Last year, the jewelry retailer, formerly known as Helzberg Diamonds, unveiled a shortened name, revamped logo, and a new brand color—blue instead of burgundy.

The new store concept rolled out to two locations last month: including a renovated space in Roosevelt Field Mall in Garden City, New York, and a new store in Galleria Dallas.

In an interview with National Jeweler, Mitch Maggart, Helzberg executive vice president and chief retail officer, shared more details about the new brick-and-mortar stores.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Lenore Fedow: Why did Helzberg decide to change the stores?

Mitch Maggart: This is something really near and dear to my heart. I’m on the real estate side of the equation, so I spend a lot of time in mall jewelry stores.

There’s a lot of sameness out there in the industry.

We felt like it was time. We feel like consumers’ preferences have changed over time.

I think their expectations of an experience have changed over time, and we’re going to invest in a more modern version of jewelry shopping. We feel like this is what will carry us into the future, because our customers expect it.

LF: Helzberg put together a customer insight survey that was shared with me. How did those results influence the store concept?

MM: It certainly influences everything that we do. We listen to our customers. We try to be responsive to their preferences.

It was all about meeting the evolving shopper expectations. The design and the features of our new store are really driven by the insights from that survey, and others that we’ve done over time. 

I’ll give you some examples, like 83 percent of couples said in-store purchasability is important to them.

Three out of five plan to consult a jeweler and purchase in person, which is really important, because there’s a lot of conversation around the future of brick and mortar.

Sure, they begin online, but they do want that [in-store experience].

Three quarters of customers would invest more to have a one-of-a-kind ring created for them. So, we’re really leaning into custom with these new stores.

Quality is a very important factor. We are very focused on delivering a quality product and a superior shopping experience.

We learned that more couples are shopping together. They’re customizing those pieces, especially in bridal. 

They really want to be able to move seamlessly between the in-store experience and the online setting and not feel friction between the two. We’re investing heavily in our omnichannel efforts to make sure that whatever they experience online, they experience in store and vice versa.

MM: I’ve been [at Helzberg] 36 years, with 45 years in the business, and it’s the most exciting thing we’ve done, not only in my 36 years but in our 110-year heritage.

The new Helzberg concept is an elevated luxury experience. It differentiates us from all the typical mall jewelers out there.

It certainly continues to give a nod to our heritage and over a century of innovation.

Helzberg has always been an innovator. It was very early into malls, very early into many of those areas of the business that others weren’t and maybe [didn’t have] the courage early on to get into. Barnett Helzberg did that.

So, we give a nod to our heritage, and we want to preserve that as we invest in a more modern jewelry shopping experience.

We’re testing an existing store at Roosevelt Field, which is a very high volume, productive store for us, and it’s more typical in size for us, closer to 2,000 square feet. 

The Dallas store is more like 1,400 square feet, and we wanted to test the smaller footprint.

We have two very good tests going on with these two very different situations, one being a new [store], one being established.

We have designed these stores for how today’s couples shop, and we feel like we have a handle on that. We continue to do research and learn more and more about it. 

We focus on customization, education, and just a seamless blend of in-store and digital experiences, which is the combination that our customers are looking for.

It’s the next step in Helzberg’s investment in omnichannel. And it really builds on our rebranding last year.

We also added large windows into the jeweler’s room. We don’t want to hide our jeweler. We want to showcase our jeweler to provide an element of theater and just an amazing glimpse for consumers into the world of expert jewelry craftsmanship that would otherwise be never seen.

[We want to] bridge the digital and the in-person experience with technology. We have all these rich digital resources in the store and the Love and Marriage Studio.

(The Love and Marriage Studio is a section of Helzberg’s website that focuses on consumer education and caters to those shopping for engagement rings as well as wedding and anniversary rings.)

They can gain education, they can gain inspiration for the style.

I think it also bolsters their confidence in the buying journey. I think it’s important for them to feel like they know what they’re talking about before they walk into the store.

LF: How would you describe the vibe you’re going for in the stores? What do you want people to feel when they’re inside?

MM: What we’re going for is an elegant, elevated, luxury experience for our customers that is also comfortable and approachable. I think we’ve hit that bell on extraordinarily well with this new store design. 

We’ve mixed, for instance, some of the color palette with our new branding. We’ve moved to a lot of blues. We’ve got some pale blues and some very rich, almost navy blues.

The new store design is very approachable. When you’re standing in the store, it just feels comfortable. But at the same time, you feel like this is a very different experience. 

We’re not trying to be anything but Helzberg. We are Helzberg. We’re that bridge into luxury, right where we want to be. We would never want to intimidate a customer. But we’ve gone certainly very elegant, upscale, but approachable. That’s what we’re going for.

MM: These are the first two. We’re building one in an existing location and then we’re building one in a new location, so there will be great learnings there, and we’ll adjust as we go.

This certainly is viewed as a potential expansion strategy for us. There is tremendous opportunity to operate in not only the mall but the off-mall environment as well with this concept.

It’s Helzberg opposed to Helzberg Diamonds. That’s part of our rebrand. I think it makes a powerful statement about the luxury aspect and how our customers view us.

From a product perspective, we are going to have an amazing, curated, elevated, on-hand product assortment. This will be product that has not previously been carried in our Helzberg stores.

They’ll have elevated pieces, larger carat weights, offering both an engagement and wedding [assortment], plus an expanded luxe jewelry assortment, and fashion as well.

These are large carat pieces that are significant. So, it is a little bit different from what we’ve done in the past, and I think it’s going to be spectacular.

LF: Why did you choose New York and Dallas?

MM: We chose New York because we felt like Roosevelt Field is one of the finest malls in the United States. We have a great location in the mall. It’s a fantastic mall and it’s an established store.

We wanted to see if we could convert this store from the traditional Helzberg design to the new one.

We chose that to test an established store versus the Dallas store, which is a new store for us.

We wanted to get into Dallas Galleria because there was a trade area in that side of the metroplex that we were not currently serving. What a great opportunity, a new concept in an established market in one of the greatest malls in the United States.

LF: Is there anything else you’d like people to know about the new store concept?

MM: I think it’s important, though, to recognize that this is not just a custom concept. We will have showcases with the elevated product offerings.

And then we also have, in our technology suite, what we refer to as endless options. So, we’ll have the ability—if we don’t have it in the showcase and we haven’t landed on a custom solution—to search and find exactly what that customer wants out there in the world somewhere. 

No matter what they want, we will deliver that product for them.