How Awe Inspired leveraged its celebrity fan base to become a DTC jewelry powerhouse

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There are a lot of mixed signals about how holiday sales will perform this year, but DTC jewelry brand Awe Inspired is bullish.
Awe Inspired sells jewelry like necklaces and bracelets, but they all feature pendants or charms meant to showcase empowerment, such as a Greek goddess or an astrological sign. The company’s sales are up 45% this year, and it has become a celebrity favorite with people like Taylor Swift and Julia Fox showing off their Awe Inspired products. “We have some forces propelling us forward, so I’m planning to have a great holiday,” co-founder and CEO Max Johnson said on the Modern Retail Podcast.
Johnson spoke about the company’s growth over the years, its marketing strategy as well as what he’s focused on for this holidays this year.
Awe Inspired first launched in 2018 while Johnson was working as a product manager at a telehealth platform. But it wasn’t until 2020 that the company really began to see traction. The brand often partners with organizations promoting causes; it saw big spikes in popularity with jewelry like a Harriet Tubman pendant alongside the NAACP and a Florence Nightingale charm with the National Federation of Nurses that was introduced during the pandemic.
With these launches came organic virality. In the case of the nurse pendant, for example, “the cast of Grey’s Anatomy wore it,” said Johnson.
Now, Awe Inspired is trying to expand to offer more types of jewelry that reach new types of customers. “We’re building a charm business,” Johnson said.
Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.
On product expansion
“We’re building a charm business. We have these goddess pendants, but we’ve expanded into amulets. So every goddess has her matching amulet — be it Athena and her sword or Aphrodite and her shell or Medusa and a snake. And all of those symbols have their own level of weight and meaning. We’ve expanded into zodiac and into auras and into affirmations. It’s all about pieces that have meaning. So we say we’re the brand you go to when you’re trying to give a gift that’s deeply personal and meaningful and speaks to someone and who they are. As you collect these charms, it starts making a mosaic of who you are and what you believe in. And we’ve designed mechanisms so that people can take their charms — their goddesses, their amulets, what have you — and connect them to a bracelet or to an earring or to a necklace. So we’re building versatility through that collection approach, which is pretty novel.”
How Awe Inspired acquires customers during the holidays
“We are a pure DTC brand for better or for worse, and the wholesale landscape for jewelry is really in a period of transition… There’s not necessarily a place for jewelry right now. The importance of having a really successful DTC channel for a brand like us, I mean, it is our whole business. So we come to play when it comes to big promotional periods. There has to be a discount. There has to be a way to accelerate the purchase. I mean, we know how much each eyeball costs, especially during this time of year, so we want to convert that sale once people are coming to us and learning about us. The goal is to drive basket size.”
Why TikTok Shop hasn’t worked just yet
“I’m not going to say specific ones, but we’ve been on other paid acquisition channels [beyond Meta and Google] that, in-platform, say they’re performing a certain return on ad spend and, when we remove them, there’s no discernible impact to the business. [This] leads us to believe it’s just duplicate impressions of the people we’re already serving to. But whenever we find that next channel that’s going to get us all these net new people and net new awareness, I’m down to do it. And I have a lot of interest in TikTok and everything that’s happening there and growing. I haven’t really seen luxury brands be able to figure out the TikTok Shop yet, which seems to be where consumer brands are having success — since the offsite in-app native browser shopping journey isn’t so great for consumers yet, and it’s not really part of the TikTok experience. I think the TikTok Shop is where we would need to make that sale, and people just aren’t really buying like, $200 items there yet. But I think that’ll happen.”