Cullen Jewellery to shake up global industry as lab-grown diamond ring offering dazzles

Diamonds may well be forever but staid jewellery industry business models are not, as Melbourne entrepreneur Jordan Cullen has proven through his eponymous offline-to-online jewellery retailer that is blazing a trail in the industry with 15 new international showroom openings planned for 2025.

The seed for Cullen Jewellery, which now has 107 staff following a hiring blitz over the past six months, was the founder's experience approaching large retailers around Melbourne asking for a tailor-made engagement ring to fit a lab-grown gemstone he had purchased.

He knew exactly what his now-wife wanted in the engagement ring and most retailers said 'no', but eventually one retailer introduced him to the jewellers upstairs.

"It wasn't seamless, but they understood what I wanted and they were able to get that done," he says.

"I figured that without me having been so relentless, someone else might have given up on that, and potentially there was a gap here for me to be able to make it really clear and obvious that you can make a custom ring using moissanite or lab-grown diamond stones."

Cullen, a business student at the time in 2018, formed a symbiotic relationship with the jewellers that would last for the first year of Cullen Jewellery's journey. Alongside an intern who is now a senior employee, Cullen deployed digital marketing nous to attract clients and the jewellers could make more profit from the increased custom.

"I came to understand that their business had been in decline, and I was always of the opinion that digital marketing was the way of the future. Online retail was going to be huge in the future, and they were not all over that in any way at all," he says.

"They held me at a little bit of an arm's length so that I wouldn’t know where to go to find an engraving, casting or setting, and I would remain in the dark. I could stay in my lane of marketing, and they could stay in their lane.

"But I wasn’t happy with that over time. I wanted to have more control over my business from start to finish."

His strategy to make Cullen Jewellery independent started with the coldest of cold calling strategies - not only calling people out of the blue, but often without even knowing who they were.

"I started asking questions and going into the city and looking at the notice boards of jeweller businesses, and thought 'I'm just going to call these suppliers'. I didn't know what they did because it wasn't very clear from the business name," he says.

"I was able to start to understand the industry and who was selling what, and I eventually needed them [the initial contractors] less and less.

"Then I got my own storefront so I could deal with customers directly, because previously my customers had actually been occasionally dealing with the contractors face to face. My biggest concern I couldn't control the customer experience."

He describes customer experience as Cullen Jewellery's biggest differentiator, and as the business has scaled he has sought to keep true to that spirit. For example, the company provides a lifetime warranty and offers profit-free repair.

"If they damage their ring by accidental miss-treatment, we only charge our jewellers' labour to repair the ring and do not take the opportunity to profit off the mistake," he clarifies.

He says the goal has always been to treat a customer as if they were Cullen Jewellery's only customer, and at times that was in fact the case.

"We had so few customers that we could give them a lot of attention, and that kind of flowed through the DNA of our business as we grew," he says.

Looking back on the early days of the business, Cullen says if he could do anything differently it would be to hire earlier. He was lucky that someone he knew from university reached out asking for an internship, which doubled the company's ability to scale.

"I would have said no to hiring someone because I didn't feel as if we could afford it at the time, but that three- to four-month window of interning really made me comfortable knowing I'm going to be able to offer him a salary that's going to be secure.

"I didn't want to hire anyone and have their job risked by if we had a down month."

Making "predictability" a cornerstone of customer experience and business growth

Fast forward to today and Cullen Jewellery has showrooms in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Auckland, with the latter two opened in the second half of 2024 - a period in which the group's staff numbers rose from 60 to more than 100 to handle growth, including its team of expert jewellers in the Melbourne suburb of Kew.

The business model is online-first, so these showrooms are not stores in the traditional sense, but rather spaces that can facilitate the e-commerce experience and tailor-made approach. 

"You can't just walk in, it's by appointment only," says Cullen, who won the 2024 Australian Young Entrepreneur Award - Retail & Services, after achieving the same accolade in Melbourne where he was also crowned with the coveted Trailblazer title.

"The majority of our showrooms are booked out for days, if not weeks, in advance, and customers will come in and they will spend a defined period of time.

"We give them a really personal experience that is completely predictable. On a Saturday you'll still be seen for 45 minutes - you're not going to be seen in between other clients because the store is really, really busy."

After trying on rings, a customer can make the purchase on the spot but it is through the Cullen Jewellery website systems, so the purchase will be made to order.

"They can come to one of their local stores to pick it up, or it will be sent to the customer all around the world free of charge with no customs and duties or anything like that. That's our model," he says.

He adds that people often travel from overseas or interstate for these appointments after discovering the business online, and expansion plans are made through data-driven techniques.

"An engagement ring is such a destination. It's not a cup of coffee where you're just going to get it from the most convenient place," he says.

"For the opening in Adelaide, we knew a lot of people from Adelaide had been coming to Melbourne. We know there's a lot of demand in Adelaide through our social media following and all the data that we have there, and also the sales that we're making through our website.

"We knew Adelaide was going to be a successful location, and it has been to be honest. There's no downtime - as soon as our store opens, we're booked out from quite early on.

"We know what demand is there. It's predictable essentially, because we are an e-commerce first business rather than just opening a store based on a hunch."

Based on these same data-driven principles, the next step is to give Cullen Jewellery a greater international presence physically than just its recent New Zealand footprint.

"In terms of physical spaces, we've made a lot of upgrades to that this year, and we've also got London, Toronto and San Francisco currently in the works. We've secured lease agreements in these places, and we're just in the fit-out process at the moment.

"We’ve got a really good, streamlined process now, and we've got the right people in place, and we're really ramping this up into 2025 so we've got 15 new stores planned for 2025, all of them international.

"We’re pretty comfortable that we’ve hit all the Australian cities that we need to – now we’re going in quite aggressively into the United States and also into Europe."

One objective of these showroom openings is to increase Cullen Jewellery's customer base, but the entrepreneur feels comfortable enough to do it based on existing customer bases in those regions and wanting to better look after them.

"We want to be able to give them repairs and resizes in their own country. We want to be able to respond to them in their own time zone."

Business for impact

The founder adds that social responsibility is a "huge" part of Cullen Jewellery's story, perhaps most importantly in the fact it only sells lab-grown stones to "take a stand against mining activities".

"We donate hundreds of thousands each year to environmental and philanthropic causes," he says.

"We plant trees every time we sell a ring, we sponsor a child in a developing nation for every employee we hire, we offer an additional week of annual leave each year to our staff to focus on volunteering their time to a charity or cause, and we sell 100 per cent carbon neutral lab grown diamonds."

Cullen says these policies mean that employees can contribute to positive causes simply by working at the company, which has motivating effects as well.

"It's really resonated well with our staff. There's so much data showing that businesses that are aligned to a staff's values retain their staff so much better," he says.

"And there's obviously business upside for it, as our motivation is based on our ethical standpoints.

"I think that is potentially underutilised in a lot of businesses, especially in some of these older businesses like the jewellery industry which is typically very old fashioned."