As the secondary watch world has continued to grow in the past few years, it has been important for the pre-owned retailers to make the most of potential business assets from management to social media.
CRM Jewelers has done just that and the company’s Chief Strategist, Dan Alvarez, recently caught up with WATCHPRO to find out more.
WP: Tell me more about the background of the business.
DA: CRM Jewelers was founded by my brother-in-law and partner Carlos Marcelin in late 2012. Since he was nine years old, Carlos and his two older sisters used to help out at their dad’s artisan jewelry shop in Havana, Cuba. Carlos had also been passionate about watches since an early age, owning his first Rolex when he was just 18 years old. When he started CRM, he did so with just five luxury watches from his personal collection.
I got involved in the business in 2013 at the request of my wife Sandra, Carlos’ younger sister. Having many years of entrepreneurial experience in marketing and finance, Sandra wanted me to help Carlos standardize the CRM brand across social media and the web, which is what I did. What was supposed to be a temporary involvement on my behalf turned out to become a long-term, successful business partnership.
WP: How has it grown since launch?
DA: When I came on board in 2013, Carlos introduced me to Instagram and showed me that he had managed to gain over 5,000 followers on the platform by posting actively. At the time, I thought that was a big deal. During that same year, we launched a YouTube page as well as other social pages and started what has become a decade-long, ongoing content distribution experiment.
As a result of this persistent effort, CRM Jewelers has grown to over a million fans across social media, which includes more than 400,000 followers on Instagram, almost 400K on YouTube, and a fan/client base stretching across more than 170 countries.
WP: In terms of management, what is the structure of the business?
DA: At the current time, Carlos and I are the only two business partners. Carlos mainly oversees the purchases and sales of the company and I am responsible for the supervision of all marketing and content initiatives, as well as all new business developments and growth opportunities strategy implementations for the firm.
WP: How has social media content become such an important aspect of the business?
DA: In a nutshell, without social media content, CRM Jewelers would not exist. Social media content is what has allowed our business to survive in the ultra-competitive and low-margin secondary luxury watch market.
People think that a business like ours is extremely lucrative, but the fact is that our historical, gross profit margins on watches has averaged around 10 percent. Without social media, our turnover would not be high enough to make it in this industry.
WP: How does that content help grow relationships and trust with clients?
DA: Content helps us connect and become accessible to our clients, which leads to long term trust. We put out multiple pieces of content every day, even on weekends and holidays. Clients have grown used to it and almost expect it. They can see videos and pictures of the watches we currently have on inventory and also constantly relate and interact with the team members on socials.
The accessibility and transparency that our content provides existing and potential clients creates much stronger relationships over time, completely the opposite of what they’re used to from the typical “take-a-number,” lifeless corporate world.
WP: What is CRM Life?
DA: CRM Life is the newest addition to our content line-up. It started on March 26, 2021, when the first episode was released. It is basically a raw, no-nonsense representation of the life of CRM Jewelers on YouTube. So far, we have released a total of 69 episodes of CRM Life, mainly sticking to a weekly schedule.
During the episodes, fans get to see a combination of weekly business interactions as well as some of our personal lives. It has really solidified our brand by allowing both fans and clients to connect with us on a much deeper level. As a result, our global fan support has sky-rocketed. Not a day goes by that we don’t receive phone calls and personal visits from loyal supporters from all over the world. Overall, it’s been a totally humbling and inspiring experience!
WP: I’m sure Rolex tops this list, but which brands get the most interest at CRM?
DA: In addition to Rolex, we’ve also been focused on Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe, and Richard Mille. Nevertheless, lately we have been discussing introducing more watches from brands such as Omega, Breitling and others to diversify our watch offering further.
WP: What’s the long term plan for CRM Jewelers?
DA: Given the low margins and potential market risk associated with high end watch brands, we want to add more higher-margin sources of revenue to our product line starting this year. This will include both jewelry and accessories. To achieve this, we have been implementing a sophisticated e-commerce solution that we hope will greatly reduce our high dependency on luxury watches over the next few years.
We have also partnered with some DeFi experts to introduce a tokenized luxury marketplace soon that will allow CRM Jewelers and other companies in the space to participate in this relatively new and growing industry.