MOVERS & SHAKERS
you’ve got the traditional aspects of the university and the history, and yet there’s all this cutting-edge technology and science – it’s so exciting.” Harriet sees strong parallels between the unique pieces created by her team of jewellers and that blend of the historical and the contemporary that she loves about our city. “We’re creating very traditional symbols for people, and sometimes people choose traditional designs for their jewellery. But we also very much embrace modern technology – where we make our jewellery, in our workshop just down the road in north Hertfordshire, we have video links between stores, using special microscopes so our designers can see what’s going on in the workshops. We use a lot of technology that our clients may not be aware of, but it’s what makes our approach work,” she says. Harriet started her jewellery business back in 1998, from her kitchen table. Like most people going it alone, she had to turn her own hand to all the tasks required to build her company. “It was a juggle, but a different kind of juggle: I was doing everything,” she says. “I was making the jewellery by myself, setting
We very much embrace modern technology – where we make our jewellery, in north Hertfordshire, we have video links between stores, using special microscopes so our designers can see what’s going on in the workshops"
the stones myself a lot of the time, polishing the jewellery myself – having design consultations by myself, writing the website myself and trying to do desktop publishing myself.” One of the contributing factors to Harriet’s rise to success was her background in the computer industry and her insistence on having a digital presence for the brand from the off. “Even though I’d been making jewellery as well, I was quite aware of technology and quite ‘techy’ – so when I set out, even back in 1996, I had a website,” she says. “It was very basic, you know, just a couple of pictures. And it said: ‘I can make jewellery, especially for you, to order’ – because that was my niche.” At that time, as one of the only jewellers on the internet, Harriet’s work attracted the interest of the other early adopters who were able to access the proto web.
“Doctors, architects and teachers were the three main groups of people who were my customers – because they were the people who were using the internet back then,” she smiles. It was Harriet’s nous for digital marketing that led to the business setting up a bricks-and-mortar shop on Green Street in Cambridge. “Back then, we were very reliant on the internet: the site was really well optimised, and we were number one for the search term ‘engagement rings’ at the time. We’re not now, obviously, because things have changed – and work was just coming in, the internet had gone crazy; we had so much work that we couldn’t cope with it. Then one day Google – which I now know was getting ready to list and to be sold – decided to get people to buy the top spaces on search results. So I came into work one day and we’d gone from
ABOVE The interior of the Harriet Kelsall Cambridge studio and jewellery shop, which was the first bricks-and-mortar premises for this independent brand
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ISSUE 06
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