Heritage luxury jewelry brand Tacori faces a unique marketing challenge: Its core bridal customer base constantly cycles in and out of relevance. Engagement ring shoppers typically research for just one to four months before purchasing, and once they buy, they're no longer in-market.

"We're one of the very few industries where our consumer is constantly aging in and out of our category," said Bec Bowman, head of brand and creative at Tacori. This creates a compressed window to capture attention and requires the brand to build awareness well before consumers enter the engagement ring shopping phase.

Tacori's answer is to move beyond hardcore bridal marketing and build cultural awareness with younger audiences.

"It's really about finding the fashion cues, finding the cultural cues, bringing ourselves into a sphere and making them want to interact with us as a brand," Bowman explained.

Tacori is pursuing that awareness through celebrity partnerships with figures like Sabrina Carpenter and Cardi B. These aren't traditional endorsement deals but rather "pure awareness plays" designed to position the brand in culture without traditional media budgets.

The brand is also tapping into broader consumer trends favoring uniqueness over mass production.

"People are looking for unique furniture, people are looking for vintage wedding dresses, archival, because they're sick of seeing this generic sameness," Bowman noted. “By nature, we're unique. It's physically impossible for two of our pieces to ever be the same.”

Breaking free from category sameness

Tacori recently completed an 11-month brand refresh aimed at breaking from category conventions that Bowman said no longer served the brand. Those conventions included muted color palettes, overly sentimental imagery, and generic positioning that left many jewelry brands indistinguishable from one another.

“We sort of took stock and we realized we weren't appealing to a younger audience because we were feeling kind of generic and were very easy to scroll past,” she said.

The new identity embraces a vibrant color palette inspired by the Tacori family's personality, alongside messaging centered on joy and celebration rather than traditional romance.

Photo credit: Tacori

“We wanted to bring the fun back into jewelry and bring the joy out that these moments are meant to be celebrating,” said Bowman.

Tacori unveiled the refresh at this month's Couture trade show, where Bowman said the response from industry partners was overwhelmingly positive.

“A lot of things we heard were like, ‘Tacori's back,’ ‘This is the brand you've always been,’ ‘It feels like you've turned the lights on,’” she said.

Preparing for the future of search

Tacori is also adapting to shifts in how consumers discover and research products.

According to Bowman, engagement ring shoppers visit an average of seven websites and three to four brick-and-mortar stores before making a purchase, with Reddit emerging as a particularly influential source of peer recommendations.

AI-powered search is becoming part of that discovery journey.

• Tacori is already seeing referrals, email signups, and website traffic originating from ChatGPT.
• To better position itself for AI-driven search, the company is migrating from Magento to Shopify, a move Bowman said will improve product data management and SEO execution.

But even as it embraces new technologies, Tacori is drawing clear boundaries around how it uses AI.

“We're not going to be one of those brands that suddenly AI's all our 30-second spots,” Bowman said. “That seems antithetical to who we are.”

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