For as long as Statement founder Amélie Huynh can remember, she had her eye on jewelry.
“When I was young, I started wearing jewelry that was quite voluminous, had a lot of character and these pieces always defined me,” said this business school graduate who cut her teeth as a product manager at Chaumet before a five-year stint at the DC&VB advertising agency.
Soon enough, her desire to strike out on her own prevailed and she started working on her own fine jewelry offering, albeit with an usual precious metal choice: silver.
The precious metal’s association with the moon and femininity appealed to her, particularly when paired with an aesthetic that blends Art Deco geometries with a touch of Brutalist architecture.
“I’m rather square,” joked the founder, who sketches all the designs herself. “Being an urban person, I’m used to things being arranged to a certain geometry. I also need pieces to express a form of energy and balance, which I find in Art Deco.”
“The period really spoke to me because I wanted to make jewelry that would mark its time rather than follow trends,” she continued. “The creations that were made at the time, a century ago, are completely contemporary. They could be made today without any modifications and that’s something I find extraordinary.”
Setting it with diamonds also harkened back to 19th-century fine jewelry, where this was a popular combination among French jewelers.
Symbolism is built into the eight collections currently released, with ideas such as movement underpinning the Rockaway spinner ring, an upward trajectory in the architectural “Stairway” line or the self-explanatory “MyWay” design and “Wish Boxes” pendants that reveal a precious gem inside.
Having age-old silversmithing know-how is the bedrock of the brand; Huynh is also keen to explore new territories of expression, including dabbling in virtual worlds with Alyh, a digital face of the brand that made an appearance in 2020.
Despite this unusual combination, Statement quickly carved a niche for itself since its formal launch in 2019.
Prices for the brand range between 500 euros for silver single earrings and 19,000 euros for full pavé pieces, with an average between 3,000 and 4,000 euros.
Though Huyn said the brand remains modest in size — it passed the 1 million-euro mark in late 2022 — its sales doubled year-on-year, a growth that she expects will stabilize this year around the 30 percent mark.
For Huynh, adding gold to Statement’s offer made sense both in terms of creation as well as commerce.
“Clients didn’t just come to us for silver, they came because the design appealed to them,” Huynh said. “So once your design works, it’s easy to go with the most sought-after material.”
“The hardest part was convincing manufacturers and clients that silver was as precious as gold and that it could be used as fine jewelry,” she continued. “We had to master fine silver jewelry, be recognized for our know-how with silver, before stepping into the crowded gold fine jewelry market.”
And early results are promising. “Gold [pieces] are still new to us but we already sell it online to U.S.-based clients, while we haven’t yet had any French or European orders for it,” she revealed. “In store, it’s really gaining on silver and starting to outweigh it.”
Taking part in this year’s Couture show is also a mark that the brand is mature enough to take on the U.S. fine jewelry market, an opportunity that weighed some $62.8 billion in 2023 and is expected to continue to grow to $67.6 billion by 2028, according to Euromonitor.
“We were contacted after the pandemic but I didn’t feel ready,” said Huynh, deeming the occasion “a superb platform for visibility and a key professional event” in the sector.
With the addition of gold, which will take the lion’s share of the lineup, that moment has come, in her opinion. Statement will also have its MyWay ring in white and yellow golds in the running for the Debuting award at the show.
Plus there’s another reason Huynh wanted to join the show. “I quite like meeting other brands, their founders, having a friendly acquaintance,” she said. “I am not in competition because I find that we all have different messages and meeting all these energies is quite extraordinary and an opportunity.”
While French and Europe-based clients make up an overwhelming majority online and at the Statement boutique on Rue du 29 Juillet, U.S.-based consumers have been a game changer.
“They come in store and they [generate] the most remarkable sales,” she said, recalling a pair of friends who recently visited and purchased a matching pair of pavé rings. “They wanted to share this moment.”
Overall, U.S.-based consumers account for around 10 percent of sales, a proportion Huynh hopes could grow to a third of the business in the next 24 months.
In addition to participating in this year’s Couture show in Las Vegas, she has also signed with an agent to have a more permanent professional relay in the country.
Adding gold to her creative repertoire will also open up other possibilities, with other territories such as South Korea, where she is planning a trip in the early summer, but also for online distribution.
“Silver was always an obstacle to opening with online pure players,” Huynh said. “They didn’t question the look but diamond-set silver is too complicated to classify for them.”
Though Statement may go for gold in this new step, Huynh continues to believe in her signature material.
“I will never stop silver even if gold is going to take a bigger and bigger share. I still believe in silver and the alternative it proposes to gold, which is getting ever more expensive,” she said. “My goal is not to only sell to wealthy clients. I love it when [the customer is] someone who has never bought a gold diamond-set ring, because these are pieces that have a lot of meaning to them.”
Huynh has been increasingly steering the brand toward jewels imbued with personal meaning, recently leaning in with a new “Make Your Mark” tag line and defining Statement as “strong vision, guided by the light of celestial bodies that shine on the different facets of a life.”
That too is a reason why she believes the U.S. will be a territory of growth for her five-year-old label.
“[Female American consumers] resonate well with marking the steps of a personal road to success, marking accomplishments,” she said. “So I think we understand each other.”
