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…
More episodes of The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan
- 669: They Built a Luxury Beauty Brand in Year One — With a Team of Two | Brunel
- 668: (Solo) The One Marketing Concept Behind the Fastest Growing DTC Brands Right Now
- 667: He Built a $300M Men's Grooming Brand in JUST Three Years | MANSCAPED
- 665: (Solo) Why Waiting Until You Feel Ready Is the Biggest Mistake You Can Make
- 664: He Changed How the World Builds Startups. Now He's Warning You About What Comes Next | Eric Ries
- 663: (Solo) More SKUs, More Problems — The Case for Going Deeper, Not Wider
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