The Eric Musgrave Interview: Robert Tateossian celebrates 35 years of adorning men with intriguing jewellery
A bracelet of black rhodium-plated sterling silver set with yellow nano stones. A pair of round cufflinks, made from a palladium-plated base metal, in which seven circular interlocking gears, comprised of palladium, gunmetal, and rose gold plating, can be rotated. A grey, hand-threaded macrame bracelet on which titanium beads contrast with black snowflake obsidian.
It is with such complicated and carefully-crafted men’s accessories that Tateossian London has made its global reputation since 1990. Starting out with a desire to add some fun and fashion to men’s classic cufflinks, Robert Tateossian has become a pioneer of providing men – and occasionally women – with more reasons to add to their accessory collection.
The three items described above retail for £350, £365 and £279. He operates expertly in the area of premium discretionary purchases. It would be hard to claim any man needs another hand-assembled bracelet or another pair of dazzling cufflinks, but Tateossian has proved plenty of men want to buy regularly.
The 35th anniversary of the business was officially 20 October, but any celebrations were somewhat overshadowed by the founder wrestling with the considerable problems caused by Trump’s tariffs on Chinese-made products and the rocketing price of gold (with silver prices not far behind).
One result of the US trade war might be that Tateossian brings back some of its metalwork manufacturing to the UK, which would be déjà vu for Robert, who used only British workshops in his early days. He decided to start the business after buying a job lot of silver cufflinks for $2 each while on holiday in Thailand and selling them for £20 each to Harrods.
Tateossian bracelets and cufflinks
Subsequent trading has been less simple but Robert Tateossian was better equipped than most for a career in international commerce. Born in Kuwait to a prosperous Armenian family, he was educated at French schools in Rome and at the prestigious Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked in City finance for Merrill Lynch for seven years before deciding he wanted to be an entrepreneur. The seven languages he speaks helped him build his impressive global network of around 700 stockists.
The post-pandemic years have seen the business re-setting how it works, prompted in part by the COVID-related death in July 2020 of Ariel Thompson, who was Robert’s life partner for 23 years and the creative director, “the creative heart”, of Tateossian London.
A slimmer, trimmer company now enters its fourth decade with the urbane and polished founder still seeking opportunities for growth despite Donald Trump’s best efforts to make his life difficult. We met in the company’s stylish offices overlooking the Thames in Fulham.
Thirty five years as a privately-owned business selling cufflinks and other men’s jewellery is a fine record, but hasn’t the post-COVID era of working from home and dressing down been a huge challenge?
The cufflink business has always been a niche business, so in a way nothing’s changed. Cufflink lovers continue to be cufflink lovers. They are like collectors of watches. No one needs 20 watches, no one needs 35 pairs of cufflinks, but people collect them. Literally, some come straight from the airport to my shop on Conduit Street because they want to add a new piece to their collection. We're not into mass market distribution. A lot of our cufflinks are editions of one, five, 10 or 20. Even if we do a big production, it's a couple of hundred, it's not thousands.
People wear cufflinks and our shirt stud sets for weddings and special occasions, of course, but generally more and more people want to feel good by getting dressed up again. And if they do get dressed up, they get dressed up big time. They might not wear a tie with a suit or a sports jacket, but they still want to wear the cufflinks because they are that finishing touch.
What is spoiling your 35th anniversary celebrations at present?
Exogenous factors, outside factors, are always the worst. Since 1990 we have had I don’t know how many government changes, wars, economic slumps in Japan and so on, but the toughest challenge we faced was Brexit. Now it’s the tariffs Trump has imposed because the USA is our biggest market and we're manufacturing part of our production in China, Thailand and India and he’s slapped 40% tariffs on the countries.
In response, I am looking again at getting things made in Birmingham, which, along with London, is where we worked when we started. But the question is, have they got the quality I need and the capacity…
Right now, the price of gold is also a nightmare as it has gone through the roof in a few weeks to hit an all-time high. We don’t wholesale our gold jewellery, but in our shop today’s retail prices are what wholesale prices should be. That’s how fast it has moved. Gold is about 10% of our sales, especially on our women’s jewellery, which we sell only in the store. Any smart person could have walked into the store 10 days ago, bought everything in gold, then melted it down to make a killing.
Tateossian bracelet stack
What was the original concept of Tateossian London in 1990, and how has it changed?
I was 28 and after seven years in City banking I wanted to have my own business, to be an entrepreneur, to travel internationally. I had a bit of savings, no family and no expenses to worry about apart from the mortgage on my flat. I thought, that's a good foundation on which to start a business.
The little opportunity I identified, which didn’t really exist, was to take cufflinks and make them fun, more adventurous, to give them an element of fashion. Obviously Links of London was there at the time. Simon Carter started about the same time, and Paul Smith had his cufflinks, but that was about it.
I’m not a designer, but I have ideas and I know what looks good. I contacted the head of a jewellery association and asked for guidance on manufacturing and he put me in touch with a little workshop in London. After using them for a while, one of their people was moving back to Birmingham and said he’d work for us if we gave him a guaranteed £5,000 a month worth of business. This was around 1992, long before we started making in China.
After not very long I could see we could not survive just making cufflinks. Japan was our first successful export market and in the late 1990s Japanese customers asked me for other things, specifically bracelets for men. We were one of the first British firms to do them. Today guys come in with their bracelets stacked, looking to see what they can add to create just the right stack. They'll spend an hour, an hour and a half, on this because they aren’t many stores like ours where men can play around with accessories.
Why did you choose to have London in the company name?
A friend told me to use my own surname as it is so exotic, but I wanted to add London because that is my home. Also Japan was always going to be a target market and they love anything to do with London and the UK generally. It’s been very important in our story.
Is Tateossian London a menswear brand or a jewellery brand?
That’s a very good question. About 80% of my sales are through menswear shops, including department stores and specialty boutiques worldwide. Only 20% is through jewellery shops because they are not interested in selling silver or stainless steel. They want to sell gold because of the higher prices and that's not a market I've invested in very heavily.
Apart from my own shop on Conduit Street, in the UK I wholesale through Harrods, Selfridges and Harvey Nichols and a few small stockists. We used to have a much bigger distribution but today small boutiques do not want to invest in our category. Of course, if somebody is interested in buying the collection and they contact us, we might sell to them.
Limited distribution gives me exclusivity.
Around the world we have between 600 and 700 stockists. Our top markets are USA, Turkey, UK, UAE and China. Japan used to be our Number 1 but that was when the yen was 120 to the pound, not 200.
In the USA, where we have a good agent, we're in every major city. A typical stockist is Mitchells Stores, which has 10 menswear stores carrying high-end tailoring brands like Zegna, Canali, Loro Piana. That’s where we sit.
COVID negatively affected all the mom and pop shops around the world, but my main clients still remain strong, apart from Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue that are still not paying their bills in full.
Tateossian cufflinks
Did your financial training assist you as a start-up entrepreneur?
At the beginning I thought, if this doesn't work, then I can always go back to banking. I am a creative person, but for me, everything has to make financial sense. You can't operate with the heart only. It has to be the brain and the heart.
We were profitable from the word go, more profitable than we are now, when our sales are in excess of £5m. After about four years of trading we were making £0.5m profit and my accountant said, Robert, as you grow the business, your profit is just going to go down and down and down. Sure enough, I don't see those figures anymore.
Admirers of yours in the industry always mention how hard you always worked. How do you rate yourself as a boss?
I've always had a very strict work ethic. Starting out, you're motivated by wanting to succeed, but also by fear because you know there's nobody to blame except you. When you're starting your own business, you have to knock on every door, so, yes, so I did every possible trade show that I could to test the market, thanks to the help given back then by the (trade body) BKCEC (now UKFT).
Now I do just two trade shows - Pitti Uomo in Florence and the Chicago Collective menswear show. We used to do the tax-free fair in Cannes, but this year I went and met with buyers outside the show. It's a very difficult decision to stop a show, but it always comes down to the results. To be at the jewellery trade show Couture in Las Vegas was costing me $50,000 – I need to sell a lot of cufflinks to cover that.
As for being a boss, I’d give myself seven or eight out of 10. I'm very demanding. Obviously, I'm very passionate about my business, so I find it a little bit difficult just to be very polite and quiet if there's a mistake internally. I always try to be as calm as possible, but it's very, very difficult.
I demand a lot from my employees because the whole motto of the business is that we're striving for excellence. You must have excellence in the way you deliver things every step of the way. So the day’s emails have to be responded to before people leave work.
As the owner, I'm still very much involved in every single step of the supply chain, whether it's dealing with a client, working with design, approving the pieces, looking at packaging, reorganising the office, hiring, looking at the price lists. I don't think there's anything I don't do or don't get really involved in.
But I do have a loyal team. Most of the key people here, maybe half of the 20, have been with me for more than two decades.
The team used to be bigger…
Up until six months ago, we were about 45 people but we have at last outsourced a lot of things. Right here in prime real estate in Fulham we had 15 people in a room next to the showroom doing packing and shipping. Now we’ve outsourced that part to three warehouses – one in Peterborough, one in the Netherlands and one in the US. I must admit it's been a disaster because the warehouses don't know how to pack our things and are very slow at processing orders.
We still have a smaller unit here with all our discontinued and our very high-value stock.
The Conduit Street store
You also used to have more shops…
Yes, by the mid-2000s I had four stores in London, but I bled money during COVID because the landlords were not very cooperative. During the past 18 months I got out of the last of them as soon as the leases allowed. The one in the City was a disaster as no one went back to work. The one in Westfield at Shepherd’s Bush, which we exited earlier, stayed empty for about five years after we left. We had an off-price thing in the O2 Arena but that place didn’t work. It was too far away, too cold and the hours were too long.
We had a lovely store just off Sloane Square, in Belgravia, the most prestigious neighbourhood in London, but even that was losing £3,000 to £5,000 a month. A friend of mine told me to just think of it like advertising in a glossy magazine once a month, which would have cost about the same. That was the logic in my mind, so I’ll admit there my heart over-ruled my head.
I thank God we’ve now got just the one at 27 Conduit Street, where I've got a lovely landlord who did help me out during COVID. It’s about 23 sq m or 240 sq ft; it’s all I need for my small products.
You were smart to pitch yourself at a premium price right when you started. What are your retail sweet spots?
From Day 1, I wanted to be on the upper level, to sell a luxury product with limited production. That comes with a price because my manufacturing and associated costs are so much higher than just having one product and running thousands of units.
We have Tateossian London and RT, which is our second line, plus Thompson of London, which is a cheaper line. Although we were known for silver cufflinks, the price of sterling silver has gone up by 30% in the past year, so the core products now are non-silver. So for stainless steel or brass, our sweet spot price point is about £250 to £295 for cufflinks, with bracelets starting at £250 to £350.
I do create unusual, one-of-a-kind pieces too. The most expensive thing in the shop is a pair of cufflinks in 18-carat gold with a big, very unusual black diamond and white diamonds. It's one of a kind and it's £65,000. I have others at £20,000, £30,000, £40,000 and £56,000 pounds. I’ve had them for many years. If I sell them, great, if I don't sell them, even better, because then they form part of my personal archive.
In all, I have about 30,000 pieces in the archive, everything we’ve ever made.
You are seen as a men’s brand despite selling women’s jewellery…
I sell women’s jewellery in my shop and on online, but it’s only precious jewellery in gold. It’s beautiful, but it tends to be more one-off pieces. The sales are infrequent, but they are good sales. There are so many rich girls doing jewellery collections, it’s not worth competing.
You have rarely diversified from a relatively small group of products…
We don't really look at trends that much. We have our signature. We do what we do. I’ve tried diversifying into other accessories, but to launch something you need big budgets. People know me as a jewellery person, not a belt, wallet, sunglasses or watch person. It is usually not worth the effort.
We had a line of Tateossian white shirts for a time as they went with the cufflinks. I’m trying to revitalise the shirt but only as a collaboration Choya, which is one of Japan’s oldest shirt manufacturers. It will probably be just one evening shirt to be worn with studs and cufflinks. A lot of guys don’t know where to find a French cuff shirt.
Tateossian cufflinks
Who do you work with on private label?
Over the years I have worked with every important Italian tailoring brand you can think of, such as Isaia, Kiton, Corneliani and Canali. I had the Zegna licence for 25 years. I’ve just started working with Pal Zileri. We have also collaborated with Lamborghini, with Zaha Hadid and we have been working with Elton John’s Aids Foundation for 10 years. We’ve also done things for Harrods, Waterford Crystal, Ede & Ravenscroft – it’s a long list of names. It used to be more important than it is now.
What are your personal weaknesses in business?
I’m a technophobe and I don’t like change. I'm a creature of habit. I am very slow in adopting new technologies, even now, when it comes to embracing AI. We could have been online a lot more quickly. We launched our transactional website in 2005.
Ecommerce is about 15% of our total sales, which I’m happy with. It is growing, but it’s driven primarily by the UK and the US. To grow in the rest of the world we’d have to think about websites in Arabic, Chinese and so on. As a technophobe, I’ve outsourced this and I am waiting to be told what we need to do to sell more in, say, the UAE.
Overall, the procedures internally could be a little bit more advanced. I'm still doing things the way I used to do in 1990. We're still writing orders by hand on paper at Pitti Uomo where everybody else is on an iPad.
I’ve also recently started to reduce the number of new products we introduce each season. We were taking out about 150 SKUs and adding 150 different ones. It was crazy. We now have taken that down to 60 or 70 twice a year, which is still too much. Of course, none of our customers even noticed. They just come with their budgets and buy deeper into what we now offer.
What are you particularly good at as a company?
Creating tailor-made, unique, desirable products. It takes from six months to 18 months for us to create a new item from me having an idea to seeing the finished product. We have to research the raw materials. I deliberately make my cufflinks as complicated and as labour-intensive as possible, from the front to the back, because I want to make sure nobody is able to copy them easily.
Currently, anything that involves fire and is labour-intensive I have made in China and, increasingly, Thailand. In the workshops I use in China, a guy spends five hours making a pair of my cufflinks. That’s were the cost comes from and that’s the level of craftsmanship I have to try and find in the UK.
Beyond that, I use Italy for everything that involves chain or clasps or leather, but all the assembling of the bracelets and all the beading is done here in our London office.
What would you still like to achieve with the brand?
I'm very happy with the trajectory that my business has taken and where we are today, still independent. The shop in London is doing quite well and I've always had this dream of having a shop in Tokyo and one in New York. With the right formula and the right local partner, I think we could do really well.
