Bright Like a Diamond

Jeweller TSL finally makes a comeback after a decade of slowing sales, lawsuits and foreign competitors, Joyce Yip investigates.When we met for this interview in mid-June, the very-tanned Anthony Jim had just returned from his two-week food tour in the most unconventional of places, Scandinavia.“The art and food movement is heading from France and Italy to the north. The plating is immaculate; they know what their expertise are – seafood – and maximises it to best potential; and you can’t help but appreciate the attention to detail they put in, whether you’re a foodie or not,” he says, and goes on to explain the nine-course meal he had at Noma.“Delicateness”, “expertise”, “attention to detail” are fitting word choices coming from the associate director of marketing at a jeweller who’s been in the region for almost half a century, TSL.As a brand that has dove from its peak in the 1990s to a standstill with lawsuits, an influx of international brands and growing local competitors, it’s desperately trying to wipe its slate clean by heralding those precise qualities in a 360 brand revamp.TSL’s fall started in the late ’90s with the founder’s lawsuit that ended with him, his son and three other senior executives in jail in May of 2008 for offering illegal commissions to travel agencies, embezzlement and tax fraud; its luck further plundered with the popularity of international brands and the opening of Chinese borders, which lost a lot of business to overseas retailers.“To be honest, the biggest competitor we had back then was ourselves: we needed a transformation,” says Jim. “But our value is in our ability to pick ourselves up: we like to think we’re a peacock finally being able to show off our feathers again.”We’re here to disrupt the market; disrupt it with the TSL DNA.For its first step, it cranked up the volume of its diamond-making craftsmanship by partnering up with micro-sculptor Willard Wiggan in a crossover event where the artist made miniature models to complement TSL’s patented diamond cut, The Estrella.Though Jim admits that Wiggan is not a conventional partner with boy-band good looks, the artist’s personal story really touched him.Born autistic, the African Briton was an outcast among friends and entertained himself by building paper houses for ants. This craft of miniatures later garnered him an MBE award from Queen Elizabeth II – a fortunate turn from misfortunes that TSL can relate to.The next phase was to show off TSL’s changed self, one that’s contemporary, innovative and can satisfy changing customers’ needs: sharing its vision was Hong Kong-born designer Vivienne Tam, whose Manhattan studio Jim spent days sleeping in before the first collaborated fashion show during New York Fashion Week.“We flew in a good week before the show started and found ourselves still tweaking things the day before the debut,”he reminisces. “There is almost no space in her studio, we just sort of squeezed into whatever space that was not occupied by her assistants, mannequins, fabrics, my people, her people: it was absolutely mayhem, but it was so satisfying."The show was in so high demand it repeated itself in Beijing this May, and Jim says future plans with the designer are already on the table.  “I nag Vivienne a lot, even she says ‘I can’t stand you, but I am also really happy that this happened’,” he laughs.When the puzzle pieces of Wiggan, Tam and a revamped retail offering – conducted in late 2010 with a refurbished décor, in-store iPad e-magazine featuring gimmicks like matching personalities with jewellery, and a wedding-planner concierge service – were in place, Jim knew it was time for the final act: the four-minute prime-time TVC.More a micro-movie than a commercial, the tale tells of a girl who has gone deaf after a car accident and her boyfriend who, out of her expectation, takes up sign language and proposes despite learning her disability. Almost too fittingly, the TVC ends with the latest tagline, “to love is to persevere”.“We wanted to wait until our brand was completely ready in people, place and product before we put down the curtain to the finale; we want to be a better and improved version of TSL; we want to translate that emotion people get when they watch the TVC to when they visit our shops.”So far, Jim’s strategy has worked, seeing that the first quarter of sales was in the highest in the last 10 years; and he’s already a good way into the next collaboration with a Japanese artist.“The imagery of jewellery in Hong Kong has always been perfection, romantic, ideal; but TSL – with our history and how we’ve thrived out ofour misfortunes – is anything but; and I think it’s important that every one of our pushes reflect that,” Jim says. “We’re here to disrupt the market; disrupt it with the TSL DNA.”