BaubleBar Branches Out Into New Categories, Starting With Weddings

After two years of delivering affordable, on-trend jewelry styles every week, BaubleBar has expanded its offerings with a new bridal vertical. It’s likely the first of many: by breaking down jewelry shopping along demographic and occasion lines, BaubleBar is looking to continue expanding its reach with distinct categories and micro-sites.

The bridal shop targets brides-to-be shopping for themselves as well as for their bridesmaids, mothers, and flower girls — those last two representing age groups that BaubleBar had not previously hit. The filtering system in bridal is a bit different from the rest of the site: because accessories often come after the bride-to-be has selected her dress, wedding venue, and overall styling, they can search jewelry by hairstyle, dress neckline, and style. The vertical shoots for a different feel from the rest of the site, with a greater emphasis on personalized service.

As co-founders Daniella Yacobovsky and Amy Jain explained, BaubleBar is relying on a tight production chain to expand their offerings.

“I think that a lot of people like to call us a fashion company or a tech company,” Yacobovsky said. “But the truth is, what we do best is sourcing.”

True to its tech startup roots, BaubleBar’s design process begins with data. By looking at social channels, insight analytics, and the broader jewelry category, the team is able to suss out what designs might hit it big in the coming weeks. Visitors’ search histories are also a strong indicator of trends. Products are pre-tagged with different characteristics on the back end of the site, so if rose gold or stud earrings are seeing an uptick in searches, they’ll modify their designs accordingly.

If a trend does surface through analytics, that gets communicated to the design team, which can either start from scratch on a sample or tweak existing products. After working with factories over the last two years, the team can take a design from sample to market in as little as ten days, with an average production cycle of two weeks.

Getting into bridal was a data-driven decision, Jain and Yacobovsky explained. A lot of wedding-related requests had been directed toward BaubleBar’s team of personal stylists, because finding jewelry for an entire wedding party was a relatively fractured process. The aim with bridal is to become a one-stop destination for brides.

Because BaubleBar often modifies existing designs, it’s easy to see how creating jewelry for brides and bridesmaids would be relatively seamless. The mother of the bride and flower girl pieces are, however, distinct in design from many of the site’s other pieces. Most pieces on the bridal site don’t exceed $150, although a few statement pieces cost more.

Jain and Yacobovsky did not say which verticals were coming next, although they said that they have a long list of potential directions in which to go based on user behavior.

“When we think of verticals, sometimes it’s a different demographic from what we’re focused on. And then there’s different occasions,” Jain said. “If you think of the landscape in those two buckets, and you think of all the reasons you shop for jewelry and who you’re shopping for, you could see how different verticals could fall.”