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Articles from RINGS - GENERAL (890 Articles), GOLD JEWELLERY (685 Articles)
Bridal jewellery brand Romance is now wholesaling in Australia.
Romance jewellery comes to Australia
Posted July 10, 2012 |
Another high profile international jewellery brand has decided to expand
into Australia with its extensive bridal jewellery collection.
Romance, which has been the registered bridal line of US company Kim International for more than 30 years, has started full wholesale operations after testing the waters and getting a feel for the Australian market.
“We started to approach the Australian market about a year ago,” Romance sales manager Justin Wong told Jeweller. “And we have been happy with the results over this year.”
After taking the Romance name and collection to Hong Kong, Wong said that it’s an opportune time to continue the expansion by moving into Australia. He believes recent fashion trends are creating a demand for high-end bridal jewellery similar in style to Romance’s collection.
“We feel that the Australian market has a very high potential because the jewellery trend in Australia is changing,” Wong said. “We feel that the demands are more complex and fashionable designs are higher than a few years ago.”
Despite many similarities between the Australian and US markets, Romance has had to restyle some pieces from the US collection to appeal to Australian consumers.
“We feel that the styles are bit different in Australia Wong said. “We feel that the designs are toward more simple, elegant designs. We had to modify our pieces in some ways, such as we know that the centre stone can’t be set too high and that Milgrain and Filigree designs are not too popular in Australia. Even applying these modifications, we still managed to keep the Romance element to our pieces.”
The company’s promotional material claims that the bridal collection is “the most comprehensive and profitable program in the industry”. Romance jewellery pieces also use a patented ‘Precise-White’ alloy, which is a white gold that the company says doesn’t require rhodium plating and can “be finished as easily as yellow gold, but without the brittleness of other white gold alloys”.
Wong said Romance was pleased with its business in the US despite tough times, and placed Australia as a priority market before expanding in nearby countries.
“Well as far as we can see, the US market is definitely in a recovering stage,” Wong said. “[But] actually, we are happy with our 25 per cent to 30 per cent growth on our business annually for the past few years."
He said the company has no immediate plans about expanding beyond Australia at the moment saying, “We want to secure our position in Australia first before approaching other markets.”
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