Museum of Jewelry

Role Website Development / SEO / Consulting
Tech Shopify
Scale 250k visitors/yr
Organic Traffic (google) 171k visitors/yr
Website Sales 450k/yr gross

Over the last 17 years, I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with The Museum of Jewelry, designing and evolving their e-commerce websites to reflect both the timeless beauty of their pieces and the modern needs of online shoppers.

The company was started in 1964 and was fashion forward enough to be featured on the cover of Vogue in the 1980s, but had done a poor job converting from a catalog driven sales environment in the 1980s and 1990s to more a website driven one in the early 2000s. Their wholesale b2b sales dried up considerably around the same time, so they were in a position of sitting on a ton of inventory without good sales channels.

I landed the project originally because I had interned with the company in university. A few years later their only web developer quit unexpectedly, the owner reached out and I promised him I would have the site online again in a matter of days, and delivered on this goal. The design I inherited was a little bit offensive on the eyes, and the former developer was not helpful in sharing assets so the initial iteration of their product catalog was built by scraping their old website.

Because of the long term nature of this project, I’ve migrated the site a few times now across a series of technical stacks (Zen Cart, Magento, and most recently Shopify). The goal with their websites has been to showcase their unique collections but also to provide a seamless user experience—from browsing to checkout.

The Museum of Jewelry’s target demographic, generally folks who are a bit older and sometimes less technically inclined, presents some unique challenges and opportunities. Despite this, through continuous iteration, responsive design improvements, and integration of customer feedback, their website has evolved to became a central platform for their brand, connecting them with a global audience and bringing in fresh customers.

Beyond handling all their technical needs, I’ve focused heavily on expanding their footprint in third party marketplaces such as Etsy, eBay and Amazon as well as on search and social marketing. Their website receives excellent natural traffic, in part because their blog has become an authoritative source on historic jewelry, and in part because their product catalog and copy writing lends itself to long tail targeting. In addition to natural results across a breadth of terms, we’ve also been able to get consistently strong results on more competitive keywords like “ruby,” “opal earrings,” and “Egyptian jewelry.” This is predominantly done through targeted content creation, metadata optimization, back link building around such terms. As the Museum of Jewelry no longer manufactures new pieces, in some cases content creation included fleshing out their product offerings, which is how the BoneNE line was born

The site receives substantial organic traffic (google: 171k clicks, 13.6m impression in the last 12 months). The result has been transformative: a website that garnered just a few hundred dollars a month in sales has grown into a thriving online store generating tens of thousands in sales monthly. It’s been incredibly rewarding to watch the brand re-grow and flourish through the digital foundation we built together.