Growing sales, growing campus for JTV

The retail jewelry market these days is fragmented, but executives with Knoxville-based Jewelry Television believe the company has fit the right pieces of the puzzle into place to allow it to gain some impressive growth.

Jewelry Television, or JTV, finished the year with sales up 15.7 percent, and a customer base that has increased by 11.8 percent, said Steve Walsh, JTV's head of Global Operations and Logistics. It is in the middle of a three-phase expansion of its Knoxville campus, that so far has added 95,000 square feet of new construction, an automated carousel system for filling customer's orders and other improvements.

Tim Matthews, JTV president and CEO, said that when he became involved with the company as a shareholder in 1996, it had a few dozen employees. Now, it has 1,700 worldwide, with 1,500 employees in Knoxville. It recently opened an office in Hong Kong.

A lot of the growth has been during the last three years, when the company developed what it calls its "omni-digital" strategy.

“That’s when we started seeing a big uptick in sales,” Matthews said.

According to Polygon.net, a global online jewelry trading network, the retail jewelry industry in the U.S. during 2016 faced falling diamond prices, large numbers of jewelry store closures and an industry wide liquidity crunch. Major retailers shrank their distribution networks and jewelry sales at retail stores grew at the slowest rate since 2011. Online retail sales in all jewelry categories grew.

However, Polygon.net also noted in a report on U.S. Jewelry sales during the first half of 2016, that studies and surveys show customer expectations are changing, with higher desire for good service. "The ability to see and feel an item of jewelry before making a purchase is particularly important to younger customers," the report read.

The key is that people have different ways they prefer to shop, and a company needs to try to adapt to all of them, Matthews said. That's what JTV's omni-digital strategy is supposed to do, he said.

"What it means is that we’ve got multiple digital ways of touching the customer," he said. "We can interact with the customer on a mobile device, we’ve got a great app to do that.On the website we’ve got a robust catalog of more than 100,000 items.We have television people can watch and become educated and entertained."

People make much use of mobile devices. Matthews says they can provide a lot of information, but he doesn't believe they provide the entertainment value that television does. So JTV tries to play them off of each other.

"We think of television as a great way to show and tell, to actually demonstrate a product, turn it around, turn it upside down, open it up, show all the varieties of colors a given product comes in," he said. "It’s a great way to provide education and entertainment. By the same token, if someone is out in a store, and they are curious as to whether JTV has something like that, they can pop open their phone and look up diamond rings or whatever and see what JTV has to offer, that’s a great use of a mobile device.

JTV tries to make the most use of as many digital platforms as possible and use platforms together to develop a synergy, Matthews said.

“We’ve got an extensive email mailing list of customers," he said. "We might tell them, 'Hey, tonight at 7 o’clock we have a very special prime time show with our new Bella Luce lineup." So, now we are using the email channel, which is traditionally used to drive e-commerce, but we are using it to drive television."

Likewise, viewers won't get far into a JTV program before the announcer tells them that if they like what they see, there is a lot more on the website, Matthews said.

"So, I think we’ve got a good strategy and I think we are employing the right tactics to use these channels synergistically, and that is why, in my opinion, we are achieving so much success," he said.

There are plans to add to the television experience as part of the expansion. This will include opening a 400-seat auditorium in a new building that JTV recently completed. This will be used to add a live element to the program as JTV hosts do their broadcasts.

“We can have the community come in and watch a live show, and we will have a show with an audience,” Matthews said. “We never really had the space to do that before. I think it is going to be fun for the community and for our audience.”

The expansion is being done in three phases. Phase one, which is complete, includes the new building, warehouse space, new automated order processing equipment and executive offices. The company also added a new floor in its existing building. Phase two will include additions to the new building, such as the auditorium, a space for the company's IT staff and a new space for its 350-member call center staff. Phase three will consist of renovating and remodeling older spaces.

Phase two is to be finished in April and phase three will be ongoing. Matthews didn't want to estimate the total cost of all three phases, but said it will likely be in the tens of millions of dollars. The expansion will add about 95,000 square feet to the existing 160,000 square feet, Walsh said.

Another key feature of the expansion is an automated carousel system for processing orders, Walsh said. It will greatly increase the speed of the process.

"We used to have the capability of one person picking 1,000 items in a day, and now we can do 1,000 items per hour, per person," he said.

The system uses eight carousels on the ground floor and eight more on a mezzanine. The carousels use fast-moving cranes to load storage totes on conveyors and bring them to the picking stations. Before the system was installed, employees had to walk down aisles of shelves and pick items out of bins to fill an order.

This addition of automation to JTV's process means fewer staff is needed.

"But we are not laying folks off," Walsh said. "We are just re-assigning them. We use them in the call center or other places."

Matthews said JTV wants to be known as being a desirable place to work. It has added amenities such as a park, gym, medical clinic with pharmacy, soccer field, running track, picnic area and others to make life more pleasant for those who work there.

“There is a long-term vision that Steve and I have shared with our human resources people to really make our work environment the tops in Knoxville," he said.

Jewelry TV got its start in 1993 as a small Greeneville, Tenn., company called America's Collectibles Network. It sold everything from baseball cards to quilts and electronics, but eventually became Jewelry Television and has operated in Knoxville since 1996. At first, it was off Kingston Pike near Pellissippi Parkway, but about five years ago moved to its current campus at 9600 Parkside Drive.