Jewelry TV expands its headquarters as sales grow
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Even though the retail jewelry market these days is fragmented, executives at Jewelry Television think they're hitting consumer preferences from several directions.
Jewelry Television, or JTV, finished the year with sales up 15.7% and the number of individual customers has increased by 11.8%, said Steve Walsh, head of global operations and logistics for the privately held company. It is in the middle of a three-phase expansion of its Knoxville headquarters that so far has added 95,000 square feet, including an automated carousel system for filling orders.
"We’ve got multiple digital ways of touching the customer," said Tim Matthews, JTV president and chief executive. "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."
The key is that people have different ways they prefer to shop, and a company needs to adapt to all of them, Matthews said. That's what JTV calls its omni-digital strategy.
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The cable-TV network has 1,700 employees worldwide, including 1,500 employees here, and recently opened an office in Hong Kong, Matthews said. When he became involved with the company as a shareholder in 1996, it had a few dozen employees.
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.
Other cable-TV networks that have their corporate headquarters in Knoxville are likely better known: HGTV, DIY Network and Great American Country. They are a part of Scripps Networks Interactive (SNI), which formed in 2008 when E.W. Scripps Co. turned its cable-TV division into a separate publicly traded company; it has about 3,500 employees worldwide, according to its 2015 annual report. (E.W. Scripps (SSP), which now operates only TV and radio stations, owned the Knoxville News Sentinel until April 2015.)
Jewelry TV has grown to reach 86 million U.S. homes, in part through access on AT&T, Comcast, Cox, DirecTV, Dish Network, Time Warner Cable and Verizon FiOS, according to the cable network's website.
During 2016, retail jewelers in the United States faced falling diamond prices, large numbers of jewelry store closures and an industrywide liquidity crunch, according to Polygon.net, a global online jewelry trading network. Jewelry sales at retail stores grew at the slowest rate since 2011, but online sales in all jewelry categories were up.
Yet its report noted that younger customers are changing their expectations and want to see and feel an item.
That's why Matthews' network tries to catch customers in several ways.
"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."
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JTV also has an extensive email list.
"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 more variety is on the website, Matthews said. Part of its expansion includes plans for a 400-seat auditorium, so announcers can talk before a live studio audience.
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“We never really had the space to do that before," he said. "I think it is going to be fun for the community and for our audience.”
The expansion is being done in three phases:
• Phase 1, 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 2 will include additions to the new building, such as the auditorium, a space for the company's information technology staff and a new space for its 350-member call center staff. It will be finished in April.
• Phase 3 will consist of renovating and remodeling older spaces.
Matthews didn't want to estimate the total cost of all three phases but said it likely will be in the tens of millions of dollars. A key feature of the expansion is an automated carousel system for processing orders.
"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.
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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.
Follow Ed Marcum on Twitter: @bizmarcum
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