Childhood Treasures
The days where children were content to wear daisy chains are far behind us. Kat Slowe investigates the booming demand for Children's jewellery and questions the source of this extreme growth.
I was in my mother's jewellery box by the time I was four," designer Dinny Hall says, guiltily. “I stole my mother’s engagement ring and swapped it for a friend’s doll. My mother went round to the neighbours, whose daughter she was, and asked for it back. They accused her of lying. Maybe I became jewellery designer out of guilt. I make sure my mother gets plenty of jewellery.”
Hall’s tastes have definitely improved. Despite preferring her friend’s doll to a diamond ring in her early childhood, she now produces her own pieces for children and claims that the scheme is proving to be a far greater success than her early attempt at bartering.
The designer is by no means the only adult jewellery brand to branch into the children’s sector. Other brands seeking to get in on the act include Babette Wasserman, Chamilia, Amore & Baci, Aagaard, Mancini and Gecko, to name just a few.
Hall first recognised the lucrative opportunity in the children’s market a few years ago when she was working in her Notting Hall store. This was when she noticed that ‘yummy mummys’ had started coming in to purchase pieces for their daughters, asking for the chains to be shortened.
After noticing the growing demand, Hall launched her Bijou collection and held an event with great Ormond street to launch it. The children’s range is not as big a departure from her former business plan as might at first appear, as the jewellery pieces are, in essence, miniature versions of her existing range featureing motifs of stars and flowers. Hall attributes the heightened interest in young jewellery to a high street boom and an improved demand for accessories stemming from women wanting to ‘prettify’ a simpler look. She also considers that children are being introduced to fashion at a young age, partly due to the influence of celebrities such as Miley Cyrus.
“I have a teenage boy,” she elaborates, “and all the 13 or 14 year old girls that he hangs out with are very much in fashion.” In recognition of this trend, Hall is currently planning to expand her range to ecompass teenage jewellery, with new line Bijou Rocks. She believes it to be the area which is going to take off over the next few years, as teenagers gradually get more money to spend on themselves.
“There is more aspiration and a huge factor, which is sex appeal,” Hall claims. “You suddenly want to appeal to the opposite sex and that starts at 12 or 13.” The collection is still at a very early stage, but the designer already has an idea about how she wants it to look and is working with her 16 year old goddaughter Alice, and her friends, to produce some pieces. She doesn’t want to go for the celebrity endorsed commercial market, which she admits would be easier, but instead wants to produce something ‘cool’.
“The children’s market is much easier in that way,” she says. “Teenagers all like something just for a while. They all used to like Jack Wills for a while and now they hate it. We have to get it right and be cool without being dumped.”
Hall is not the only brand to recognise that the young jewellery market has it challenges. Gecko is the creator of well known jewellery line D for Diamond. D for Diamond director Barry Bennett has seen a successful past year, but admits the market is now evolving. “There is a little bit more competition than when we started,” he says. “But, if there are more people in the market and our business is improving, then there must be growth.”
When D for Diamonds started, it produced mostly christening gifts for children up to five. But, like Dinny Hall, it has recently seen the demand from older children pick up. While it currently has no intention of entering the teenage sector, at its customers’ request it has introduced a number of pieces for eight to 12 year olds. D for Diamonds has also gone for the more sophisticated end of the market, creating miniature versions of adult styles.
“It is more for mini me – like the tiffany heart, but smaller,” Bennett says. “They are the sort of pieces that mums might wear, but scaled down a bit.”
Babette Wasserman also plans to utilise this desire within little firls to look like their mothers in her first children’s collection, which she will be launching at the Birmingham Spring Fair 2011. Wasserman, however, has decided to take the concept a step further with matching mother and daughters pieces. “It is all swapping around,” she says. “Women are wearing men’s jewellery and men are becoming metro-secual and wearing androgynous leather pieces and charms. It is the same for kids and mums to some degree. Girls love looking at their mums and mums might want some cute pieces like their children would wear.”
Wasserman’s new line will be composed mostly of sterling silver with bits of 14 and 18 carat gold, but she will also be designing cheaper pieces with ribbons and little coloured rope featuring charms. The collection is aimed at children of all age, from babies to 15 year olds, and seeks to incorporate young, fun and trendy designs, whilst remaining affordable for the stores. In reflection of this, some of the bracelets have little extension chains, so that they fit a wider range of wrist sizes.
The designer is going to begin with a relatively small satellite collection, composed mostly of bracelets and necklaces, and then grow on this over the next few years. She also does not rule out introducing earrings in the future, saying that if children want to have their ears pierced or their parents want them to, it is simply not her decision to judge.
Whether it is earrings of mini me pieces, children’s jewellery is undoubtedly becoming increasingly main stream, with a greater choice of pieces and styles available each year. Mancini director Karen Moore gives her opinion on the topic.
“As far as wearing jewellery and everything, I am based in the north east, she says. “They look at Girls Aloud and Cheryl Cole. Children do have the celebrity magazines and when they see someone wearing something, they want to wear it. It is getting more sophisticated.”
Like other brand owners, Moore also believes the huge trend in children’s jewellery is partly due to children looking at their parents and their siblings, and wanting their own thing. She says that even school girls want to get into the charm phenomenon and are demanding pieces from brands such as Pandora and Chamilia.
“I have done events in kid’s schools where I can see them following trends,” she says. “It is much more fashionable for children to be seen with a pieces of jewellery now – the accessories side of the market is very much growing.”
And more only sees demand growing. Mancini brought out the children’s line Petit Range after most of the accounts it dealt with repeatedly requested whether the company had any jewellery for children. Its most recent collection, Little Angels, was launched this year at IJL and Moore claims it received a ‘brilliant’ reaction.
“I think the children’s jewellery market will just get bigger,” she says. “I think it is like 10 or 15 years ago with retail fashion. They are bringing out as much merchandise and as much creativity in fashion for children as adults. I think it will be the same with jewellery. You are now seeing all the big brands wanting to introduce a children’s line.
“Now for most of the retailers I deal with, it is the norm. They will ask ‘what do you have for this and that, and what do you have for children?” Yet while the demand for children’s products on the consumer levels appears indisputable, not everyone agrees that retailers have caught up with this new trend. Jewellery brand Jo for Girls is a force to be reckoned with in the children’s jewellery market and has experienced 300 percent growth over the past year. When Jo for Girls director Linda Lambert attended IJL, she claims a number of retailers met the reported changing habits of consumers towards children’s jewellery with apathy and even ridicule.
“We find that the buyers most open to selling children’s jewellery are women and younger men,” she says. “ The older men were poo pooing it, no matter what their partner or sales team were saying. This is general comment and I do not tar all older men with the same brush. But our biggest section of customers is the high end gift shops.”
With many of the traditional children’s jewellery brands now seeing adult company’s expanding into the market, competition in the sector has never been so high. Molly Brown director Erica Illingworth clains she has definitely seen an increase in volume in the children’s jewellery market – not necessarily in stand alone brands, but in add on collections, with a lot of the bigger brands, like Amore and Bacci, introducing children’s products. However, the growing number of players in the market goes not appear to concern her, as she considers growth is easily high enough to cover these new additions.
Indeed, Molly Brown is taking advantage of the increase in demand to launch a series of new initiatives. It recently launched a ‘mummy and me’ section on its website and is presently expanding into the teenage market. Illingworth has just returned from a jewellery photo shoot, where she used two models, a girl of six, named Tilly and a teenager called Georgia. The director says that a lot of the Molly Brown products are bought by adults and teenagers, but plans for SS 2011 include doing more teenage jewellery and items that appeal to the teenage sector.
“We are seeing a lot of teenagers showing interest in Molly Brown,” Illingworth says. “I think a lot of teenagers kind of like wearing the same things. Whether we like it or not, girls of all ages buy into brands. A friend of mine said to me, ‘Daisy (her daughter) wants one of your friendship bracelets,’ and I gave it to her for free, because she was a friend. She then said, ‘don’t worry, Daisy will wear it to school and all her friends will want one.’” “Another friend came up to me and told me, ‘your jewellery is the cult product at my daughter’s boaring school Downe House.”
Molly Brown recently launched a line of jewellery on British Airways which chose to stock the brand’s festival and strawberry jelly bean bracelets. According to Illingworth, the airline tried less expensive products for girls and children onboard and they had not sold. “Their feeling was it was too cheap,” she says, “and that people thought it wouldn’t last. They wanted something to sit alongside the adult ranges of Links and Pandora, which would appeal to children and teenagers, aswell.”
The company has already planned its collections to 2012, but has decided against bringing out a sizeable earring collection, as from a ‘very personal perspective’ Illingworth doesn’t like very young girls with pierced ears. She also disagrees with people who tell her to bring out pieces featuring designs such as skulls, as she doesn’t ‘think that is Molly Brown at all’.
“I also don’t like jewellery on boys,” she says, “and I don’t like it on men. I know in certain European countries having your ears pierced is very popular, but it is not for me. And I don’t like having your ears pierced in funny places. Most of our jewellery is filled with Disney Characters, hearts and stars.”
Kit Heath creative director Yasmin Moss also believes in keeping children’s jewellery uncontroversial and upbeat, claiming that for her brand it is all about ‘colour’. Each season, Kit Heath brings out new colourful ranges and it recently achieved a large amount of success with its polka dot theme. Last season, it introduced a fair ground concept, with pieces that featured styles surrounding candy floss and candy stripes.
In the upcoming year, the brand plans to build on some ideas that have their roots in the classic children’s themes, but with a fun and modern twist. It has also got a new collection planned for April, which will include pendants, earrings, bracelets and necklaces.
With the demand for children’ jewellery growing at a phenomenal rate, it appear there will be no shortage of profits to be made in the years ahead. Whether geared towards toddlers or teenagers, the jewellery being produced for the younger market is seeming to be undergoing an astonishing evolution. As its profile grows and the sector become increasingly main stream, more brands will no doubt seek to take advantage of this lucrative trend.
“We have seen in the last 12 months such an increase in demand,” Moss concludes. “We are fighting to keep pup. Even though some adult brands have started to move in, it is still a tight little world. There is still a huge opportunity in kids’ jewellery. The children’s market is a phenomenal market in terms of its scope.”

 

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