Larry Barkley came to Georg Jensen in January 2006, two years after the company celebrated an auspicious centennial. The erstwhile Bulgari retail director long admired Georg Jensen’s esteemed heritage and illustrious product. Here was a heralded company whose fortunes and directions he was entrusted, a formidable challenge which the merchant of 20 years relished.
Barkley is a jewelry and watch pro and he was brought on to build that side of Georg Jensen’s business. He is, in fact, the first executive with a jewelry and watch background tapped to run the U.S. operation, precisely because of this expertise. “Our challenge is to raise the level of brand awareness and communicate the brand’s distinctive difference in the market, our Scandinavian designs,” Barkley begins. While the Danish operation has made and sold watches and jewelry for decades, it has not aggressively promoted that category here, resulting in an undeveloped market.
To help in that turnaround, Barkley is overseeing a multimillion-dollar all-media consumer ad campaign as he steps up the opening of Georg Jensen boutiques. (There are currently more than 100 in 12 countries; eight of those are in the U.S.) “In order for a luxury brand to be an option for a customer today,” Barkley holds, “you must put yourself in front of those customers. Georg Jensen hadn’t in the past, but we are now.”

While Barkley is reticent to put an exact figure on what that investment entails, he does allow: “There’s no cap on it. We’re building our business and we’re open to spending what we have to to get our name out. We’re not looking for a quick return, just the right avenues to build steady word-of-mouth.”

Although jewelry and watches will be the key category benefiting from the largesse, it’s not the only one. Georg Jensen’s holloware and cutlery will, too, reap rewards from this marketing overhaul, including an aggressive trade ad crusade. But it’s not merely marketing. On the product side, a more mainstream (translation: affordable) collection, Living, will be launched in the U.S., coinciding with Georg Jensen’s separation from its longtime U.S. distributor, Royal Copenhagen.
Earlier this year, Barkley appointed an industry colleague, Glen Fraser Ross, to oversee the wholesale division, working in tandem with the company’s retail accounts. (Before he was promoted to this post, Ross opened Georg Jensen’s glamorous new Rodeo Drive store.) “I understand luxury retail,” Ross notes, in an endearing Scotch brogue. “I understand customer service and presentation and have many of the same ideas and vision about the company that Larry does.” That vision – according to the tag team – is to concentrate on jewelry and watches but not neglect holloware and flatware – which currently generates 20% of overall sales volume.
Tableware is virtually nonexistent in Georg Jensen’s own stores. “We want the product in the hands of the retailers who sell it best, retailers like Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s, Michael C. Fina, Gump’s, and Geary’s,” Barkley stresses. “They’re our strategic partners. People go to these fine stores looking for our products where they can see an entire range. It’s important that we continue to develop relationships with these stores because they’re the leaders.”

In order to work better with the strongest accounts, the execs drastically reduced the number of stores that carry Georg Jensen tableware from 200 to 50. There were, they acknowledge, a network of discounters – now shed – carrying the prestige brand. “We had to be serious players who respect the heritage and level of the brand,” Barkley pronounces. With just “choice” merchants as partners, Ross and Barkley are eager to see Georg Jensen carve a larger presence on those shelves.

Now that distribution has moved in-house from Royal Copenhagen, Barkley and Ross understand they won’t get a second chance to make a good first impression. And, they acknowledge, there was rectification to be done. “Deliveries were a problem,” Barkley accedes. “If we can’t deliver product, we can’t exist.” Happily, he adds, the problem has been addressed. “We’re now delivering product on a timely basis with a 90-day turnaround for sterling,” he says. It was time, Barkley continues, for the company’s infrastructure to live up to the character of the company’s founding father.

Arguably, the greatest claim to fame of Georg Jensen, the company, is Georg Jensen, the sensitive and skilled founder, a revered artist whose love and respect for silver was clear. The New York Herald Tribune hailed him the “greatest silversmith of the last 300 years.” He was, of course, awarded numerous accolades over the years – including several top prizes at various world fairs – but it was his keen and creative imagination and his pure and joyous love of the material and his fellow craftsmen which catapulted his self-named enterprise to fame and fortune.

But it didn’t come easy.

Jensen struggled in a few careers before he gained recognition not just among Copenhagen’s high society, but the world’s. The seventh of eight children of a knife grinder and a housemaid, Jensen grew up in a pastoral factory town north of Copenhagen. The Arcadian region factored into Jensen’s work; organic and natural themes were often reflected in his designs.

The youth worked alongside his father from an early age and, thus, had little schooling. But his artistry was apparent and when he was 14 his family moved to Copenhagen so young Georg could apprentice a goldsmith. The bright boy gained admission to Copenhagen’s Royal Academy of Art where he studied sculpture, his true passion, which would significantly influence his later work as a silversmith. But responsibilities diverted Jensen’s dreams. With a growing family (a wife and two children) Jensen settled on making pottery, for which he had little love.

By 1904 Jensen was widowed and at the then advanced age of 36 decided to start his own business as a silversmith. With little capital, Jensen operated from a tiny room in the center of Copenhagen, producing jewelry because the financial investment was limited compared to flatware and holloware.

continued . . . .