Fabian Geyrhalter:
Welcome to the show, Kegan.

Kegan Fisher:
Thanks so much for having me.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It is so great to have you founded Frank Darling together with your husband back in 2017, I believe, and you set out to revolutionize the fine jewelry industry. It began in your Brooklyn apartment, and over the years it has grown into a nationally recognized brand. Now that has, I believe, nine brick and mortar locations, you have a hundred percent year over year growth. Congratulations. That’s amazing. The biggest question I have. Thank you. Yeah. Biggest question. Yeah. And why did you start a diamond ring business out of your apartment? That’s not a very common thing to do. Did you wake up one day? How does that work? Tell us a little bit about those first inspirational days and mums and how did it all start?

Kegan Fisher:
Yeah, so throughout Jeff, that’s my husband’s name, Jeff, throughout both of our career over the past three companies that we’ve worked at together, we’ve both always sort shared this common fascination with custom products and what does custom look like at scale? And this fascination with the idea that you could make it possible for everybody to get something that’s totally unique and perfect for them. And I think there’s all sorts of reasons that custom is interesting from the sustainability aspect where there’s no waste to the personalization aspect where the idea of getting a bespoke product, especially in a category of jewelry, is just so much more exciting than getting something that’s mass produced. And then on the technical side, there’s all sorts of interesting problems to solve there. And so at the beginning of Frank Darling, we had just sold our previous company, which was in the software space.
And both of us, we come from art and design backgrounds, and we really, really missed working in the sort of art creative fields and wanted to be around creative people. And we knew that we wanted to start another company because me, I’ll speak for myself, I’m literally incapable of doing anything else. And so they started thinking about what that company would be. And I’d always been interested in Blue Nile. They were one of the really early dotcom jewelry companies, like the first people to sell diamonds online. And you can say a lot of things about the brand, but they were able to crack into a market that nobody had at the time. And it sort of boggled my mind that so much time had gone by and that there weren’t more competitors in the space. And I was always saying at the beginning, you could have a better experience buying a $20 toothbrush online than you could shopping for jewelry.
And it was just crazy to me that nobody had come in and tried to tackle that category in the context of the internet. And there were still these kind of legacy juggernauts that were hanging in there and there was nobody new. And then I think the more that we looked at the category, the more that we saw all these interesting trends kind of converging, there was this idea that couples had started shopping together and women were leading the shopping experience. And that was a big change in just the purchase process. Then you had lab grown diamonds. And from a technology standpoint, we were both super excited about that because we have backgrounds in 3D printing. And so it was like, oh my God, you get 3D print diamonds, how cool is that? And then there was just, again, when we looked at the brands in the space, I think through the lens of being a couple and through the lens of being entrepreneurs and also from the lens of people that doesn’t love products and beautiful things, it felt like the incumbents were kind of doing the bare minimum.
And there was nowhere that we would really want to shop. And everything felt so beige and so dated and kind of so out of touch with the younger consumer that again, I was like, why hasn’t anybody come in and tried to do things differently and not make just another copycat brand? You look for diamonds online, there are so many brands. I mean, I even hate to use that word on a podcast about branding, but there were so many businesses selling diamonds, but there was nobody that really felt like they were tackling it from a brand perspective. And that to us, I think felt like a really big opportunity. And

Fabian Geyrhalter:
You both had zero experience in sourcing or selling jewelry?

Kegan Fisher:
Oh yeah. We didn’t know anything about diamonds. That was a very steep, awesome,
I studied industrial design, so I definitely knew a fair amount about making things and designing products. And we met at Shapeways, I’m not sure if you know Shapeways, but they were a fairly large, they grew into a fairly large company doing 3D printed custom products at scale. And so there were some tangential threads there that I think we both felt were interesting. But as far as the diamond joy world, diamonds are, it’s a very insular world and it’s not super friendly. And I remember the first time that I think the whole diamond world, it operates on a memo basis where people just trade stone. So you would email me and say like, Hey, Kegan, will you lend me these diamonds? And I’d be like, sure, Fabian. And then I would send you the diamonds in the mail and then when you were done with them, you would return them to me.
And that’s just how the world works. And I remember the first time that I emailed a supplier with sort of no, I guess call it courage or whatever, I never spoken. We had no credit and no relationship, but I just thought this was a completely normal thing to do, which clearly it wasn’t. And I think that they gave us one of the stones which they shipped to our apartment, and I was so nervous when I opened the envelope and the stone fell out on the floor and I was terrified my cat was going to eat it, and I was just like, I don’t know. It was a really interesting kind of beginning of things. And now obviously all of that feels normal and we probably, the term is memo, but we turn over fun memo maybe like 600 to a thousand diamonds a week now. So it’s just like the scale has changed so tremendously in a really, really fun and exciting way.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Unbelievable. You have touched on literally everything I want to talk with you about. So let’s just start somewhere and then somewhere is going to be your last thought that you had here about how unsettling of an idea it is that you receive a diamond in the mail and how unsettling of an idea is to me, thinking that you actually accept returns within 30 days. All of that to me is just mind blowing, but I mean it’s truly falling in line with customer’s expectations, obviously, right? It’s like, yeah, 30 day return if anything, and you get it in the mail. But I mean, there’s a whole slew of challenges and emotions that what comes me thinking about that, but it’s just normal. It feels dangerous, it feels weird. How does that work? Or is it just normal? Am I the non-normal one here?

Kegan Fisher:
No, no, no. I mean, it’s weird, right? It’s a weird category. People are spending a lot of money. The price point is extremely high. We’ve had people and it doesn’t happen that often where people just spend it in inordinate amount of money on our website. But it does happen sometimes. I think the biggest direct checkout that we got was, I want to say $75,000. And it was just like somebody’s put it on their credit card. I was like, I guess that’s a thing that we do. And I was so nervous and I was like, should we show them the stone? Do we want to send them photos? But it’s like they’re purchasing a product, they’re purchasing anything else online. So I think that obviously people have different appetites and pallets for what they can stomach, but as it stands now, the brand is, I wouldn’t say that we’re big, but we have grown quite a lot and we exist on the internet.
And so a lot of the challenges that we faced when we were smaller people, we had customers that would ask to talk to other customers to do reference checks and things like that because they weren’t sure that it was for sure send the money, especially because we accept bank wires as payments, and it’s actually a pretty common way to pay for things because people often don’t have enough credit on their credit card or they want to take advantage of the 1.5% discount or whatever it may be. But you can imagine wiring $20,000 to a company on the internet in a different state is scary, and I can understand that from a customer point of view because I would be nervous if I was in their footsteps. From a business point of view, I mean, that has become normal and returns, I think it’s par for course selling things online today.
People expect that, and we’ve always tried to provide the best possible customer experience that we can. And from day one it was like that. Now obviously we have more of a safety net. The business is bigger, but I remember in that first year somebody returned a $20,000 diamond, and if you end up owning it because you can’t return it to the supplier, that could basically sink the month. So it was a lot riskier back then, and it’s still stuff like that still happens. We’ve ended up owning very expensive diamonds that we would prefer not to own, but we can absorb it because we’re a little bit bigger.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Right, exactly. So when you go to your website, you can choose from, I guess over a quarter million certified ethically sourced natural and lab grown diamonds. Tell us a little bit about your stance when it comes to ethically sourcing. And obviously we already hinted at the idea of lab grown stones and your fascination with it or just what is your ideology around that, and do you only offer those types of diamonds, the ethically sourced and the lab grown ones?

Kegan Fisher:
Yeah, so the industry has come long way. I think since what we think of as blood diamond and where it was back then and the approach that we’ve always tried to take around sourcing and sustainability is just to be as transparent as possible. I think it, it’s not as much as everybody would love for it to be cut and dry, and this is good and this is bad. The reality is, I think with any kind of sourcing, it’s more of a gray scale and everybody has different standards as far as what they think is acceptable. We introduced, so we were inspired by the whole food supplier standards when we went in there in the early days and we saw this thing that they had for fish where they were like, do you want to know the fishermen that caught your fish? Or do you just want to know that your fish came from a sustainable fishing operation and they had these standards that they laid out?
And that was kind of like our thinking around sustainability in the beginning was, okay, we have the bare minimum standards, which is like, yes, anything we sell has to be conflict free. And in the US that is the standard. Now you are not allowed to sell things that are not conflict within the us. I think there is a lot of confusion around that, but then beyond that, there’s all sorts of nuance to it, whether it’s is it natural? Is it an antique stone where maybe it was mined and maybe it wasn’t even mined in the best way, but now it’s being resold, so therefore no new damage is being done. That’s definitely an interesting and growing category. Then you’ve got lab grown diamonds and you’ve got lab grown diamonds that are grown in carbon neutral facilities, but you’ve also got lab grown diamonds that are grown in factories in China.
So there’s a lot of complexity there, and I think it can’t be boiled down to just say, this is good and this is bad. What we try to do is everything is what we consider a bare minimum of good. And then with our customers, we educate them as much as possible and we try to be as transparent as possible about everything that we know and meet whatever they’re looking for. So they come in saying, I want a diamond and I want to know exactly the profit of where it came from. There’s a lot of really interesting things happening there now, and we can source something with a known and feel confident in that information that we’re giving them. Somebody else may be comfortable with it just being a lab grown dive in, but whatever it may be, we just try to provide as much, I would say, info dump, but just provide as much information to them as possible so they feel confident in the decision they’re making. Whatever that decision may be, even if it requires a little bit more explanation upfront.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And that touches on something that’s extremely important to your company as a whole is that customer journey. Right? The ring finding journey is a huge part of your website. It is as real life as it possibly can be, I suppose, and even real life. It’s much, much more thought, thoughtful and all encompassing as it is in a lot of competitive jewelry stores. Tell us a little bit about that quiz and how it works and how you hold hands with your customers through the journey.

Kegan Fisher:
Totally. Yeah, so it’s interesting because going back to the beginning when we launched the brand day one, we launched with our home Trium kit, and we felt that the idea of going into a store to shop for something like jewelry where there’s often not price tags on things or maybe you’re made to feel bad about asking the salesperson for too many things from the counter, or maybe you are made to feel bad about however much money you’re spending, it just didn’t feel like a warm and hospitable experience. We felt like the try and home kit was the answer to that, where we created a kit where people could pick out three rings on our website, we would send them silver and CZ samples, and then they could send those samples back to us. And that would allow them to have that kind of in-store experience first at home with their partner where it could be a fun and comfortable discussion.
And then once they’d had that they could come in armed with some degree of knowledge and feel more comfortable kind of with the in-store experience. But try Home Kit is still part of the business, but I think what we saw during that first year where we sort of muddled through things, for lack of a better word, and tried to figure out what was working and what our customers were reacting to was that they would do the Try home kit and then they would email us and they’d be like, oh, I love this ring, but actually can you change ETS and X and X about it? And that just happened over and over and over again. And from a revenue perspective, that first year, I mean it was radio silence people, we were getting a little bit of traction, but it was about enough. So at some point, I think we launched in, I think we launched in January or February by the time it got to the October and it was still sort of radios on, so people were ordering the trade at home kits, but they weren’t really converting to sales. We said, well, why don’t people keep asking for customs? So why don’t we make this quiz where people can take a quiz and then we’ll send them a free sketch of their dream ring, and I would just make those sketches for them. And in the beginning, they actually made full on CAD models, even though I had no idea how to, I figured that out.
And so we made this type form quiz. It was all manual. People would take it, like I said, email in, and then I would send them a CAD model, and people went crazy for it. And it was just immediately everybody was so excited and suddenly we started to sell things and then it was like, okay, well we can’t continue to all this stuff. So Jeff and I actually had a big argument whether it was okay to make these sketches an illustrator or not, and I was like, no, they have to be 3d. And he was like, illustrator is fine. And eventually we ended up making them an illustrator because it wasn’t going to work the way that we were doing it. And again, though, we were manually drawing them an illustrator for customers. And we went that December, the first month we launched this quiz from 10 K in monthly revenue to 100k in monthly revenue, which was a huge jump the time. And then again, the people are requesting the quizzes and they’re requesting more and more. I think at this point we’ve done over a hundred thousand of these ring sketches, so it’s like we’ve done so many of them, but at that point we were like, okay, well, we can’t continue to sketch these by hand because it’s taking too long. And we’d already had to hire a freelancer to do the sketches for us at this point. Of

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Course. Course, I hope so.

Kegan Fisher:
Yeah, I know she’s still with us. She’s our first employee now. She became our first employee and now she’s our director of training for the wholesale and design team, but she’s absolutely wonderful. So she built out a library of assets and illustrator and Jeff wrote this little JavaScript program to automate the compilation of these symbols, little stickers, and we started generating the sketches automatically through this program that we made, and it just took off. And that year, I mean I think we did 2 million our first year and it just every month was just double and double and double, and then COVID hit and there was a period of, okay, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but we bounced back pretty quickly thereafter. Luckily because we didn’t have an office at this point. Luckily we had some diamonds in our apartment, so we were just like, let’s just sell the diamonds that we have.
And everybody was freaking out and wanting to get engaged and that seemed to work. But anyway, so the quiz, surprisingly, it’s pretty low fidelity and thought about improving that experience, talked about building it into the website. We’ve talked about making it fancy. There’s all sorts of things we’ve discussed, but at the end of the day, people love it, and I think we probably should put some work into it at some point and to make it a little bit nicer, but the beauty of getting a sketch and not like a CAD rendering is that it’s not too perfect. There’s that phrase, the uncanny valley. That’s what I was trying to think of. It’s not like where you’re in the uncanny valley where it’s like, oh, this is like a ring, but it looks weird like a CAD rendering. The sketch is just a sketch and it’s pretty and it looks nice, and it’s designed to feel like you’re getting something that feels handmade and hand done. And everybody on our design team now is trained to sketch in that same way, and it’s really become a huge part of the brand that I think on day one, we never would’ve guessed that that would’ve been the thing that kind of catapulted us from the potential fear of having to get jobs to actually having to build a considerably large business.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Absolutely. And I mean the difference of doing this in Illustrator on day one or doing the actual renderings to 2025 and you’ve got AI and God knows what the future can hold to actually make that experience different, but I think it’s not even so much the quality of what you give them, I think, and obviously this is a known truth for all of us here, but it’s obviously because you involve them on the creative level that it’s their idea and therefore it’s so unique. And so when they get this one instead of three or five samples from you, but no, it’s that one thing that they dream up, therefore suddenly the actual sales rate is sky high because they feel like it’s their unique ring that they were involved with deciding. So super exciting. And then you also, you have a free lifetime care on your website, and I’m wondering, is that a way for you to invite customers into the retail environment or how does that work? The lifetime

Kegan Fisher:
Care? I mean, it’s nice if they come in, but they don’t have to. They can also mail the piece in As we’ve expanded our retail footprint, generally people will come in and it’s this emotional experience that we’ve gone through with them purchasing an engagement ring. It’s always really nice when customers come in because people like to chat and have a good time. But for us, the lifetime care was more about just wanting people to have rings and take care of them and love them for however long that may be. And I think we found nobody really knows how to care for the ring or to take care of it or what to do if they need to get it, it rero plated or something like that because they got white gold and it’s not as white as the day that they first got it. And so just being able to bring the experience that if they were shopping with a local jeweler, they would have more into the e-comm online experience and then bridge that with our retail stores was kind of the thinking there.
And then continue that conversation around the brand, right? Because it’s not just a one and done purchase, even though I do think a lot of people think about it that way where they’re like, oh, you told the engagement ring so you’re done now. But it’s like, no, we’re not done. The engagement ring is one purchase in what could be a very long customer journey as you go through these wonderful milestones with someone, and if you expect them to go on that journey with you at this price point, then you need to be there for them and you need to be there for them when things go well and you need to be there for them when things go wrong, and you need to be there for them when they want to make their rings look nice for their wedding

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And you want to be there for them when they need another ring. Exactly. Let’s not forget exactly which, it’s a really smart move. And then after you figured out, which of course, I mean that was not easy as you said in the first year when you were going one direction and then you suddenly realized, oh, that’s what people really want. And then suddenly it changed from 10,000 to a hundred thousand a month for huge, huge changes and just the process and just thinking about what people really need, just the empathy part, which is so exciting that that is literally you’ve got data to put against customer experience and empathy and that kind of thinking and how that changed your business early on. This is amazing. But once you had that all figured out and then you moved into brick and mortar, now you’ve got nine stores. I think you just recently opened up your ninth store in New York, Flatiron District, I believe. Right? Tell us how was that move? And it sounds so backwards around because usually people start in brick and mortar and then they went online. You started online obviously, and you moved into brick and mortar. How was that? I mean, it was super exciting, I’m sure, but it comes with its own challenges, I’m sure.

Kegan Fisher:
Oh my goodness. It’s so funny because I feel like in the startup world and in D two C, it’s beat into your head eCom, you’re only supposed to be e-comm, and that’s where the feature is. In the same way, it’s only supposed to be your brand. You’re not supposed to sell third party, whatever may be. It’s like the internet has collectively decided what new consumer looks like. And I think obviously we followed that trend. But again, if you go back to the beginning, we had people that started shoppers in New York that started to ask us to see the diamonds, and the brand is mostly bootstrapped, so it’s amazing the things that you do when you haven’t raised venture capital and you actually have to generate revenue. You’ll pretty much do whatever you need to do to make it work and figure out what people actually want, which I think is actually really, really great for a brand because you’re forced to address those quiz questions very early on and iterate much more quickly than maybe you would if you have a large cushion behind you. So we had people asking us to see stones in person, and we didn’t obviously have an office space or anything like that. So what we did in that first year when that first started happening was we rented, do you remember a company called Breather?

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I do not.

Kegan Fisher:
It was this company where you could rent office space by the hour, and they had partnered with all these office buildings in New York and I think all over the US where it was just underutilized space, and they would send you a code, you could go into the space, you’d pay ’em like a hundred bucks for the space, and then you’d leave at the end of it. So

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s like the pre WeWork kind of era, right?

Kegan Fisher:
Yes. Yeah, it’s like private WeWork where you’re just in a random office building and you just go into a room. Sounds

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Like a creepier version of Airbnb.

Kegan Fisher:
Yeah, well, that makes sense. We started renting these breathers and meeting clients there to show them diamonds, and we had a little traveling lamp that we’d bring with us and a traveling stone kit, and we’d bring the diamonds, obviously Jeff and I would do it together and show them the diamonds. And it worked really well. People started, they bought things, and we probably did this I think for a year, and Breather had this coupon promo code that was going on at the time where if you were a new customer, they would give you half off. And we were so cheap and broke that we just kept making new accounts. Eventually their CTO found out and kicked us off the platform. So that was the end of that.
But then we moved on from that to WeWork or a WeWork competitor where we got a private room and a coworking space and clients would there and meet us to look at diamonds. And then at some point COVID hit and it was like, okay, we can’t go to the WeWork anymore because this doesn’t feel safe. And we did have a short period where we invited people over to our apartment to look at stones, and that was a whole nother saga, but eventually we got the first office and it had one meeting space in it where we would meet people at, and bookings just started to increase. And I think we realized pretty clearly that the in-person experience was just, it was better than the strictly online experience. And that’s not to say that the online experience isn’t important. I very much think that they work together and I think that people appreciate the transparency of being able to go to our website.
They can see what things cost. Everything has a price tag. They can browse as much as they want for as long as they want and get a feel for it. We have a huge educational component with our blog, which is a big part of our marketing strategy in the beginning. And then when they’re ready, they can pick out the diamonds they like on the website, email them to us, we’ll bring those diamonds into our showroom or our gemology team will curate similar stones based upon their preferences, and then they can make that internet search that they’ve been doing real and continue to process or offline at a showroom. And the other advantage of that is obviously being able to pick up the ring at the showroom, having the post care experience with that and having that relationship with the brand, much like you would have with a local jeweler or something like that where there’s only one location. The difference with us is obviously we have lots of locations and you have the backing of a bigger brand and the trust of a bigger brand behind your local footprint. So that was the thinking there. And 75% of our revenue comes through our showroom, so obviously

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, wow.

Kegan Fisher:
Yeah, it’s been a huge part of our growth strategy. Our showrooms are profitable pretty much out the gate and they’re very inexpensive for us to get off the ground. We always go into second floor spaces, we’re always by a appointment only, and we do what we consider a local living room type feel. Each showroom is designed differently and it’s designed for the local market that it’s going into. We want it to feel comfortable and we don’t want be Zales where everyone is identical. We want each one to be a reflection of the area in the community. And again, we don’t want to be zales in that. You have to ask to see the things beneath the counter when you walk into a Frank Darlene showroom, everything a, well, you have an appointment B, everything is curated and customized for your appointment. So if you tell us that you want to look at yellow gold settings and your budget is $2,000 and you like ovals, you’re going to look at yellow gold settings alongside oval diamonds that are sub $2,000 the same as you tell us your budget is $50,000 and you only want to look at three stones.
We really try to curate and customize every aspect of that experience. And part of that is because don’t want, we’re not the right place for them. We cater to all price points and all types of customers, and that inclusivity I think is a big part of the brand, but also because as a consumer, I hate trying on something in a store and then finding out that it’s more that I’m prepared to spend, and then you suddenly take this thing that you were really excited about and you rip all that excitement away. And so I just never wanted our customers to have that. And by having that discussion around price point upfront and then curating it, I think that we’re able to manage that a lot better. The great thing about diamonds that I think, again, people don’t understand is, and also just custom jewelry in general, I think they have to spend a lot to get something beautiful, but you can get something beautiful at any price point as long as you know that that’s the price point that you’re working towards when you start the experience.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love that. I love so much about what you said, this entire journey that ends in empathy. It’s so clearly visible and it’s so logical for you, it’s kind of like car shopping. You start car shopping online, you spend the majority of time online, and then at some point you have to go to the dealer with car shopping, you have to go to the dealer, you don’t want to go to the dealer with you, you actually want to go, you want to go and then do that final decision of I can finally see a couple of these options that I’ve been now playing with for half a year online. I can see them at Frank Darling right there. And I think it’s this really nice ending to a journey, but it’s not the beginning. Very often it’s the ending. And so I think that the way that the two work together I think is really fantastic. I just can’t get over the idea. You and your husband renting random rooms and walking around with 10,000, $20,000 diamonds in your pocket, meeting a stranger who knows here to come with a $20,000 diamond in the pocket. It’s just pretty, I’m just glad you’re still around and everything is the way it is today.

Kegan Fisher:
No, I know in retrospect, you’re like, huh, I really did that. We had so much fun and we’re still having fun, obviously. But those early days are a lot of just trying something and seeing what works and sort of being relentlessly stubborn until you figure it out and do better. So I’m excited about, you mentioned data and I’m excited about the stage that we’re in now because we’re finally, obviously because our price point is higher, our unit numbers are lower, and so for a long time it felt like we just didn’t have nearly as much data as we would hope to have about what styles people are purchasing or how they’re engaging the brand, how they’re using the website, et cetera, et cetera. And now we’re at a point where we’re scaling and we do have a lot there, which is really exciting. And it feels like that’s the next stage of the company is being able to really leverage that to make smarter decisions as we scale. And yeah, it’s a nice point to be at.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Very, very impressive. And that makes tons of sense that that’s where you arrive after a certain amount of time selling. A while ago, a pretty good while ago, I had Anna Sheffield on the show, so I was not planning to have another jewelry brand on hitting the mark ever because I’m like, okay, jewelry is done now, but then your brand name caught my attention and I’m like, wait a minute, what’s up with that brand name? And so once I read the story page on your website, I just knew I had to get you on the podcast, so I’m just going to go ahead and read the first paragraph and it’s a lengthy paragraph, but it’s very adut for everyone listening. I’m going to read that off of your website real quick so that everyone can understand a little bit more about the brand name and also about the very specific tone of voice that you have. So here it goes. The hardest thing on earth is now a little easier. We’ll be frank darling. The diamond industry benefits from confused customers, from the low rent retailers to the high end boutiques. The lack of clarity is positively app compelling, high quality diamonds with scandalous markups, low quality diamonds with scandalous markups, an industry that buys and sells carrot and clarity. This opaque, you can almost smell the irony. And online retailers, all that can really be said is good luck. So I could recite this much better. I didn’t really practice but this.

Kegan Fisher:
No, love it. I love it.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
What a great, and this is the first paragraph of a lengthy story and almost like a testament and a mission and is this is who we are. And then suddenly that idea of which greets visitors on the Frank Darling website, that idea of be bold, be frank, be frank, darling, it suddenly all comes together. How did that naming and that entire kind of taking that bold brand voice and that stance, how was that born and when was that born? Was that immediate or how did that work? Take us a little bit on that journey.

Kegan Fisher:
Well, it’s so funny because one of the questions that you had asked beforehand was, did you ever go against your early customer data and do something based on instinct? And the name was definitely that thing we did. And I’ll go back and say how we came to it, but when we finally settled thought about Frank Darling, I think Jeff and I both loved it. We were like, this is a great name. We should clearly name the business. And we did some tests, we did some testing against the other names that we had been considering, and it just tested horribly. It was by far the worst option out of the four options. And we were like, you know what? Whatever, let’s just go with it. It’s a great name. And I think that it’s a great name and it’s memorable and it’s weird and it’s funny, and people call and ask for Frank, and there’s alsos of fun Easter egg stuff I think that we can do here as we grow. But it did test really terribly, which I thought ironic and a good lesson. But sometimes you just have to trust your gut and sometimes you trust the data. And in this case, we trusted our gut.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
If you ever want to do something crazy, don’t go with a focus group, right? Because it’s obvious. It’s like, oh my God, this is so foreign, I can’t relate to it. It must be a bad idea. And so that falls so perfectly under this. I mean, us people in marketing and branding, we know it, but yet I don’t know how much of marketing is actually AB testing and whatever performs the best because the really crazy ideas just never make it out there. The liquid death water would never be born and nor would be a Frank Darling terribly Liquid Death is a great name. Let’s just let it, yeah, that’s so cool. And then the entire narrative was shaped based on that.

Kegan Fisher:
Yeah, I think the narrative came first and the name came second from the get go. And I did mention this a little bit at the beginning, but when we looked at the space, it felt so unbranded, it felt so beige, it felt so boring. It was blonde women on beaches, it very heteronormative, and it just felt like completely out of touch with where the consumer was. And I think when we thought about, well, Jeff and I are a little weird, obviously we come from our own design backgrounds and we’re definitely, I think a little weird, but I think when we think about great luxury brands and you think of the people that are doing really interesting stuff like Louis Bay and maybe where Gucci was before and things like that, you think of these brands that they are over gentle monsters. There’s another example. These brands are weird and they push the envelope and that’s exciting and they try new things and they try things that more like classic luxury brands wouldn’t be able to try.
And I think that was really exciting to us. And I think we felt that if we wanted to stand out in the space and we wanted to create something that was memorable, that felt different and it didn’t feel like everything else that we just, at the end of the day, we didn’t want it to be beige and we didn’t want it to be boring and we wanted to have fun with it, and we wanted the tone of voice to be witty, and we wanted for customers to feel like we were having a good time and it was playful and we were joking with them and that they could come here and have a good time and it wasn’t going to be this very serious conversation about love and men relationships. And

Fabian Geyrhalter:
You’re not sitting down at Tiffany’s, right?

Kegan Fisher:
Yeah, exactly. And I dunno, it felt like there was just an opportunity to do that, especially now that people were shopping together, and especially now that people were exploring more interesting designs and customization options. So that was, I think on day one, that was how we were thinking about the brand. And we cycled through a lot of different names, the one that we almost pursued, and I’m so glad that we didn’t because I feel like it would not have been a great brand. And Frank Darlene I think is a great brand, or at least the beginnings of a great brand, but it was called Rockwell House. I think you’re the first person I’ve told this to. It was, it was like your classic D two C naming sort of thing, because we were like, oh, we’ve got the rock and you want to be a good rock. So it’s like Rockwell and there’s this air of the Aristocrat House in the Cowell sort of thing going on, and I think it was a safe choice, but

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It sounds like an investment group. It sounds like Blackstone, right? Yeah,

Kegan Fisher:
Yeah, exactly. But it’s so, so boring. But that was where we started, and then briefly it was going to be called with Arter, but then we realized that nobody knew what Arter meant. So then that went out the window, and then we were just sitting in our kitchen one day and we were talking about the brand, and I think we’ve been fighting with each other for a week about this at this point because we just couldn’t come up with a name. I was like, I see

Fabian Geyrhalter:
A constant here.

Kegan Fisher:
Oh my God, Jeff and I know we’ve been together for 10 years now, so I feel like we know each other really well. And branding and design is, we both have our separate areas of the company that we manage, but brand and design is the one area where we both have strong opinions, and so

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It can divide or unify, right?

Kegan Fisher:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. But where you’re like, what is the brand about? And the brand is about honesty, and the brand is about romance, and we want it to be about romance. We don’t be like cheesy romance ads. And then we were just like, Frank, we’re frank, we’re darling, we’re frank, darling. And that was it. Oh my

Fabian Geyrhalter:
God. That’s how it came about. That’s fantastic. Yeah, totally. And actually now that we are at that point of we sat down and we thought about what the brand is, and we talked so much about the brand right now, what is that word today? That one word that is kind of like the brand

Kegan Fisher:
DNA? So I mean, I thought a lot about this and it’s a really, really impossibly tough question. Thank you. Yes.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I make it easy for my interviewees.

Kegan Fisher:
I think when I first thought about it, I thought it was honesty, and because we do, the brand is about taking a category where there’s so much confusion and such lack of transparency and just going on a really comfortable and honest journey with the customer. And so I think that that still is a big part of who we’re and who we try to be. But at the end of the day, I think what the brand is about is about delivering these custom experiences and it’s custom product, custom experiences, customized journeys that they go on, and acknowledging that in this category, every journey and every product that we make is unique, and that’s got us to where we are. And I think that’s different about our retail strategy and that’s different about our stone sourcing strategy and our design and production strategy. So I think while honesty is still a big part of the DNA, I think the word custom or bespoke, my coworker said bespoke is a little hoity, so we’re not that hoy to when we’re acceptable, so I think we have to go with custom.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
You put the custom in customer. There you go. No, that’s great. It makes a lot of sense, and I’m sure that can be worked out further because you’re already doing it. That is the DNA, right? That really is that custom journey. What’s next as we come to the top of our time here, what’s next for your brand? What are you excited about in the next six months?

Kegan Fisher:
Well, right now I’m really excited because we have a bunch of new website changes that have been long in the making and are very, very close to launching, hopefully within the next week or two. So I am excited to see slowly as we’ve been building out the brand and then developing, I’m excited to see some of this new experience coming to online, so I think that’s really exciting. We also have a huge photo shoot coming up, which I know doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but we’ve been so frugal our entire kind of brand journey that we’re finally starting to invest in more polished, professional, creative, and making jewelry for it. And that is just something that I’m really excited about. It feels like I’m doing creative things. Again, big projects. We just signed the lease on a new production facility in actually just down the street from our Tribeca location on Broadway, and it’s 5,000 square feet, and we will be insourcing about 90% of our production, so that means making 90% of our own jewelry.
We’re also going to have a fast track service for post care, things like repairs and resizes and polishing and cleaning and all that. The things that you mentioned when we spoke about Lifetime Care, I think when we’ve looked at other brands in the space, the customer let down is always around the post-care experience. And I think we feel that we have an opportunity to, we want to be the brand that has an amazing post-care experience and does it better and faster and cheaper than anybody else, and really makes people feel like they’re taking care of beyond that initial purchase. And so this production facility and sort of fast track lane is a big part of being able to execute that. So that we’re really excited about. We just launched our Austin showroom. We’re opening Philly next month and we’re opening Seattle later this year. And then obviously we’re going to continue our strategy of opening these local footprints throughout the us. I’m hoping at some point in the next year, year or two years that we make the move international because we do have quite a lot of interest in several international markets, and there’s some complexity there around our sourcing strategy, but I think that that would just be something that is personally really exciting for me.
And beyond that, I mean on the product side, I guess that would be so many things on the product side. I

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Know I’m like, and then that’s a lot already. It’s amazing. It’s amazing.

Kegan Fisher:
Yeah, no, it’s a lot and it’s fun and we have such a great team that’s making it all happen, but I think we’re at a really, really exciting point of the business and every point, to be fair, has been exciting for different reasons, but I can’t wait to see where we go in the next couple of years.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, the excitement comes through. Thank you. Thank you for sharing it with everyone. Where can people go to follow Frank Darling or to start their own journey?

Kegan Fisher:
Sure. I mean, follow us on Instagram. It’s just Frankdarling, and we post all sorts of really fun and inspirational ring content. That’s great. If you’re, you can’t see what’s out there and what people are making and get an idea for what you might like and obviously go to our website, take the ring quiz, get a free sketch. It’s so fun. There’s no limit. You can do it over and over again. People do it all the time. And if you want to come and visit us in person, we would love that. We have showrooms in New York, both in Manhattan, Flatiron and Williamsburg. We’re also in DC and Boston, and we’ll soon to be in Philly. We’re in Chicago, Austin, LA, and San Francisco and hopefully others and soon to be throughout the us, but please come visit. We have a very fun, casual, in person experience, super low pressure, and it feels like hanging out. Our goal is to make it feel like you’re hanging out with your best friend in their living room, and your best friend just happens to be an expert who wants to look at diamonds with you. I love that.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Kegan, thank you so much for sharing all of this wisdom and the journey and the customization thoughts and the brand empathy thinking and all of this with us for a good 45 minutes. We’re so grateful for your time. Thank you so much.

Kegan Fisher:
Oh, thank you so much for having me. This was so fun.