• by Sarah Mahoney , Staff Writer @mahoney_sarah, December 14, 2022

Making fun of men who buy terrible holiday gifts is a tradition as old as eggnog. Kendra Scott takes a swing at the guys this year with a “Buy Better Gifts” campaign. Tom Nolan, chief executive officer of the Austin, Texas-based jewelry brand, explains the strategy behind its first ads aimed at men and what he expects from consumers in the coming months.

Retail Insider: This is your first campaign aimed at men. Can you discuss the strategy? Why now?

Tom Nolan: Men already comprise about 20% of our customer base. So we have a lot of men walking into stores and going on our website. Often, they're tagging along with a woman.

And we are a great gift-gifting destination. Whether you're a male or a female, there's a high-value proposition. It’s going to be a high-quality gift, and it’s not going to cost a fortune.

So this is our first attempt, and I feel it is a clever way to reach men. We’ve had a long-standing relationship with Omaha Productions, owned by Peyton Manning, and we love how they brought this to life.

Retail Insider: Kendra Scott is known as a creative, almost artsy brand. People can walk into a store and experience the color bar, for example, mixing and matching in unexpected ways. Does that intimidate men?

Nolan: We have some amazing people in our stores that hold your hand through the process. When Kendra started the company 20 years ago, the jewelry experience was intimidating. Everything was in the case, with people wearing white gloves. It was judgy.

We tried to tear those walls down in the very beginning. When you walk into one of our retail stores, they're fun, lighthearted, uplifting experiences. A guy walks in and can get a beer and have an associate say, "Tell me about the person you’re shopping for."

We do lots of personalization. So if you know your partner’s name and favorite color, you’ll get a great gift. Our boxes are beautiful, so you don’t have to wrap them.

Retail Insider: How much are you spending on the campaign?

Nolan: As a private company, we don’t disclose that. But it's a meaningful amount of our holiday budget. As I said, 20% of our audience is male. It’s safe to say that that same percentage of our holiday budget will be allocated towards them.

Retail Insider: Talk a little about your in-store experience and how you think it’s different from competitors.

Nolan: It’s the tip of the spear for us, and it’s all about experience. By the end of this year, we’ll have done close to 15,000 events in our 130 stores, all targeted toward philanthropic initiatives that are important to us.

The experience when you walk into one of our stories is a happy one. We sell Scott Brothers, our men’s collection, with watches, bracelets, rings and necklaces. And we offer demi-fine to fine jewelry. You can have champagne, beer, water, or a cookie when you walk in. We want them to see the whole breadth of what we offer.

It's hard to duplicate that online, but we try and make it as close as possible.

Retail Insider: Who is your core customer?

Nolan: Anyone from my 14-year-old daughter to my mom, and everyone in between. But for men, we use analytics differently, trying to understand who he is. Generally speaking, he is a partner, a dad and a son. He’s got a lot of gifts to give. The spots are running on Amazon and Hulu, online and all our social media channels so that we can reach him in many places.

Retail Insider: How will you decide whether this effort is worth the investment? What are you tracking besides sales?

Nolan: We’ll want to know if men purchased more this year, and we do a nice job of reaching back out to customers post-purchase to ask what the experience was like and find out if they’d shop with us again. We do a lot of focus groups. I like to hear what the customer says about what was and wasn’t good.

And while this ad is for the holidays, this isn’t just a sprint. There’s Valentine’s Day, birthdays, and anniversaries. We want to make sure we check all those boxes, too.

We recognize that to raise brand awareness, you have to make a lot of noise and be consistent. Our national unaided brand awareness is still only around 5%. For a company of our size, that’s an exciting opportunity.

Retail Insider: Consumer spending is slowing in many discretionary categories. How concerned are you?

Nolan: There is some real challenge in the market. And there are not a lot of positive economic indicators. Short term, we've not seen an impact, and right now, the biggest growth in our business is in our higher price point items.

We launched engagement successfully and haven’t seen a material pullback. However, I think 2023 is going to be challenging. But we’ve been around 20 years and weathered some tough economic times. And we do have an amazing connection with customers. We do it by helping local communities, and that creates a stickiness.