“I noticed it was a lot of women buying diamond pieces for themselves,” Whitelaw says, citing wedding jewelry, promotions and 30th birthdays as common drivers. Los Angeles brand Christin Marie Studio shows how far the model can scale, with reported revenue of $5 million in 2025 despite launching only in 2023, with growth largely driven by a weekly “FaceTime Friday” live stream format that lets founder Christin Marie utilize her real-time audience interactions as a sales channel.
This shift is also playing out across Instagram, too. For Ring Concierge, Wegman sees 70% of her customer base as women buying for themselves via social media: “Traditional messaging is built around milestones you wait for. Younger consumers aren’t waiting for permission or a life stage to buy; if a brand only shows up at the engagement moment, it’s missing everything else that actually drives purchases now, the promotion, the solo trip, the just because.” It’s reflected in how the brand markets to them, deliberately blurring the line between founder and brand, which is the same logic Whitelaw applies to TikTok.
What large retailers can’t offer
Being self-funded allows Whitelaw to adapt more quickly to demand than heritage houses, letting follower feedback shape her designs and materials directly. “A much bigger jewelry house is steeped in years of tradition, which they’re unable to change as much. Even from the materials that we use, we’re able to introduce lab-grown diamonds easily, but still work with natural diamonds, which is a testament to how we can respond to demand.”
Independent, founder-led brands have a structural competitive edge too, says Canaves, as “they are more responsive and don’t have to go through lengthy campaign planning processes or wait for approval of content.”
Edahn Golan, co-founder of diamond and jewelry data analytics firm Tenoris, doesn’t see this as a direct threat to the legacy houses; instead, he sees Whitelaw as competing for a different consumer entirely. He believes this is due to the fragmented structure of the jewelry trade with mostly small, independent operators rather than chains, which leaves room for a founder-led brand to compete on “personality rather than scale”.
Bespoke design simply meets a demand large retailers aren’t built for, he says. Buyers want to be treated as individuals, not routed through “a very big display with a lot of different options”, and founder-led, personality-driven social content fills that gap. “The flexibility that you can create with a personality, those kinds of channels work best for independent designers.”
Social media content is a virtual door to a retail process that once required a sales floor. Inquiries for Whitelaw typically arrive as a comment or DM, which can then turn into a video call to discuss budget, designs, sketches, and CAD renders — an experience that runs the same way whether the client is based in London or elsewhere in the world. Rather than operating as a direct sales channel, the showroom appointment has moved online, with the consumer journey beginning on TikTok.
Crossing the Atlantic
Whitelaw spoke to Vogue Business shortly after returning from trunk shows in Nantucket, Massachusetts, and in New York. The East Coast was a natural fit for the brand’s international expansion, and for Whitelaw personally, as she trained as a gemologist at the Gemological Institute of America in Manhattan.
