666: Jess & Victor Started A Jewellery Brand With $2,000 — Now It Brings In $40K A Month

About this episode

Jess and Victor share their journey of starting a successful jewellery brand from a personal gift idea.

Victor Chan bought a $2,000 engraving machine off Amazon to make his girlfriend Jess a necklace — a hand-engraved star map of the exact moment they met. She thought it was the most thoughtful gift she'd ever received, and two weeks later they had a store. Two years on, By Lumine is doing $30–40K a month and Jess has quit her accounting job to go all in. A software engineer and a Big Four accountant — both with zero e-commerce or marketing experience — they started with $100 worth of blank pendants, cardboard packaging with a sticker logo, and a lot of figuring it out on evenings and weekends. What they built is a fully customisable, hand-assembled personalised jewellery brand where no two pieces are the same, consistently hitting 10x growth year on year. In this episode, Jess and Victor get completely honest about what the first two years actually looked like — two weeks with zero sales after launch, wasted batches from engraving errors, influencer gifting that went nowhere, and how US tariffs hit them just as they were finding their feet. What you'll learn in this interview: How a personal gift sparked a business idea — and the Etsy research that validated there was a real…

People in this episode

Host: Nathan Chan

Guests: Victor Chan, Jess

Topics covered

• jewellery brand
• entrepreneurship
• e-commerce
• startups
• personal gifts
• business growth

Keywords

• jewellery
• entrepreneurship
• e-commerce
• startups
• personalized gifts
• business growth
• marketing

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: By Lumine, Amazon, Big Four, Etsy

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