Chaumet’s Bee-inspired Collection Gets New Name and Sets New Ambitions
PARIS — When Chaumet launched a graphic line of rings inspired by beehives in 2011 under the moniker “Bee My Love,” its executives expected a warm reception from a demographic looking for a less-classic wedding ring.
Instead, what the French jeweler got was a runaway success that attracted a whole new clientele and has now been consistently in the top three bestselling lines for the past five years.
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Last year, it was even the line growing the fastest among its mid-range offer, second only to the Joséphine collection.
“It was very successful because it’s really different,” chief executive officer Charles Leung told WWD, who attributed its success to designs that are “very neat, very unisex.”
“But we realized that we attracted a lot of customers whose interest had nothing to do with getting married or celebrating an anniversary,” he continued. “They were coming for everyday wear and the name felt a little strange to them — especially for male customers.”
With plenty of lines addressing sentimental occasions and commitment, the executive decided it was time for the line to shed bridal connotations altogether and shine in its own right as “Bee de Chaumet.”
And this new name comes with a new message, new designs blending the graphic and the figurative — and new ambitions.
First, “we focus back on the essential of this collection, which is the bee itself and the beehive that goes with it, and the contemporary meanings behind them,” Leung said.
Clarifying and simplifying the line was an essential part to further opening up the “huge potential” Leung sees in the collection. As such, it’s one of the major moves since his arrival at the helm of Chaumet in 2024, after a five-year stint as CEO of its LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton stablemate Fred.
While the insect serves as “an important and fundamental sign of nature,” and has been part of Chaumet’s history as an emblem of Napoléon Bonaparte’s imperial era, its hexagonal home is also a powerful symbol for today.
Built over time, “it is a symbol of community, of a group of people coming together and that [has] a very speacial meaning for many now,” the executive explained. “In jewelry we talk about sentiment but the togetherness, the sense of community is also something very interesting for those of us who need to feel that we are not really alone in this world.”
The person tasked with evolving the brand’s aesthetic range is Chaumet’s new creative studio director Olga Corsini, who returned to the house last year and was coincidentally the original designer of the Bee My Love capsule.
She will be leaning into the bee and hive, balancing the latter’s graphic imprint with figurative renditions. “And we have to think unisex, we have to think everyday jewelry and we have to slowly go up the scale also to fill all those business opportunities,” Leung said of the brief for this era.
Because the 17 new designs slated for 2025, including a broad gem-set cuff and an open ring with a bee resting on the finger already in stores, aren’t just meant to plug a stylistic gap.
They are also meant to address an undertapped opportunity, particularly a growing proportion of jewelry consumers unafraid to shop the 30,000- to 50,000-euro range. At Chaumet, high jewelry, a segment that accounts for 15 percent of the jeweler’s business, starts at 75,000 euros excluding tax.
“We’re focusing so much on recruiting customers and once they are recruited, we don’t do much to upgrade them and make the experience more enjoyable,” the CEO remarked. “It’s like we have economy class and first class but we are lacking business class.”
In the Bee collection, that meant a current average price between 2,500 and 3,000 euros, below the brand’s average of 4,000 to 5,000 euros.
While its designs that start retailing just over 1,100 euros for stackable gold rings and silk cord bracelets with gold motifs are a great entry into the brand, there was appetite for more.
Case in point: last year’s high jewelry rose gold bib necklace, a design priced over 650,000 euros that featured 400 diamonds, including 10 in Chaumet’s hexagonal Impératrice cut, for a total of more than 43 carats.
“Suddenly, we uplifted the range to a higher [position] and now we are trying to fill in the rest,” said Leung, calling the design also a “successful media piece.”
The new designs start at around 1,400 euros for a bee stud, but there are also white gold sets that start at 13,500 euros for a ring and go up to 93,000 euros for the matching necklace. A pompom sautoir is at 22,500 euros while earrings hit above 25,000 euros.
It dovetails into a broader intention of showing that “Chaumet is not only about high jewelry and wedding and bridal,” Leung said.
“The idea is really to show that it is a community of fashionable, good looking, maybe nature-conscous but definitely style-conscious people, men and women of different ages who could [adorn] themselves easily with Chaumet jewels,” he continued.
That’s the idea behind the Paris Fashion Week celebration on Wednesday evening at the jeweler’s 12 Place Vendôme home.
But don’t expect the line to get its own ambassador, as Leung feels that “for Bee, it’s more like everybody can be an ambassador.”
All this comes after the jeweler recorded its “biggest year ever in history in sales, turnover and profit,” according to the executive. Although LVMH does not break out an individual company’s results, industry sources place Chaumet’s revenue at around 500 million euros for 2024.
New store openings in Rome and Bangkok as well as a focus on consumers in Japan, South Korea and the Middle East helped the brand navigate the choppy luxury environment.
While China, still the jeweler’s top market, continued to be challenging, Leung said that “growth with other nationalities compensated largely the missing part in China.”
Global exposure for designing the medals for the 2024 Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games also boosted the brand’s visibility, which resulted in new clients around the world, he added. The jeweler will be exhibiting in the finale of the Osaka-Kansai World Expo 2025 in September.
The number of American customers coming in via its European doors grew, also thanks to a strong-dollar, weak-euro scenario.
For this year, the goal is to “give another dimension to the image of Chaumet,” while exploring new territories, although that won’t include a big move in the U.S. quite yet, Leung said.
A major thoughline of his tenure so far is “making sure that there will be enough opportunities for the brand and to make sure [it] is releveant for the future, coming from where we were” — 245 years’ worth of jewelry designs for royals, red carpet and now the Paris Olympics.
With a consumer base that skews 90 percent female, there’s plenty of avenues to explore, including those brought by Bee’s unisex designs.
Another way is broadening Chaumet’s naturalist imagery with fresh directions, such as the Bamboo high jewelry capsule shown during January’s couture shows.
“We are not limited to our European past and sources,” Leung said. “We see the world as a global village so let’s stop saying ‘we’re French’ and stopping there. There are a lot of beautiful things in this world we should cherish, share, communicate and exchange.”
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