President of First Jewelry, Neil Travis to Retire After 40 Years
Neil Travis, President of First Jewelry, the exclusive distributor of Persona®, has announced his retirement and exit from the jewellery business after a career spanning more than 40 years. The decision comes amidst recognizing the rapidly changing marketplace despite the success of the Persona brand.
Known for its unique selection of sterling silver jewellery, Persona gained tremendous success through its portfolio of iconic licenses, e-commerce, and retail distribution to become a major force in the silver charm business. Beginning only 8 years ago, Persona experienced dramatic growth and expanded from the North American market to become an international brand, carried by over 1,000 retail locations in Canada, the USA and the UK.
In recent years, Persona’s brand growth and popularity was driven by a bold strategy fueled by offering unique and iconic licensed collections that gained the attention of consumers worldwide. The strategy proved to be so effective with the exceptional success of the Peanuts© by Persona collection that the brand introduced three additional licenses featuring The Beatles, emoji and Coca-Cola: all icons of popular culture for diverse and cross-generational fans to love and collect.
However, these successes were offset by the decision of the brand’s largest retail partner to exit the silver charm business in their mall-based stores, resulting in a dramatic decrease in revenue through the latter of 2017.
“Although the business and positioning strategy was sound and the onboarding of new Persona Partners continued to grow over the past year, after more than 40 years of manufacturing, marketing and merchandising in the jewellery business, it seems like the right time for me to retire”, said Neil Travis, President of First Jewelry.
Though the business has been slated to close on March 30th of this year, Travis also expressed an interest in seeing the Persona brand live on and is currently making every effort to transition the business to another company and/or investor to capitalize on what continues to be viable and a growth opportunity. “Any interested parties with jewellery and/or online marketing expertise would be suitable candidates”, according to Travis.
For more information please contact:
Neil Travis
ntravis@firstjewelry.com
