Growing Configurable Jewelry Sales Online with SolidWorks Sell
Support jewelry configuration, ordering, and sales online to grow sales and expand the market.
Implement the SOLIDWORKS Sell online product configuration solution.
Maison Tournaire is a French jewelry house founded in 1973 by Philippe Tournaire, who started the company in a workshop in his parents’ basement in the small, quiet village of SaintGermain-Laval. The young designer’s passion for jewelry created word-of-mouth buzz in French jewelry circles regarding the quality of his craftsmanship and the uniqueness of his designs. Tournaire entered the ranks of world-renowned French jewelry houses in 2004 with the opening of a boutique in the prestigious Place Vendôme in Paris—a flagship location that made possible the company’s international expansion into the United States, the Middle East, and China.
Since then, Philippe Tournaire—now working closely with son Mathieu and a team of designers—has refined his style, improved his technique, and explored countless sources of inspiration, resulting in the introduction of the “Alchemy” and “Architecture” collections. The “Architecture” collection, in particular, is a highly configurable product line that allows buyers to customize jewelry designs that incorporate wellknown, iconic, architectural monuments from Paris, London, Italy, the United States, and other sites around the world. To make Tournaire’s configurable architectural rings available to the worldwide market, the company needed an online product configuration and ordering solution, according to Designer3D Pierre-Loïc Senger.
“Shopping for jewelry online—especially pieces with multiple options, such as size, style, precious metal, etc.—is a deeply personal endeavor that demands a high degree of visualization,” Senger stresses. “The customer wants to see how the final piece will look online before placing the order, and may not be able to visit one of our shops. To support online orders and sales, we needed an online product configuration solution that enables customers to fully configure, visualize, order, and purchase their rings from our website.”
Tournaire was in discussions with another configuration provider when the company heard about SOLIDWORKS® Sell, the online product configuration solution from SOLIDWORKS Corp. “For the past 10 years, we have been designing, modeling, and creating our jewelry using SOLIDWORKS 3D design software,” Senger explains. “Because 99 percent of our products are designed in SOLIDWORKS, it’s much easier to set up all of the possible configuration combinations that are used by SOLIDWORKS Sell than with other solutions. SOLIDWORKS Sell is less costly and more affordable, and the implementation of SOLIDWORKS Sell is much smoother and easier.”
Because 99 percent of our products are designed in SOLIDWORKS, it’s much easier to set up all of the possible configuration combinations that are used by SOLIDWORKS Sell than with other solutions. SOLIDWORKS Sell is less costly and more affordable, and the implementation of SOLIDWORKS Sell is much smoother and easier.
Since implementing SOLIDWORKS Sell in 2018, Tournaire has realized a 1600 percent increase in architectural ring sales and a 10 percent jump in web traffic. Because the online configuration solution enables Tournaire to move orders through production more efficiently, the company has also cut a week from its delivery times.
“Before SOLIDWORKS Sell, configuring our architectural rings was a manual process that required customers to visit one of our shops,” Senger points out. “This limited our potential market reach, and because customers had to meet with shop personnel to choose configuration options, the process added time to our ordering, production, and delivery processes. With SOLIDWORKS Sell, we’ve reduced our delivery times by one week while simultaneously reaching an entirely new set of potential customers.”
Customers can now select the size, precious metal, iconic monument, or combination of iconic monuments for their architectural rings. This flexibility produces more than a million distinct ring configurations, all of which are supported by automated design configuration capabilities in SOLIDWORKS design software and made available for viewing as renderings by online customers.
“Jewelry customers want to express their individuality by putting their own personal touches on a configuration so that they can obtain a piece of jewelry that is totally unique,” Senger stresses. “With SOLIDWORKS Sell, they can choose from more than a million possible combinations to configure a ring that is special to them. We already have fixed architectural rings featuring monuments of a specific city or country (Paris, London, Italy, etc.). Now, with SOLIDWORKS Sell, customers can configure rings featuring a custom combination of monuments from the same location—or different locations—such as a ring that features the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa.”
Due to the success of its online architectural ring configurations, Tournaire is planning to extend SOLIDWORKS Sell online configuration capabilities by including more examples of iconic architecture as options for its configurable rings, such as monuments from Lyon and Spain, and adding other types of configurable jewelry to SOLIDWORKS Sell to further extend its market reach. “We’ve found that SOLIDWORKS Sell provides an automated configuration process that allows us to produce and deliver rings more efficiently,” Senger notes.
“Because everything is linked together, the system works as efficiently as possible,” Senger continues. “Not only are we looking to extend SOLIDWORKS Sell capabilities by adding other jewelry collections for configuration, we’ve also purchased iPad®s for use by our retailers to extend configuration capabilities to our stores.”