homewares, sterling silver bowls and plates. And then, as things developed over the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, they started playing with stainless steel. They used the designs that had been created, and instead of producing them in sterling silver, used stainless steel. And that has developed now in Australia and globally as a really strong part of the Georg Jensen brand.  IR: Tell me about taking over the brand in 2000. What did the business look like then? AS: It was a very elegant brand, but you had to hunt to find it. There was one big store in Centre Point in Sydney, and a concession in Georges [department store] in Melbourne, and that was the extent of it. In 2000, we came in and started developing a retail component. That’s my background – in retail. We felt that the most important thing we had to do was protect the brand. No matter what responsibilities you have, you are here for one reason, and that’s to protect the brand. Everything we do is always with one eye on the brand.  It wasn’t until 2009 that we started having a marketing department in Australia. Nadia Bayfield was our first marketing person in Australia, and she’s still around today. What that’s done is maintained a consistency with the brand. We do fly under the radar. We don’t want to jump and scream and yell too much. But we’re showing consistent growth. We grew very quickly from 2000 to 2009, and then we [really accelerated] from 2009 – that’s when we started putting the marketing blowtorch on it.  IR: When you talk about ramping up the growth, was it about increasing the marketing? Trying to get to understand your customer and how you could nurture that relationship? What were some of the things that you were doing? AS: We found that we needed to get a better customer base. We had a solid customer base, but it wasn’t as multigenerational as it needed to be – so, widening the neck of who our customers could be. That also aligned with a very major launch in Denmark where they started focusing on gold. They introduced a range called Fusion, which is a combination [of gold and silver], so that was a very strong story to tell, and it was a story we could tell to a much broader customer base. IR: What does Georg Jensen’s presence in Australia look like today? AS: We went from one store with two or three concessions, to 14 stand-alone Georg Jensen stores around Australia and 35 shop-in-shops for David Jones [department stores] and a very fast-moving e-commerce site. Our business has grown 50-fold in 20 years, so it’s a serious business, such that we are the largest market for Georg Jensen outside of Denmark. IR: Despite the fact that Georg Jensen doesn’t see itself as a fashion brand, it does a lot of collaborations with fashion brands, like the Danish designer label Stine Goya and, most recently, the award-winning knitwear designer Amalie Roege Hove for the Moonlight Grapes collection. Does that serve to keep the product offering fresh?  AS: Exactly. We refer to a great motif that was done in 1918, and have someone like Amalie produce these incredible pieces. It still has the same DNA as what was done in 1918, but 105 years later, it’s the most beautiful interpretation – very contemporary and an amazing aesthetic. We don’t pick designers who are big in the spotlight, we pick emerging designers, somebody who’s got the passion and spirit of the brand. It would be much easier if we got Stella McCartney to do something, but that’s not what we’re seeking. We’re seeking somebody who can bring a freshness to the [traditional] method. Taking from the past, but producing for the future.  IR: You did a really cool customer event to launch the recent collaboration with Amalie Roege Hove. Can you tell me about that?  AS: We have these customer dinners. Pre-Covid, we would have one in Melbourne and one in Sydney, sometimes in Brisbane, and we would always try to make them money-can’t-buy experiences. What is the latest restaurant, who is the latest singer? Sometimes it’s an association with Vogue. Other times, with the Australian Ballet.  What we do is ask customers to buy the ticket, so there’s a price that we place on the ticket, but customers get the value of that ticket in a voucher, and they can go in-store and buy a piece. I took the idea from the cosmetics industry. You go and have a facial, or have your makeup done; it costs you $70, but you’ve got a voucher. I thought, ‘What a great idea.’ And now it is just hugely popular.  This year, because of time constraints, we could have only one dinner, so we made it a fantastic dinner at Bennelong [at the Sydney Opera House]. It was the most expensive event we’ve had – each person spent A$550 (US$350), and it sold out within a day. We invited our top customers across Australia, and the amount of people who reached out to me on LinkedIn, whom I’ve never met, asking if I could get them another ticket, was absolutely mind-blowing. The customers were absolutely buzzing, they loved being a part of it, because everybody wore their Georg Jensen. It was the icebreaker in the room.  They are really tricky to pull off, but every time we have one of these events, we walk out thinking, ‘These are our customers.’ It is encouraging to face our customers one to one. We used this dinner to launch the Amalie range, but it’s not always a range launch. Sometimes we have a few products there, but it’s mostly to bring everybody into the same room at the same time. IR: So many brands and retailers talk about their customers as a community, but it’s not always true. Can you reflect on the importance of the customer relationship today? There’s so much choice out there, and when you have an economic environment like what we have now, people are really looking at what they’re spending… AS: We’ve got to be really careful to hit that spot, because as you said, money’s tight, disposable income is zero. How do you make yourself better? We have a brand that has stood the test of time. We’re a sustainable brand. One hundred per cent of our gold is recycled gold; by the end of this year, 100 per cent of our silver will be recycled as well, which costs us more to produce. But sustainability is a very important part of what we do.  There are so many people who say, ‘My mother has given me these things. I had never heard of the brand, and I opened my mother’s jewelry case after she passed, and discovered it,’ and then they became addicted to it, because it is a well-kept secret. And I think it did go out of favor in the ’70s and ’80s, and then it came back.  IR: I know Georg Jensen is really interested in tapping into the growing men’s jewelry market. Can you tell me more about how that came about?  AS: There was a need. There were customers coming in and saying, ‘Do you think I could wear that?’ But then they’d try it on, and we just didn’t have the sizes. So we had a lot of people interested in looking at our jewelry – there was something there. We’ve got some fantastic chains that we launched last year that were just really beautiful links, and it wasn’t designed as gender neutral, but it became gender neutral. When we saw the success of it, we moved towards having them in bigger sizes. That then evolved, and there’s been natural growth. I think gender neutrality in anything – you see it in fashion more, jewelry more – that’s where we’re going. I think there are a lot of women who don’t like to wear pretty little things.  We’re really comfortable in our niche, and if we move in any direction radically, we go where the crocodiles are. This is who we are. We sit very comfortably in our skin. From the marketing, branding and design perspective, there’s no one else that does it quite like us.  IR: What are some of the other opportunities that you see for the brand in the next few years? AS: I’m a consummate retailer, and I think e-commerce certainly helped us survive during 2020, 2021 and 2022. I think retail is crucial to the brand, but I think it’s experiential retail. There will be digitalization of some of our stores, and we’re going to be opening a new store next year, and you’ll see the digital impact of what we’re doing there. That will be great.  Omnichannel is something that we’re focusing on. We’re late to it – we just launched click-and-reserve, and click-and-collect launches in the next couple of months. But no matter what we do, the most important thing is the customer experience at whatever touchpoint they have. Everybody went heavily into digital, but I think the future lies in physical experiential retail, and we just have to find a way to do it in a genuine way. Those dinners are a start. E-commerce provides convenience, and that’s great – nothing will ever take that away. But to build the brand, it comes from the soul, so we’ve got to find that sweet spot, and really find out what they want from the brand and complete that. There is nothing worse than if you’ve got a passion for a brand, and the brand doesn’t recognize it. Customer loyalty is a useful thing to have, and it’s important that we track it – better than we do. Customer loyalty is not just how much you spend in a year, customer loyalty is what you say about the brand, what you think about the brand. I don’t care if a person hasn’t bought anything for five years, if they are fond of the brand, and they think, ‘My next opportunity, I will be buying the brand’, then you’re as important as a customer that spends tens of thousands of dollars a year.