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Over the last 25 years, deBoulle has grown from an 800-square foot shop with two employees (my lovely, talented wife Karen and me) to a 13,600-square foot signature store with 25 employees. As our business grew, Karen and I strove to make it different from other jewelers. We began by attracting the finest brands. This, in turn, allowed us to attract high-performing salespeople which, in combination, attracted highly affluent clients. We grew fantastically and wanted to know how to keep the process going. What had developed from intuition now needed a systematic approach.

We were fortunate to have Bob Bloom, chairman of Publicis N.A., and a marketing genius (who has just published a book, The Inside Advantage), as a friend and client. Bloom led our team through a “branding” exercise. He tasked our team to define exactly what deBoulle was, what the unique benefit to our client was, and what competitive advantage that gave us. After two days of head-scratching and soul-searching, we concluded it was the human element, the way that we interacted with each other and our clients, that was the real difference between us and the competition, local or national. We called this phenomenon “The deBoulle Experience.”

OUR DIVERSITY IS A STRENGTH

That discovery may sound arrogant, but it was humbling. We realized our business can only be as good as we are to each other. Our growth hinges on the ability to serve a diversity of affluent personalities and tastes. We can only be as great as our ability to nurture the variety of internal talents it takes to run a fine jewelry business: the blending of fashion and finance, attention to detail, and stimulation of desire. We serve an international clientele. As a result our team includes Americans, Brazilian, Canadian, English, French, Korean, Lebanese, Laotian, Mexican, Spanish, and Vietnamese. “The deBoulle Experience” binds us together and our customers to us.

THE RULES

Over the years, we realized we had developed a culture that harnessed both ego and empathy. We evolved a set of unwritten rules about how we interacted with our associates and these rules in turn governed how our associates attended to each other and our clients.
The branding session articulated the previously informal rules that said we were to be simultaneously creative and caring. We were to be demanding of ourselves and respectful of each other. We were to care for each other like family and care for our clients like individuals. It may sound corny, but we all treated our clients the way we wanted to be treated. Over the years these “rules” had created an environment especially attractive to successful business people who can immediately tell the difference between real service and lip service.