Stop Chasing Rainbows

How jewelers can best reach out to LGBTQ+ consumers

By Deborah A. Yonick

Although the jewelry industry has done a good job of embracing its members that hail from the LGBTQ+ community, it hasn’t always done a great job reaching out to the larger community of LGBTQ+ consumers. Some might even say that the outreach has been dismal at best.

But some companies are doing things right. Take Tiffany & Co., which kicked off Pride Month this past June with a new campaign, “Stand for Love.” Part of the campaign included a short video, widely shared on social media, that showcases New Yorkers from the LGBTQ+ community and allies telling what they stand for and how “it all comes down to love.”

Tiffany, which has been showing same-sex couples in its marketing since 2015, says the campaign honors the 178-year-old jeweler’s legacy of celebrating love in all its forms—“across all gender identities and expressions.” Through its LGBTQ+ Employee Resource Group, the jeweler donates to the Ali Forney Center, which helps homeless LGBT youths, and SAGE, which advocates for LGBT elders.

Other companies have also reached out to the LGBTQ+ community, including Forevermark. In 2019, the company launched its “I Take You, Until Forever” campaign, which presented a modern view of marriage, with its ups and downs, while also injecting age, race, and sexual orientation diversity into a space that has traditionally been occupied by young, white, straight, cisgender couples.

One would think that in the past six years since the United States legalized same-sex marriage that the jewelry industry would have been courting this community more aggressively.

“Jewelers have had 17 years of time to learn who the LGBTQ+ community is and how they are different than traditional wedding couples.” —Matthew Perosi & George Blair IV, Jewelers Equality Alliance

“Even though it’s understood that the U.S. as a nation legalized same-sex marriage with the Supreme Court ruling in June 2015, the reality is that jewelers have had 17 years of time to learn who the LGBTQ+ community is and how they are different than traditional wedding couples,” say Matthew Perosi and George Blair IV, partners in Jeweler Websites, a jewelry e-commerce website company based in New York. (States first began legalizing same-sex marriage in 2004.)

Blair and Perosi have a long history of providing staff training, market research, and understanding for the jewelry industry through their Jewelers Equality Alliance agency services (jealliance.com). While they applaud Tiffany for its “Stand for Love” campaign launched during Pride Month, Perosi points out that businesses often choose to display their acceptance of this community from mid-May through the first week of July.

During that seven-week period, you will see businesses showing support for the continued battle toward equal human rights for the LGBTQ+ community and the celebration of self-identity, says Perosi. While Tiffany clearly supports the community within its organization and at large, he says that many wonder if the marketing campaigns represent the philosophies of the business beyond Pride Month.

A study published in October 2020 by Statista reveals that 50 percent of respondents find companies debuting special Pride-themed items were doing so as part of a marketing tactic and not to genuinely support the community.

“It’s pretty simple for every jeweler to re-imagine their ads with a couple of men, a couple of women, or a couple of people whose genders are not apparent.”

Perosi explains that the Pride season isn’t simply about the marches and parades for the sake of showing LGBTQ+ Pride. “There are hundreds of small local businesses that thrive as their cities are teaming with spectators and participants. June is also a popular month for LGBTQ+ couples to get engaged, often times during one of the Pride events. Google keyword trends always show a yearly uptick in searches for LGBTQ+ related wedding ring and engagement ring phrases in May and June.”

The LGBTQ+ community, as with every other collective of marginalized identities, is not a monolith, but two divergent sides get much of the volume.

“The younger demographic is viewed as whimsical, trendy, stuck on their phones, and protesting in the streets,” explains Blair. “An older demographic is seen as refined taste, sophisticated, measured, and also out of date and old-fashioned, and slow to adopt new terms, ideas, and dogma. Add class, race, gender, and sexuality, and the intersections are fraught with uncertainty and frustration.”

Fix the Disconnect

There is a disconnect between the type of jewelry that the LGBTQ+ community is interested in and what jewelers believe the community wants that Perosi believes exists because the industry hasn’t taken the time to understand the audience.

When he asks retail jewelers about their ads targeting the LGBTQ+ community, “we are usually told what types of rainbow gemstone jewelry they carry,” he says. “On the surface, the suggested rainbow product lines seem logical, but it really shows a clear example of not understanding your target customers. When it comes to the jewelry industry’s understanding about how to attract the LGBTQ+ community, the general (and incorrect) sentiment is to include a line of rainbow color stones or colorful spectrum jewelry.”

“Most of the discrimination that jewelers are guilty of is simply in their terminology.”

That is evident in Google search results for LGBTQ+ jewelry or any phrase including the words gay, lesbian, or transgender and the word jewelry. Search results for those words include an abundance of items and online catalogs categorized under pride jewelry, rainbow pride jewelry, and LGBTQ+ jewelry.

Moreover, the LGBTQ+ community is being forced to search for phrases that jewelers are using instead of the phrases they would rather search for, says Blair. “We’d like to search for ‘same-sex jewelry’ or ‘same-sex engagement rings,’ but the jewelry industry is using marketing phrases like ‘gay engagement rings,’ ‘gay wedding rings,’ ‘lesbian engagement rings,’ and ‘lesbian wedding rings,’” he says. “This isn’t going to help your customer base that is moving beyond some of that language, or falls outside of it.”

The problem, says Blair, is that the jewelry industry hasn’t really attempted to understand the LGBTQ+ customer beyond these superficial elements. “The belief is that they have to use rainbows and the letters LGBTQ+ in their marketing as a signal that they’re welcoming.”

Drop Bridal for Wedding Vernacular

Many jewelry stores are still afraid they will alienate existing customers by creating marketing campaigns that would show same-sex and gender-neutral couples sharing tender or casual, everyday moments at home or in public.

“It’s pretty simple for every jeweler to re-imagine their ads with a couple of men, a couple of women, or a couple of people whose genders are not apparent,” Perosi and Blair say. “The ad copy would further reinforce the support, particularly if it does not feature language that pats itself on the back for acknowledging diversity. If the display of same-sex couples together is something that a jeweler is not willing to commit to, then the easiest way to portray inclusivity is to show a groom by himself or a bride by herself rather than always showing heterosexual couples pictured together.”

Perosi applauds Shane Co., a national jewelry brand that has made great strides to reinforce its “Your Friend in the Jewelry Business” tagline by expanding the inclusive pages on its website with engagement stories, photographs of couples, and a selection of jewelry curated for the LGBTQ+ community. “Shane Co. actively promotes its appreciation of the community and conscious choice to be an LGBTQ+ ally through online ads.”

The jeweler who is afraid of losing customers after a public LGBTQ+ ad campaign will experience a similar feeling to what it’s like for a gay or queer person when they’re coming out and afraid of abandonment by friends and family.

“Once out, it’s disheartening and traumatizing for a gay or queer person to constantly ‘in’ oneself to please others,” Perosi says. “I understand how a jeweler might feel secure in running a Pride ad in June alongside many other businesses showing support; that’s the obvious feeling of safety in numbers driven by the potential for capital gain veiled by the appearance of support for civil rights.” But what he really wants to see is the jeweler willing to contribute to advocating for civil rights year-round instead.

What You Can Do

Blair explains that jewelers must be part of the community if they intend to serve it. “Language and behavior must be explicitly open and affirming, which may seem like a simple idea, but it really isn’t. Understanding what it means to be explicitly open and affirming isn’t just the notion that a jeweler instructs all employees to treat all customers with respect; it’s the express practice of showing the local community that LGBTQ+ customers are welcomed into their store. Specifically, this is accomplished by including occasional LGBTQ+ messages in local and online ad campaigns year-round.”

People are looking for jewelry that resonates with them, not necessarily with their gender or sexual identity, say Perosi and Blair. The marketing of products has taken the slant of individuality in the age of conformity.

“The jewelry industry has spent years focusing on images portraying traditional relationships when it comes to purchasing wedding, engagement, or other jewelry for a relationship,” says Perosi, who advocates substituting “wedding” for “bridal” in all text.

Perosi also notes that there are 21 states that allow employees to deny service to LGBTQ+ customers based on religious exemption, even if doing so goes against store policies. These states are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

Jewelers in these states who want to serve the LGBTQ+ community should ask their employees if they are also willing. Employees in these states do have the right to refuse to serve an LGBTQ+ person. Such employees could completely undermine a jeweler’s attempts to become an inclusive store, which is exactly what happened to Kay Jewelers in Owensboro, Kentucky, when one of its sales associates refused to help a gay man shop for an engagement ring.

“Creating a safe shopping experience for your same-sex couples is not as easy as flipping a switch or slapping photos and words on a website,” says Perosi. “Jewelers have to consciously unlearn their previous engagement and wedding jewelry sales techniques and replace them with new ones. Most of the discrimination that jewelers are guilty of is simply in their terminology.”

Today’s jewelers are still in a very unique position to help the LGBTQ+ community establish new rules for wedding rings and jewelry, says Perosi. “There’s plenty of opportunity for jewelers to ‘out themselves’ as supporters of the LGBTQ+ community and win their loyalty with honest displays of inclusiveness.”