Challenges for Designers

Rising Competition in the Branded Jewelry Market: Branded fine jewelry, which accounts for just 25% of the overall fine jewelry market, is expected to capture a larger portion of the unbranded segment, and since branded fine jewelry can command prices up to six times higher than comparable unbranded pieces, the competition to secure a portion of the growing high-value pool is intense.

Long Purchase Cycles and Partial Brand Alignment: Fine jewelry purchases occur infrequently, and despite high-value sales opportunities, the challenge in the fine jewelry sector revolves around preserving relationships with valuable brand-conscious consumers throughout their lifetime. There has been a shift from consumers fully adopting a brand’s overarching style philosophy to gravitating towards specific hero products that align with their personal aesthetics. In the past, brands would communicate in a monolithic way, as if giving consumers entire sentences reflective of the brand ethos; in this era, consumers desire to curate their personal collection, selecting specific products from brands they love, as if choosing words for the sentences that will express who they are.

Sustainability & Ethical Sourcing Pressures: Digital transparency will emerge as a critical element of the value proposition for many jewelers, and over a longer timeframe, adhering to the highest standards across the supply chain will become an industry baseline in many markets. The fine jewelry industry cannot turn a blind eye to issues like polluted waterways and alarmingly high fatality rates among miners. It is estimated that between 20 to 30 percent of global fine jewelry sales are influenced by considerations around environmental impact and ethical sourcing practices. 

Multi-brand Retail Buyers often Overlook Independent Designers: Independent designers depend on their wholesale channel, oftentimes exclusively relying on multi-brand retail partnerships as their revenue source; they frequently lack the financial resources to make the necessary investments in production, technology, or marketing required for selling online. Unfortunately, retail buyers oftentimes are reluctant to purchase from independent designers due to concerns about profitability and the perceived inability to sell their creations at a sufficient margin. Despite designers having the opportunity to engage with multiple retail buyers across the industry, consumers lack a direct platform to express their preferences and effectively cast their vote. As inventory management lies at the heart of the matter, retail buyers become the arbiters and essentially assume the role of gatekeepers, determining what is and is not a product that should go to market. 

No Revenue from Secondary Sales and Missed Opportunities to Increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) : Once a customer purchases an item and removes the product identification, the product is untraceable—the asset is unable to be tracked as it journeys through the secondary market. A Digital Product Passport, which serves as a digital twin of a physical product, holds key product and material data across the entire lifecycle, offering end-to-end traceability. While Digital Product Passports are useful for transparency, authenticity, and sustainability, there are no royalties or secondary market revenue. Fashion consumers are seeking deeper, more meaningful connections with brands, not just during their shopping experience but also when engaging with brand content and throughout the life of owning their products, but DPPs provide no proof of ownership, no direct communication with owners, and data can be altered or duplicated without blockchain security.

Tokenization Alone Fails to Drive Customer Engagement: NFT platforms that enable the tokenization of Digital Product Passports (DPPs) lack the ability to seamlessly integrate their tokens into a gaming ecosystem that transforms ownership into an interactive, ongoing experience. While tokenized DPPs provide proof of ownership and allow designers to personalize their communication with their customers, brands may still miss out on opportunities to build meaningful social and interactive experiences around products without a platform that actively encourages engagement. 

Digital Discovery Tools remain fragmented and Time to Value is difficult to measure: The current ways customers find and engage with brands online—through social media, e-commerce sites, and NFT marketplaces—are scattered across separate platforms. A customer might see a designer’s post on Instagram, then visit their website, then view an NFT drop on an NFT marketplace—but these touchpoints aren’t linked or contextualized. Moreover, many users browse without logging in, leaving no trace until they take an action (make a purchase or sign up), which delays the point at which a brand can measure the start of their journey. Time to Value (TTV), a metric that serves as an early warning system for retention risks, is a leading indicator that is oftentimes overlooked. TTV measures how long it takes for a new user or customer to realize meaningful value from a product. It tracks the time between their first interaction with a product and the point when they achieve the key outcome. A faster TTV often leads to better activation, higher retention, and stronger customer lifetime value (CLTV). If customers are not reaching first value in an acceptable timeframe, the activation funnel needs attention. Long TTV windows almost always signal onboarding gaps, UX friction, or poor product-market fit for certain segments. The designers that systematically shorten TTV — through better UX, smarter onboarding, clearer value messaging, and targeted feature work — will build stickier products and stronger businesses. Without TTV data, designers guess about where to invest; however, insights into which channels or customer types consistently have low TTV can feed into marketing and sales targeting.