BaubleBar, an Upstart Jewelry Seller, Raises $10 Million

Three and a half years ago, two onetime investment banking analysts decided to turn their backs on Wall Street and dive into the jewelry business instead.

Now the duo and their company, BaubleBar, have garnered the eye of prominent investors like J. Christopher Burch, the co-founder of the popular Tory Burch empire.

BaubleBar plans to disclose on Tuesday that it has raised $10 million in a new round of financing led by Mr. Burch’s investment firm. Other participants include Aspect Ventures, Triplepoint Ventures, the investment arm of Comcast and the existing investors Accel Partners and Greycroft Partners.

The new money will go toward financing expansion efforts, including more advanced logistics and shipping software, and expanding the company’s partnerships with retailers like Anthropologie and Nordstrom as well as its stand-alone stores.

It is the latest step in what the start-up’s founders, Amy Jain and Daniella Yacobovsky, see as the path to a thriving brand that can upend the $22 billion jewelry business as much as Warby Parker has shaken up the market for eyeglasses. The goal is to become the first name in fast-fashion jewelry, with the company constantly staying on top of the latest trends.

It is an area that the founders say has yet to be filled.

“If you ask a woman where she’s going to get earrings for a wedding this weekend, she will stop and say, I don’t know,” Ms. Jain told DealBook by telephone.

But like other nascent fashion start-ups, BaubleBar has focused as much on novel ways of selling goods as it has on product design. Befitting their financial backgrounds – both were neophytes at UBS before attending Harvard Business School together – Ms. Jain and Ms. Yacobovsky emphasized their extremely quick product turnover and in-house logistics and shipping capabilities.

And the company uses data to analyze which styles are particularly trendy at any given moment before going to an array of suppliers to produce those hopefully coveted items as quickly as possible.

“We felt very strongly that we should control the whole customer experience, end to end,” Ms. Yacobovsky said.

That intense focus on the business of fashion was what helped the two bond with Mr. Burch, who happened to be friends with the father of an early BaubleBar employee. Neither woman expected that a meeting with the entrepreneur – who is currently occupied with his latest fashion venture, the less-expensive C. Wonder brand – would lead to a working relationship.

Yet Mr. Burch surprised them both by offering to become an investor and an adviser.

“What was nice about the meeting is that he was already familiar with the biz,” Ms. Yacobovsky said. “We’re at that stage where we’re starting to face some strategic forks in the road.”

While Ms. Jain and Ms. Yacobovsky declined to elaborate on their company’s financial performance, they did allow that sales this year have tripled from the period a year earlier, averaging more than 1,000 orders a day. Their website has grown to an average of 1.3 million monthly visits.

And yet, the two claim, the company’s working capital needs are low. That they took on far less money than they could have raised indicates how well BaubleBar is performing already, they said.

“The cash-flow profile of this business is incredibly attractive,” Ms. Jain said.