LONDON — With sales booming and space at a premium, Liberty has opened the Fashion Jewellery Gallery, which specializes in demi-fine and fashion-led designs.
The new space houses 37 brands, including 11 exclusives, and is located on the first floor, adjacent to the designer and advanced contemporary womenswear rooms.
Ten shops-in-shop line the perimeter of the new space, which features rows of glittering glass cases and a living room area for launches, events and consultations.
The gallery is meant to complement the fine jewelry hall on Liberty’s ground floor, which specializes in 14- and 18-karat gold pieces, and which has been running out of space due to new brands arriving.
It has also opened in response to customer demand. Liberty said jewelry sales are up 20 percent year-over-year, with customers eager to discover new brands, layer jewelry, and wear a mix of metals and of old and new pieces.
The consultation area in Liberty’s new jewelry gallery.
Ruby Beales, Liberty’s jewelry buying manager, said her team worked hard to find new brands, or ones not currently available in the U.K., in a bid to add excitement to the space.
“We thought hard about the customer journey, brand adjacencies and prices, too. We wanted there to be a sense of discovery, and we wanted the space to be as interactive as possible,” she said during a walk-through.
The gallery is next to designer womenswear and advanced contemporary collections on the first floor, because the store wants fashion and jewelry to complement each other, she said. She and her team have positioned statement jewelry brands such as Kenneth Jay Lane, Julietta and Vivienne Westwood right near the passage that leads to the fashion part of the floor.
Exclusives include Wouters & Hendrix, a 42-year-old brand based in Antwerp that specializes in organic, surreal and often humorous designs.
The Liberty shop-in-shop is Wouters & Hendrix’s first store outside Benelux. It is stocking necklaces adorned with copper-plated mussel shells; rings with chessboard patterns inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s passion for the game, and brooches shaped like Salvador Dalí’s Mae West lips.
Liberty’s new jewelry gallery on the first floor.
French brand Gas Bijoux has also picked Liberty to open its first shop outside its home country, selling its colorful, textured, bohemian-flecked designs. Missoma, a longtime Liberty brand, has installed a welding machine for bracelets while Daisy London is creating personalized jewelry boxes in its shop-in-shop.
There are in-house jewelry specialists on site who aim to offer expert, unbiased advice to customers across the brands, and in gifting and collecting. Liberty is also stocking fabric dust bags, matching cleaning cloths, handwoven envelopes and note cards as part of its service in the new space.
Beales said jewelry “is one of the most personal categories we buy and increasingly our customers are looking for pieces that reflect their individual style, rather than simply following trends. The Fashion Jewellery Gallery was created in response to that shift.”
She added the new gallery “is about helping customers discover pieces they may not have been looking for, but fall in love with nonetheless. That’s always been at the heart of the Liberty experience.”
The Danish brand Kinraden has a shop-in-shop at Liberty’s new jewelry gallery.
Liberty has been on a mission to reshape its floors to cater to customer demand and the way people shop today. Over the summer it expanded its fabric floor by 140 percent, taking over an area formerly dedicated to tableware, crockery and small home furnishings.
Lydia King, Liberty’s retail managing director, told WWD in July that the store’s overall strategy is “to focus on what we do well. Fabrics are integral to the brand, they’re in our DNA. We wanted to celebrate the category, elevate the customer experience and show the breadth of our range.”
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