The e-retailer now sells jewelry in addition to home goods.

Members-only furniture and home goods retailer One Kings Lane aims to help customers decorate not only where they live, but their bodies, too. After months of testing special one-off vintage jewelry sales, the retailer this week began selling jewelry in its regular flash sales, says Susan Feldman, One Kings Lane’s co-founder.

“Jewelry is a natural extension to our business,” Feldman says. One Kings Lane has added other products that complement home goods, such as travel bags and decorative gifts, over the four years since its launch. Like those, jewelry fits into the lifestyle category that its primary shoppers enjoy, she says. “And I love that jewelry actually does make great decorative accessories,” she says. “If we sell a beautiful strand of beads, it can easily be put on a bowl on a table and be decorative—but you can also wear it.”

The retailer’s first jewelry flash sale—as is typical for the merchant, those sales last for three days—featured a collection of handmade Kenyan pieces from designer Ashley Pittman priced between $100 and $500. Feldman says part of the reason One Kings Lane began adding jewelry to its regular product mix was to make it more affordable and accessible to customers than in the one-off sales that it tested before launching the category. In those vintage-themed events, found in the “Tastemaker Tag Sales” section of the e-commerce site, the retailer sells higher-end pieces from designers like Chanel or Yves St. Laurent that often cost more than $500—one diamond link bracelet even sold for $40,000 a few weeks ago, she says.

Feldman declines to share sales figures for jewelry. “It definitely was apparent to us that there was an insatiable appetite for jewelry,” she says. The 14 retailers in the Top 500 that sell primarily jewelry had combined 2011 web sales of $1.218 billion, up 8.89% from 2010, according to Internet Retailer estimates. Together they account for 0.67% of the total web sales in the Top 500.

The retailer so far has also gained more first-time customers buying jewelry than in other categories, as new customers often buy something small like a candle or a pair of earrings to try out the retailer before diving in for a bigger purchase, she says.

advertisement

For now, One Kings Lane is focused on building out its jewelry offerings before adding any other categories, she says, “But I’m sure there will be something else in the near future.” Jewelry sales will occur at least weekly for now, she says.

One Kings Lane is No. 173 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide and No. 36 in the Internet Retailer Mobile 400.

Favorite