Pamela Love Launches At-Home Piercings and Ceremonial Jewelry Collection
Feeling like a new piercing but too lazy to get off the couch? A problem no more! Today, Pamela Love announces a new piercing at-home program where she dispatches a trained piercing artist to New York City shoppers’ homes to stick them with designs from her piercing collection.
The idea was hatched after Love and her business partners scrapped near-term plans for a New York boutique in light of the pandemic. The brand currently operates a boutique in Paris that features a piercing salon — one of the experiential retail features to see considerable success during pandemic times.
More from WWD
“It’s super easy, they’ll come with everything including sterilization equipment and a selection from the collection. It’s in lieu of a New York store now while we are letting the dust settle. But we want to keep doing this, it’s a convenient way to do piercings without going to store,” said Love.
Each piercing costs $90 plus the price of the jewelry selected. Appointments are available to residents of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens each Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Shoppers can request the jewelry they’re interested in advance or choose from a wider array of options on-site.
In January 2020, Love launched a piercing collection of studs, hoops and charms that borrow symbolism from antiquity and the Renaissance to create a more hand-hewn assortment than what was already on the market. For Love — who founded her brand in 2008 and in May 2019 took on Red Luxury as majority business partners in order to help her scale and reposition the company — the range felt like a more personal option.
While piercings are currently about 50 percent of brand sales, Love is also launching her first ceremonial line of jewelry in order to try and level out sales across product categories.
“I have these partners in the business and was able to relinquish a lot of roles as chief executive officer which gave me more time to be creative. When we linked, the first requests I had when I came on was that I wanted to launch piercing and ceremonial collections. These are categories that need the respect of time and a lot of hands-on attention,” said Love.
Much like with piercings, Love wanted her ceremonial collection to be “something that, again, felt a lot more artisanal. The bridal space is huge and runs the gamut. I wanted something that felt imperfect, romantic and a little bit more ancient and less rigid — less traditional. I wanted you to be able to see the handwork and have something imperfect, because love is imperfect, marriage is imperfect and this is something that celebrates the beauty in that imperfectness,” she said.
Prices run from $1,800 to $3,500 for bands while engagement rings are priced from $7,000 to $45,000. The whole collection, much of it featuring a braided motif, is made from either recycled or “fair-mined” 18-karat gold and “ethically sourced” diamonds.
Love said that, ideally, ceremonial would encompass about 15 to 20 percent of brand sales. Her company still wholesales to select retailers including Moda Operandi, Bergdorf Goodman and Ylang 23, but has taken strides in the past year to rely more on direct sales — particularly in the fallout of Barneys’ closure.
“When we lost Barneys it was a big blow. We are trying to make sure we control the business so we are in charge of our destiny. For us it was a wake-up call, but we were already starting to think more about controlling the narrative,” she said.
The company is now considering additional retail stores as reopenings occur across the globe.
Sign up for WWD's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.