British jeweler Sophie Whitelaw first went viral on TikTok in 2025 while documenting the design of her own engagement ring — an emerald-cut natural diamond band surrounded by lab-grown stones — for tens of thousands of viewers. As a gemologist and founder of her eponymous, independent fine jewelry brand, she offered a rare insider’s view of a process most customers don’t see.
The business was three years old by then, its growth built on an early bet on TikTok as a discovery channel. Whitelaw launched her business in 2022, getting her start by designing bespoke rings for people she knew. “It got to the point where I’d run out of friends and family to make pieces for, so I went to TikTok because I didn’t have a marketing budget,” she told Vogue Business.
Its algorithm offered bigger reach, especially geographically, and early anonymity. TikTok has become an unexpected growth channel for jewelry through streaming, but unlike lower-priced categories that thrive in TikTok Shop’s in-app checkout, Whitelaw’s bespoke pieces aren’t sold directly through the platform, and for now, her content functions as a trust-builder that drives consumers to her direct-to-consumer site, rather than a single-tap purchase.
As Sky Canaves, principal analyst at Emarketer, notes,
As Sky Canaves, principal analyst at Emarketer, notes, “platforms like TikTok function as a destination for discovery and awareness, and research, rather than direct checkout. The opportunity within the app is to build trust, craftsmanship education, and the consultation process, rather than acting as a storefront.”
Whitelaw’s content of behind-the-scenes studio footage, [jewelry district] Hatton Garden vlogs, and US trunk show highlights is educational, intimate and informal by design, in contrast to an industry that can feel intimidating to customers.
For Katie Devlin, fashion trends editor at Stylus, Whitelaw’s social strategy is a shrewd move in a category where consumers often don’t understand the technical language of jewelry-making. “Having a trusted figurehead to guide them through that with easily digestible and entertaining content is paramount,” she says, adding, “personality and personal style are quickly becoming key drivers across the board.
Of course, heritage brands still carry some level of gravitas, but younger consumers are willing and ready to seek out new brands that are fronted by either experts or people with aspirational personal style and branding, or both.”
Consumers are also becoming increasingly comfortable making luxury, high-value purchases based on social content alone, without ever visiting a physical store.
According to Devlin, this is driven
According to Devlin, this is driven by a desire to huge appetite to seek out new and lesser-known brands and designers if it means getting the perfect piece.”
TikTok now drives 45% of new inquiries, Pinterest 21% and Instagram 10% (as of August 2026), with social media accounting for three-quarters of Whitelaw’s business
“We consistently receive 25 bespoke ring inquiries per week and, at the moment, have the capacity to work on 12 rings per month,” she says, at an average spend of £20,000 and several commissions over £100,000. Revenue grew 144% between 2025 and 2026, with a further 125% forecast by 2027, with plans for a brick-and-mortar showroom this winter. Whitelaw’s financial focus is investing in talent, having grown from a team of three to 12 in the last 18 months, with plans to hire three additional team members before the end of the financial year.
It’s evidence that high-value purchases can be scaled with a social media strategy built on organic content, not paid marketing or a physical presence, to convert inquiries into offline spend. It’s a strategy that $100 million fine jewelry brand Ring Concierge has employed in the US since launching in 2013, using Instagram to build multiple trust touchpoints for consumers before they make a purchase.
This isn’t a sneaker purchase
“This isn’t a sneaker purchase. It’s often the biggest thing someone buys outside of a house or a car, and it’s emotional. Customers follow us for years before buying, watching real proposals and real customer stories. That social proof does work that a traditional ad just can’t,” says founder Nicole Wegman. Unlike heritage houses investing in single-campaign sales funnels, social media offers sustained, cumulative visibility.
Using TikTok to drive expansion
In December 2024, Whitelaw launched a Staples collection, with tennis bracelets, pendants and earrings positioned as “everyday fine jewelry essentials for timeless wear”. Much of the demand surfaced on TikTok, where the Staples pieces feature heavily in Whitelaw’s TikTok content alongside her bespoke work, and it now accounts for 50% of revenue, up from 25% at launch.
“I noticed it was a lot of women buying diamond pieces for themselves,” Whitelaw says, citing wedding jewelry, promotions and 30th birthdays as common drivers. Los Angeles brand Christin Marie Studio shows how far the model can scale, with reported revenue of $5 million in 2025 despite launching only in 2023, with growth largely driven by a weekly “FaceTime Friday” live stream format that lets founder Christin Marie utilize her real-time audience interactions as a sales channel.
This shift is also playing out across Instagram,
This shift is also playing out across Instagram, too. For Ring Concierge, Wegman sees 70% of her customer base as women buying for themselves via social media: “Traditional messaging is built around milestones you wait for. Younger consumers aren’t waiting for permission or a life stage to buy; if a brand only shows up at the engagement moment, it’s missing everything else that actually drives purchases now, the promotion, the solo trip, the just because.” It’s reflected in how the brand markets to them, deliberately blurring the line between founder and brand, which is the same logic Whitelaw applies to TikTok.
What large retailers can’t offer
Being self-funded allows Whitelaw to adapt more quickly to demand than heritage houses, letting follower feedback shape her designs and materials directly. “A much bigger jewelry house is steeped in years of tradition, which they’re unable to change as much. Even from the materials that we use, we’re able to introduce lab-grown diamonds easily, but still work with natural diamonds, which is a testament to how we can respond to demand.”
Independent, founder-led brands have a structural competitive edge too, says Canaves, as “they are more responsive and don’t have to go through lengthy campaign planning processes or wait for approval of content.”
Edahn Golan, co-founder of diamond and jewelry data analytics firm Tenoris, doesn’t see this as a direct threat to the legacy houses; instead, he sees Whitelaw as competing for a different consumer entirely.
He believes this is due to the fragmented structure of the jewelry trade with mostly small, independent operators rather than chains, which leaves room for a founder-led brand to compete on “personality rather than scale”. Bespoke design simply meets a demand large retailers aren’t built for, he says. Buyers want to be treated as individuals, not routed through “a very big display with a lot of different options”, and founder-led, personality-driven social content fills that gap.
The flexibility that you can create
“The flexibility that you can create with a personality, those kinds of channels work best for independent designers.”
Social media content is a virtual door to a retail process that once required a sales floor. Inquiries for Whitelaw typically arrive as a comment or DM, which can then turn into a video call to discuss budget, designs, sketches, and CAD renders — an experience that runs the same way whether the client is based in London or elsewhere in the world.
Rather than operating as a direct sales channel, the showroom appointment has moved online, with the consumer journey beginning on TikTok. Crossing the Atlantic
Whitelaw spoke to Vogue Business shortly after returning from trunk shows in Nantucket, Massachusetts, and in New York. The East Coast was a natural fit for the brand’s international expansion, and for Whitelaw personally, as she trained as a gemologist at the Gemological Institute of America in Manhattan.
“We knew exactly what we were getting into, and were fully booked for all of our appointments,” she says. Nantucket, by contrast, was “a brand exercise” to grow her US following as much as driving sales, and appeal to an older demographic than New York’s younger, engagement ring-focused crowd, some of whom arrived already wearing her pieces. It’s a lucrative market as Emarketer forecasts US jewelry sales growing 8.5% year-on-year, more than double the 3.3% projected for personal luxury goods overall, says Canaves.
Whitelaw’s model, with no wholesale, ad spend, or reliance on retail, for now, has worked precisely because of the TikTok-forward strategy she’s built, and as Ring Concierge and Christin Marie Studio show, it’s a playbook that scales, especially as diamonds continue to outgrow the wedding market, in both the UK and the US.
Source: www.vogue.com
