Who You Are
You’re an experienced jewelry professional and operational leader who can bridge the gap between creative vision, customer experience, and production reality. You bring deep technical knowledge of jewelry construction, stone proportions, CAD feasibility, and manufacturing, along with the leadership skills to build scalable processes and develop the people responsible for executing them.
You’re comfortable setting standards, making technical decisions, and leading cross-functional improvements. You can identify where a process is breaking down, determine the root cause, and build the systems, training, and accountability needed to improve it.
You’re also an effective educator and coach. You can translate complex technical concepts for customer-facing and production teams, develop strong Design Leads and Sales Associates, and create resources that enable teams to make better decisions independently.
Most importantly, you bring consistency, clarity, and strategic thinking to a complex process. You know when to make a call, when to escalate, and how to align teams around a shared standard of excellence from a customer’s initial idea through CAD, production, and final execution.
What You’ll Do
- Own and continuously improve the end-to-end custom design operating model, from customer intake through CAD, production, quality control, and final execution, ensuring a consistent and scalable experience across all stores and channels.
- Serve as the company’s senior technical authority for custom design, making decisions and resolving complex technical issues that cannot be addressed at the store or Design Lead level.
- Develop and lead the custom design training strategy, including onboarding, ongoing education, coaching, and skill development for Design Leads, Sales Associates, and other customer-facing design staff.
- Drive the growth of custom design as a key revenue stream, partnering with Retail, Creative, and leadership to identify opportunities to increase custom sales, improve conversion, and expand the custom business. Over the first 6–18 months, develop and execute strategies that strengthen the custom customer experience, build team capability, and deliver measurable revenue growth.
- Establish clear standards for custom design competency and partner with leaders to identify skill gaps, improve performance, and build stronger technical capabilities across teams.
- Oversee the review process for store-team and Instant Atelier (IA) concepts, ensuring designs are technically complete, production-ready, and fully specified before moving to CAD.
- Lead cross-functional coordination between store teams, Design, Creative, Production, CAD, bench, and manufacturing partners to resolve issues and improve execution.
- Own and continuously evolve the Custom Playbook, SOPs, AI prompts, intake forms, CAD standards, reference databases, measurements, nomenclature, training resources, and technical documentation to ensure consistency across the custom workflow, Instant Atelier, website, and stores.
- Establish and maintain technical standards for jewelry construction, durability, stone setting, custom intake, repairs, and quality control.
- Develop custom repair intake standards and ensure store and production teams are trained on repair evaluation, documentation, photography, and handoff.
- Partner with the bench jeweler and Creative team to establish and uphold QC standards and ensure teams understand and consistently execute against them.
- Identify operational gaps, recurring production issues, and opportunities to improve efficiency, quality, customer experience, and scalability.
- Lead the continued evolution of in-store and online custom consultation systems, including the integration and optimization of tools such as Instant Atelier and AI-assisted design.
- Partner with internal teams and external vendors to support stone sourcing, inventory needs, CAD execution, and manufacturing requirements for custom design.
- Establish and monitor key metrics for custom design, including quality, turnaround time, revisions, operational efficiency, and other performance indicators.
- Regularly report on custom design performance, risks, trends, and improvement opportunities to leadership and recommend actions based on the data.
- Lead strategic projects related to the growth and scalability of the custom design business, ensuring processes, tools, and team capabilities evolve alongside the company.
What We’re Looking For
- 7+ years of progressive experience in custom jewelry design, jewelry production, CAD workflows, or a closely related technical jewelry function.
- Demonstrated experience leading programs, processes, or teams in a retail, design, or production environment.
- Deep working knowledge of jewelry construction, stone proportions, settings, CAD feasibility, manufacturing processes, and quality standards.
- Experience developing training programs, technical standards, SOPs, and scalable operational processes.
- Commercial mindset with the ability to connect technical expertise, customer experience, team capability, and operational improvements to revenue growth and broader business goals.
- Strong leadership and coaching skills, with the ability to build capability and accountability across teams even when those teams do not directly report to you.
- Strong judgment and problem-solving skills, with the ability to independently resolve complex technical and operational issues.
- Excellent communication skills, including the ability to translate technical information for non-technical audiences and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
- Ability to translate business goals into technical standards, operational processes, and training programs that improve custom design performance.
- Experience working with external CAD, manufacturing, or production partners and holding partners accountable to quality and execution standards.
- Strong analytical skills and experience using performance data to identify trends, diagnose problems, and recommend improvements.
- Preferred: Experience at a comparable fine jewelry retailer, designer, or manufacturer.
- Preferred: Experience scaling a custom jewelry program across multiple locations or sales channels.
- Preferred: Familiarity with AI-assisted design, virtual consultation, or emerging jewelry design technologies.
Sarah O. is an equal opportunity employer, passionately committed to equitable hiring and boldly dedicated to diversity in our work and teams. We do not discriminate in employment opportunities or practices based on actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related conditions), age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, uniformed service member status, disability, or any other characteristic protected by law. We strongly encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply. Even if you don’t meet every single requirement, you might be the right candidate for this or other roles.