The old Philadelphia jewelry retail houses of Bailey Banks & Biddle and J.E. Caldwell's may be in various stages of bankruptcy reorganization. But up on Fifth Street, Lagos Designer Jewelry, which supplies Nieman-Marcus, Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom's Saks and other high-end national stores as its former local clients reorganize, is doing well enough that owner Steven Lagos is stepping back from day-to-day management, after 33 years.
Lagos last week named Chris Cullen, a veteran marketer (Nokia's Vertu, Lalique, Elizabeth Arden) as the firm's new President of the firm he built at 441 North Fifth Street as a designer, distributor (via UPS, FedEx and Brink's) and, until recently, manufacturer of high-end jewelry (like U.S.-brand clothing, it's now mostly made overseas.)
"We'll still be run from Philadelphia," promised New York-based Cullen. Lagos moves "60,000 units a year," and employs under 100 since it outsourced production. Cullen joined Lagos in 2008 and helped change the company's focus from designer lines and collections to what Cullen calls "category management, how the market sees it, what price points, where's it growing, where's it shrinking." That made it easier to drop duplicate products, and "find the holes" where new lines were needed. Categories include, for example, "silver, two-tone (silver and gold), diamond, and color, pearl and opaque stones; natural and semiprecious gemstones."
Most jewelry is still bought for women. What do they look for? "Brand; style; price, in that order." Whereas men are more concerned with price.
Lagos, in his early 50s, isn't leaving his namesake firm. "He's the visionary and creative leader of the company," Cullen told me. The new president will concern himself with "metrics, channels, categories, margins, the sales organization. It allows me to free up his time to sketch out the creative vision."
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