1. Lead with Authenticity: Brenna believes that authenticity is a hallmark trait of a good leader. Leading with authenticity instills the trait in your team members, helping to guide in client interactions.
2. Build a Team of Educators: Brenna feels that former teachers make the salespeople because they want to educate the customer, rather than ‘sell’ them on a product or service.
3. Company Transparency: Brenna maintains that transparency is critical for a company to gain people’s trust while cultivating lasting relationships with customers.
4. Be Relatable on Social Media: Brenna maintains that customers want to see themselves in social media posts, not some sterile, glossed over version. Focus on creating content that is relatable and honest with your target customers.
5. Think Outside-the-Box: Don’t be afraid to use unconventional strategies if something isn’t working (or can be improved) in your industry. Brenna believes that thinking outside-the-box creates innovation and growth for a brand.
Fresh out of college, Brenna Lyden left a coveted job as a buyer at Nordstrom’s to start her own E-Commerce jewelry company with only $99 in her pocket. You’ll want to read how she went from hand delivering orders to being the CEO of three successful jewelry brands revolutionizing the way we think about lab gemstones.
Meet Brenna Lyden, Founder/CEO of East West Gem Co., Everly, and Created!
Headquartered in Charleston, SC, East West Gem Co. was born from the idea of making meticulously custom and beautiful rings attainable through moissanite. In an industry surprisingly dominated by men, East West is the place where the normally excluded become the top 1%. East West Gem Co.’s jewelry collections include custom rings, bands, studs, and tennis bracelets.
While studying apparel merchandising and design in college, Brenna landed a prestigious internship at Nordstrom in Seattle. The luxury department store eventually offered her a full-time buyer position, “but there was this nagging voice inside telling me what I really wanted was to start my own business,” she remembers. Jewelry was a lifelong passion – she had plans to get her GIA certificate. From Brenna’s viewpoint, there were flaws in the existing business model. “Jewelry is an inherited business,” she explains. “And when you are close to an industry, there are a lot of blind spots. I think that is why jewelry hasn’t evolved like other industries because of this lineage path that stunts innovation at some level. People are complacent, they do what their parents did.”
Being a young woman with no family lineage, in turn, became Brenna’s superpower – she saw the process of buying jewelry just as the customers did. No family money to fall back only served as motivation, driving her even harder to break into the industry. Brenna started her first company, Everly, in 2016 with only $99 in her pocket, walking every order to the post-office because she didn’t have a car. “It was a really humbling start and I never try to lose sight of that,” she adds. In 2018, Lynna launched her second jewelry company, East West Gem Co., and just recently announced Created, a new lab grown diamond company.
Brenna admits that she was taking a big risk when she left Nordstrom to start Everly. Lab created gemstones had just been introduced to the market, which was still dominated by men who were producing designs based on margins, not what the customers, young women like Brenna, wanted. She saw an opportunity and established one of the first E-Commerce companies where jewelry was made by women for women.
Timeless designs offered at affordable prices was a novel concept at the time. Brenna’s earliest customers weren’t so much concerned about the material, or gemstone, but rather how it was cut and executed. “I love the control that you have over lab created jewelry. There’s a sweet spot that you really can’t get with natural – I can offer you exactly what you want without breaking the bank.” She goes on to say, “To this day, all of our stones and $99 rings are hand cut.”
East West Gem Co. and Everly are backed by a team of 25 women with main offices in Irvine, CA and Charleston, SC. Brenna works in close collaboration with a production team at the Irvine location, which doubles as a showroom. “People have a rosy vision of jewelry and jewelry production. It’s a gritty process executed by people with engineering and science backgrounds,” she discloses. “It’s a lot more technical than people think and done by people with engineering and science backgrounds.”
Brenna just bought a historic King Street building in Charleston, where her companies are headquartered. “We are getting ready to renovate and make it our forever home,” she says excitedly. East West Gem Co. has a third store location in SoHo, New York.
To hear a CEO of multiple jewelry companies take an ‘anti-jeweler’ stance towards customer experience sounds shocking, at first. As Brenna dissects her approach, however, you see why her jewelry companies are so successful. “There’s a lot of pain points in the industry regarding the lack of transparency, pricing, and education involved, which people working in jewelry need to make,” she stresses. They recently initiated a new customer service policy asking people how educated they want to be on a scale of 1 to 3. The process of purchasing a ring on the East West Gem Co’s website is fully transparent – an itemized list shows all the features that make up the cost of a ring. “You can be empowered and educated to make the right choices for you,” Brenna says.
As business grew, Brenna could no longer meet customers’ expectations on her own – scaling customer service was necessary. “What’s challenging and where I’m happy to say that we thrive, is executing customer service through a team,” she says about passing on responsibility and trust as a leader. “To operate, to empower, to instill the ethos of the company, and have other people acting as you would, is the hardest and most powerful thing.” Her companies have near zero turnover as a result. “People love this job. And I think that it shows in the way we engage with our clients.”
Brenna evolved as an entrepreneur and goals shifted as her business went through phases. She focused on making a profit at first, then moved on to being the best in her industry reaching a point that others copied her designs and content. “That loses its sparkle eventually,” she discloses. “And then you say, ‘okay, I must invest in my people. I want to be the best leader possible.” Excellent leadership breeds authenticity in a company culture that extends to client relationships. To foster authentic energy within her team, Brenna shares a video that she has found inspiring (think Jefferson Davies and Toni Robinson). Elaborating on her leadership “secret”, she says, “I’ve started every day like this and call it ‘motivation university.’ I pay everyone who watches the same video $5 a day. It gets the wheels turning and we sync up as a team.”
Brenna says social media has been the biggest driver for growth and revenue at East West Gem Co. and Everly. Transparency has made her brands stand out in a social media landscape saturated with glossy, sterile, and unrelatable images. She elaborates on her honest and straightforward strategy, “Almost all our ring videos on Instagram are taken by me and feature my hands. It’s what you see when you look down as a woman – that’s the vantage point that we want people to tap into.” Price, carat weight ratio, metal, etc. are also listed so potential customers aren’t left guessing. “By ‘not selling,’ we’ve sold a lot,” she finishes.
Unlike most jewelry companies, East West Gem Co, which focuses on custom pieces, has consistent business with fluctuations of no more than 15%. Brenna reveals the main challenges are serving customers during busy time frames over the year – making sure people are aware of ‘order by’ dates is a priority. “Custom jewelry takes 4 to 8 weeks. It’s like ‘Happy Halloween, now place your Christmas order.’ But that’s not intuitive at all, so our customers need to be educated.”
Everly, a mass-produced band, hosts an annual Black Friday sale followed by the drop of its holiday collection. “Buy 2 get 4 free on the entire site, and it is wild,” Brenna admits while noting preparation is everything. Development for Black Friday sales collections start a year in advance (Brenna is currently working on designs for Christmas 2025). Flexible with PTO hours, some team members choose to work through the holidays saving their time off for later. Having a team on the west and east coast allows more coverage. “We're able to serve our customers, making sure that we are responsive and active on social media and in our inbox.”
Never having a mentor, investor, or business partner meant that Brenna’s journey as a Founder/CEO was dotted with “trial and error.” In turn, her position helped establish strong relationships with vendors, giving her brands a competitive advantage. She explains, “We’ve always paid merchandise outright and that plays into our business strategy. Our stonecutters favor us because they always get paid immediately – we get the best inventory at the quickest turnaround.”
On the topic of immediate goals for her jewelry brands, Brenna discloses that technology played a major role in recent developments at East West Coast Co. A Tungsten line has been in the works for the last 4 years and will be dropping in a couple of weeks. “We partnered with a former Tiffany engineer who borrows technology from the car and watch industry to do things with Tungsten that others can’t. We’ll be the first company to my knowledge that offers quarter sizes in Tungsten. We'll be able to do gold and gemstone inlay. Taking something regarded as low end and making it customizable and reach high potential is what I love to do.”
In addition to officially launching Created, Brenna is working on a gemstone marketplace, giving buyers access to every diamond and moissanite in her team’s possession. She moves onto her passion project, HACE, a high-end jewelry rental sharing that former Harry Winston setters will be making pieces for special events such as a wedding. ‘I think with lab stones and moissanite combined with our production strategy, something really compelling could be had there – you can do celebrity style pieces at a price.” She finishes by mentioning the renovation of the historic King Street building in Charleston – “were going to have a very pretty headquarters.”
What Excites You Most About E-Commerce? The innovation that E-Commerce sparks in all of us. Before E-Commerce, everyone was mom-and-pop, and your only competition was in your immediate vicinity. Now everyone in the world is your competition – we are competing with the best in the world, not just the best in our zip code. Mediocrity will not sustain long-term. You must compete on price, on speed, customer service, design, or ideally a combination of all four. The days of making jewelry, having a brick-and-mortar, and hoping people will come are done. What value are you bringing to the customers? How are you enhancing and bettering the lives of the people who work for you? How are you walking in and out of your office every day better than the person you were yesterday? I think that’s what creates the palpability of innovation and excitement that comes with E-Commerce.
Can’t Live Without Tool? I couldn’t live without Google Meet. That’s the least flawed tool because of the people on the other side of the calls and connecting with my team and my customers – we do a lot virtually and nothing can replace that like human-to-human contact.
Key Hiring Trait? I hire very differently than everyone else. I don’t like to hire people from the jewelry industry. This is a controversial statement – they have been trained to know better than you and sell to you – everything that stands against what I look for. When hiring for my showrooms, I love former teachers. They work super hard, come from an educational standpoint – they educate you and don’t try to sell you on anything. They exude what I’m trying to do effortlessly. Additionally, I look for a spark, light behind the eyes, and coachability. And you must have the willingness to pivot when you’re wrong, have ownership, and do better. That progressive mentality, no matter what your role is, distribution, creative director, or ops, that mentality is priceless. Lastly, I look for people who don’t assume malice. We only look for fully formed adults, we trust everyone equally. If anything strikes us weird, we're curious not accusatory and that gets you far, especially with an all-female team.
Influential Thought Leader? Everything I am as a leader is credited to Simon Sinek. I absolutely love him. I love his ethos when it comes to leadership as a team and how you guide it with humility. Recently, my focus has been on communication, so I’ve become obsessed with Jefferson Fisher. We take communication for granted and could be doing it a lot better whether we are talking about educating, connecting, or debating with someone. This applies not only to our offices and clients, but also to our homes. Lastly, I’m following Chris Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator turned businessman and author. Because jewelry is about negotiation. It’s a balancing act of saucers and trying not to tip one over, otherwise the equation doesn’t work.
#1 Challenge as a Leader? As we have gotten bigger, I have my own guilt formulating inside about not being accessible to everyone all the time. We’re no longer a team of 8 and I can’t have the 1-on-1 time with everyone. It’s a matter of creating enough time in my day and blocking out every single moment from when I wake up at 5 am to 10 pm when I go to bed. This means having regimented meetings so I can fit everyone in, and they feel respected and heard. Another challenge is making sure people from differing parts of the company are communicating and on the same page. You’re always trying to be better for your team and maintain a high quality of life for them while leading with empathy.
We're elevating customer experiences at 500 top E-Commerce brands (and counting). Let's see what we can do for you!
Learn MoreBook a call with one of our specialists today to see how TalentPop can assist you with putting together a solution for your customer service needs.
Learn More
.png)
