Interview with Caron Bluestone, founder of Caravan of Stones
Read what inspired Caron Bluestone to launch timeless jewellery brand Caravan of Stones.
What’s your career background?
I spent nearly 20 years in equity sales and sales trading, mainly on the trading floors of European investment banks, and I loved it. It was fast, competitive and immediate. Markets were constantly moving, every day was different and you knew very quickly whether what you were doing was working. I was never particularly interested in moving into management; I wanted to stay close to the clients, the markets and the action.
I went to school in the City of London and, when we had to arrange work experience, I went straight to an investment bank. I walked onto a trading floor and never really looked back.
Languages were another thread running through my life. My father was a real Francophone and spoke several languages through his work, so I grew up going to France, staying with family friends and loving different cultures. I studied French and German at university, including a year at university in France.
I also took Russian GCSE, which sounds like quite a small thing, but those couple of years ended up shaping my career. At an interview with the head of a French investment bank in London, he noticed the Russian on my CV. They had recently opened a Russian-equities operation and he suggested I interview for it. That became my first job.
I had my children later in life and left the City when I became pregnant. I started writing reviews and arranging skill swaps around pregnancy, parenting and travel, and that gradually became a second career as a luxury travel journalist.
Where did the idea for your business come from?
I have always loved looking for new things when I travel, particularly things you simply wouldn’t find, or couldn’t readily buy, back in the UK. It doesn’t even have to be glamorous. I have just come back from Greece, where I spent an inordinate amount of time in pharmacies. I just find it fascinating – new products, clever ideas, different packaging, things you haven’t seen before.
We were on a family press trip through Rajasthan and I must have amassed about 20 brightly coloured scarves. The colours were incredible – orange, pink, green, often with tiny pieces of mirror sewn into them. I am a complete magpie for colour and sparkle and, frankly, a salesperson is often the easiest person to sell to.
One day in Jaipur, I spotted more scarves by the side of the road and asked our driver to stop. There happened to be a jewellery wholesaler next door, so naturally I went in to investigate.
One piece stood out straight away. It was black thread with emeralds and natural diamonds and had this really cool, slightly rock-chick black-and-green feel. I had never seen precious stones worn that way before.
It was essentially a luxury friendship bracelet – serious diamonds and emeralds, but relaxed enough to wear every day. That contrast between the precious and the informal was the idea that became Caravan of Stones.
How did you move from idea to actual business?
Very quickly, and initially on an absolute shoestring.
When I came back to London, I stayed in contact with the people I had met in Jaipur and started with a tightly curated collection of Mughal-inspired threaded jewellery. What I had spotted was a completely different way of wearing precious stones, and I could see how it could become something much more modern.
It was entirely self-funded. I built the first Shopify website myself, started the Instagram account and did pretty much everything alone.
The response came surprisingly quickly. Within about a month, jewellery editor Jessica Diamond discovered Caravan of Stones and selected one of the bracelets for The Times LUXX Report in a feature on luxury friendship bracelets. We started selling quite quickly too, which obviously gave me the confidence to keep going.
As the brand developed, I began designing our own pieces and details. I designed our Stackers, our Caravan charm and the sliding-lock water-resistant bracelets. I sourced specialist kumihimo threads from Japan, and we developed our own spinning locks and diamond-encrusted Caravan links. So the brand has evolved very naturally from curation into creating our own design language.
As money came into the business, I put it straight back in. At first I brought in very senior PR and marketing people literally for a day at a time so I could learn from them, rather than pretending I knew everything myself.
What’s your USP?
For me, it is that collision between something incredibly simple and something incredibly precious: cotton thread and natural diamonds. They are almost at opposite ends of the spectrum, and putting them together completely changes the feel of diamond jewellery.
Diamonds can sometimes feel formal, or like something you save for best. Put them on coloured thread and suddenly they feel fresh, young, a bit funky and very easy to wear. You could have a four-carat diamond bracelet on with a T-shirt and jeans and it just works. I love that.
It still has all the value and craftsmanship of fine jewellery, but almost the spirit of a friendship bracelet. You can wear it every day, stack it, change the colour and make it feel completely your own.
Colour has become a much bigger part of the brand too. We now align many of our thread colours with seasonal colour analysis, so you can choose the design you love in a shade that genuinely works with your skin tone, eyes and hair. That makes it even more personal.
And there is the slow-luxury side of it. These are pieces made by artisans, with real handwork and a story behind them. I think people increasingly want that – something with meaning, rather than simply owning the same designer item as everybody else.
Who’s your target audience?
It isn’t really an age; it is much more a type of woman.
She probably travels, she likes style and colour and has an eye for things that are a little bit different. There is probably a slightly bohemian side to her. She likes discovering things for herself rather than necessarily buying whatever everybody else is buying.
I think, more than anything, she wants something with meaning. Something with a story behind it, something personal to her and something she isn’t going to see on everybody else.
She might choose a particular thread because it is one of her best seasonal colours, because it reminds her of somewhere she has travelled or simply because she loves it.
And very often she is buying the diamonds for herself, which I love. She doesn’t need everybody in the room to recognise what she is wearing. She knows. That’s enough.
How do you spread the word about what you do?
It is a mixture of PR, social media, photography and video, telling the story of the brand, meeting people and getting the jewellery into the right places.
The thing with diamonds is that you really need to see them move. They catch the light in a way that a flat photograph doesn’t always capture, so getting really good imagery has been incredibly important.
I also think you have to put yourself in the right world. The Muse at Estelle Manor, for example, was somewhere I specifically wanted to be because I thought: that is my customer. I would rather be in fewer places that genuinely make sense for the brand than everywhere for the sake of it.
What’s been your most successful marketing strategy?
I think the biggest thing has actually been learning exactly what the brand is.
That sounds obvious, but at the beginning you have a product you love and you assume everybody else is automatically going to understand what you see in it. They don’t. You have to work out who you are talking to, what your story is, what makes you different and how all of that should look.
I’ve learned an enormous amount through meeting people along the way too. Seasonal colour analysis, for example, wasn’t something I put into a business plan at the beginning. It came through people I met while learning more about marketing and PR, and I immediately thought: this makes complete sense for us. Colour was already so central to Caravan of Stones.
I have also tried to go after the right wins rather than lots of small wins. Estelle Manor was one. Getting the right press was another.
And bringing in a good PR agency when I could afford it has made a huge difference. I spent most of the first year trying to grow organically and doing a lot myself, but I have realised that however good your product is, people need to keep seeing it. Building a brand takes visibility.
Ironically, after almost 20 years in sales, I hate cold selling. I love talking to somebody who is genuinely interested in the jewellery, but I don’t enjoy pushing things at people. So I want the brand and the product to do as much of that work as possible.
What’s been the biggest obstacle you’ve had to overcome?
Money, in all honesty.
Jewellery is expensive. You are paying for diamonds, gemstones, silver, samples, production, photography, packaging and stock before you necessarily see the return.
Almost everything I make goes straight back into the business, and I still have a very small team. The challenge is that the ambition tends to move faster than the resources.
But I suppose that also makes you quite disciplined. You have to decide what actually matters and where the money will make the biggest difference. I’m building a brand, not simply trying to sell as many pieces of jewellery as possible, and that takes time.
And your proudest moment so far?
Probably getting into The Times LUXX Report so quickly. Caravan of Stones had barely launched when Jessica Diamond discovered the brand and chose one of the bracelets for a feature on luxury friendship bracelets. I remember thinking: right, somebody who really knows jewellery can see what I see in this. That gave me an enormous amount of confidence very early on.
More recently, being shortlisted for Demi-Fine Jewellery Brand of the Year at the Professional Jeweller Awards has been another of those moments where you think: God, we really are getting somewhere. We don’t know the result yet, so I’m trying not to get ahead of myself.
But one of the things I’m proudest of in a completely different way is being able to pay the school fees for two girls in Jaipur through our Jaipur Commitment. Seeing them grow and knowing that this little business, which began because I happened to ask a driver to stop by the side of the road in their city, is now helping to support their education is quite amazing.
Why is work so important to you?
The completely honest answer is that I need to work. Life is expensive, children and education are expensive, and giving my children a really good education has always been very important to me.
I also like the finer things in life and I want to be comfortable. I’m not going to pretend money has nothing to do with it.
But I also need work for me. I need the stimulation, the independence and having something of my own. I like making things happen and I get bored very easily if I am not learning or working towards something.
I was diagnosed with ADHD much later in life and, looking back, it explains quite a lot. The trading floor suited me because it was fast and constantly changing. Travel journalism suited me because I was always somewhere new. And running a business is certainly never boring – you can be dealing with jewellery design one minute, PR the next and some ridiculous technical problem on the website five minutes later.
The other thing is that I have managed to create something I can work incredibly hard at while still being close to my children. That matters enormously to me.
Who inspires you?
I don’t really have a neat list of famous businesswomen, and I would rather be honest than make one up because it sounds good in an interview.
My father had a huge influence on me. He gave me my love of languages, France, travel and different cultures, and I think that curiosity about the wider world has stayed with me throughout my life.
I also really admire people who keep reinventing themselves. Particularly women who decide that having children, getting older or having had one career already doesn’t mean that the interesting part is over.
I started Caravan of Stones later in life, and I actually think there are huge advantages to that. You know yourself better, you have more experience and hopefully you have slightly less interest in what everybody else thinks you ought to be doing.
How do you balance your work with your family?
I don’t think there is a perfect balance.
Phones mean you are always slightly at work anyway. I might be answering Jaipur, dealing with a press request or looking at the website while also doing whatever is going on with the children.
Sometimes the business has to fit completely around family life and sometimes everybody gets pulled into the business. The children helped with photographs and videos in the early days, and at one point one of my son’s wrists was actually on the website.
We talk about business quite a lot. Both of my children have now come up with their own streetwear-brand ideas, and I do think some of that has come from watching me build Caravan of Stones.
They have seen that you can have an idea and actually make something happen with it, which I think is a really good thing for them to learn.
What are your three top pieces of advice for someone wanting to do something similar?
1) This should be an obvious one, but do something you are genuinely passionate about and absolutely believe in
Not something you think happens to be a good business idea or because everybody is talking about a particular trend. Starting a business is incredibly hard and can be completely all-consuming. When things are difficult, the thing that keeps you going is really believing in what you are creating.
I am probably a person of extremes – I am either completely engaged or not particularly interested – so I could never put this amount of energy into something I only half believed in.
2) Be prepared to work very, very hard and keep learning
The idea is only the beginning. Suddenly you are expected to understand production, margins, cash flow, websites, photography, advertising, logistics, customer service and all sorts of things you never thought would be your job.
You have to stay open-minded too. Some of the best developments in Caravan of Stones have come from meeting somebody, learning something new and thinking: actually, that could really work for us.
3) Surround yourself with people who know things you don’t
You don’t need to be brilliant at everything. Find people who can guide you, mentor you and teach you. Bringing in very experienced PR and marketing people helped me enormously because I could learn from people who had already done it.
But you also have to keep your own judgement. Listen to people, absolutely, but don’t let so many other voices into the room that you lose sight of what made you excited about the business in the first place.
Find out more about Caravan of Stones.
