Andrey Yanchevsky is the CEO and founder of the LA VIVION jewellery company. Over 20 years in this business, he has worked his way from a software programmer to a member of the board of directors, gaining experience in various sectors of the jewellery industry.
Relying on the knowledge he gained and his entrepreneurial flair, Andrey Yanchevsky set up his own project, one of the first online jewellery stores in Russia, and in 2008, he opened a company in Hong Kong jointly with his partner to make wholesale supplies of diamond jewellery to jewellery stores and chains in Russia and the CIS countries.
LA VIVION is currently based in Moscow. The company’s office, boutique, and production site are located in the respectable business center Kalachevskaya Plaza.
Andrey Yanchevsky answered the Rough&Polished’s questions about the importance of developing an own brand and the ways to promote it.
For many people, the LA VIVION brand is associated with luxury jewellery. Are you of a different opinion?
We have high-class premium jewellery, which is still a slightly different segment. Our clients receive premium quality jewellery items for quite reasonable money. As for value-for-money ratio, probably, we give them a little more than other companies on the market can offer.
LA VIVION is now a well-known company: your advertisements can be seen in the magazines of airlines and the Russian Railways. Tell us, how important is the brand awareness and visibility?
Once an owner of a large business told me a phrase that stuck in my head, “We don’t have brands, we only have trademarks.” A brand is much more than a name. The brand awareness is certainly the most important factor, but it is also necessary to improve the quality of the company’s interaction with customers, formalize and promote the brand philosophy, and develop its internal culture. This is a much greater challenge than wide advertising, but this is one of our focuses.
As for direct advertising, today we really promote our jewellery online and offline actively. The current advertising mix allows for large coverage, but reaching your target audience has always been and remains a challenging task.
And yet, you have succeeded quite well in this area.
‘Customisation’ of advertising is among the main challenges: there are not many tools but many advertisers now, and the cost of attracting customers is constantly growing.
The combination of online and offline promotion formats works quite positively. We see that our actions aimed at promotion help other advertising channels in increasing their conversion rates. As for offline promotion formats, we use a number of glossy magazines. We reached an 80-percent ‘coverage of the air’ - I mean advertising during 80 percent of passenger air flights. These are in-flight magazines of the Aeroflot, S7, Rossiya airlines, as well as advertising on the screens in longer-flight airplanes, that is, video advertising during flights. Plus, we promote the jewellery in the Sapsan high-speed trains connecting Moscow with St. Petersburg and other large cities. Media advertising and advertising in magazines combined provide a significant increase in awareness and visibility and higher website traffic.
In addition to direct advertising, we periodically hold events for clients. In general, systematic work in this area continues, and there is still a long way to go.
What are your priorities now?
From this point of view, we now give priority to digital advertising options even more than to the awareness and visibility. We have very clearly worked out the query semantics and do our best to buy out the maximum number of items for them. I mean the queries related to engagement rings, stud earrings, and so on. They have very good indicators. These queries are mainly made by young people. Now, a family theme is in trend. So, we are increasing our budgets significantly, and our plans are to keep on doing so. These trends give a very good return. In fact, we only have Yandex.Direct today as we have not been able to advertise in Google for a long time, but Yandex works really greatly. The better the query semantics is worked out, the more clearly the queries are formulated and the more money we invest in a specific request, the more clients we actually get thanks to this work.
Tell us what’s new in your company. Have you managed to set up production in Moscow and built up a team?
To be honest, this partly lost its relevance some time ago.
We developed a set of standards and now work with five different contractors here in Russia. Thanks to this, we have slightly reduced the production cost and slightly increased the ‘speed’. But globally, the problems are the same as with our own production. Firstly, there are very few highly qualified specialists. Many specialists got used to working not quite the way we would like them to. And in general, the work culture here is somewhat different compared to that in Hong Kong, where we got used to working on our own production site. Of course, we did not encounter such difficulties there. To create a premium product, certain qualifications of product managers, marketers, designers, jewelers, as well as the knowledge of technology and understanding of many nuances are required. Here in Russia, the business ‘school’ and approach are different.
You once talked about your concept of a basic ‘stock of jewellery’. What is your progress in this area?
In general, the main thing done recently is a significant expansion of the jewellery range. We have added quite a large number of new designs, expanded the assortment of precious stones. As a result, we created the collection with very beautiful top-quality Zambian emeralds. In collaboration with YOKO London, we added pearls to the jewellery line. What else are we focusing on now? We also focused on expanding the jewellery line as a whole, and especially on offering the maximum number of high clarity diamonds. We see a trend for engagement rings (these are our main jewellery items) with polished diamonds over one carat featuring high characteristics, including within the first three color groups and the first three clarity groups. This was unexpected for us, but these stones and jewellery items are in good demand now, so we are expanding this jewellery line.
What are the current difficulties or ‘challenges’, as they say now?
I think, the challenges that can be noted are the same as everyone has. Firstly, this is the problem of the demographic pitfall. We see that the number of buyers and the number of people available for hiring are decreasing on the market. That is, there is a fierce and difficult struggle for qualified professionals: it is quite difficult to hire people with the necessary qualifications on the market now, and the salary level is quite high. The cost of attracting customers is also high - again, because there are fewer buyers due to the demographic pitfall; so, there are slightly less people on the market willing to buy, and their income level has not grown as much as the prices of precious metals and precious stones have grown.
Polished diamonds are a separate story. The price for polished diamonds is currently at a fairly low level. But in fact, their declining prices are fully offset by the growing logistics costs, the exchange rate difference, the growing dollar exchange rate (it has fallen a little now, but for how long?) and various issues related to the complex payment operations. And the complexity always means an increase in price. That is, the retail consumers did not feel, in fact, the decline in prices for polished diamonds in the world market. For them, the price either remained the same or even increased a little. In general, this is the situation.
Galina Semyonova, Editor in Chief of the Russian Bureau, Rough&Polished
