If you’ll be at the Luxury show in Las Vegas this year (it opens June 8 to invited guests and June 10 for all JCK attendees), stop by the Sylvie booth to see what a brand “evolution” looks like. The Plano, Texas–based bridal manufacturer and longtime Luxury exhibitor recently unveiled a new logo, new typography, and new brand campaign on the occasion of its 15th anniversary.
Spearheaded by Gary Levine, the company’s director of operations (and eldest son of company founders Ian and Sylvie Levine), the rebranding project is a very deliberate effort to position Sylvie for several more decades of growth.
“This is very much about evolving into our next chapter and celebrating our heritage and better communicating our vision and our story,” Levine tells JCK. “Particularly the love story between my parents Ian and Sylvie, and the details in the designs of our products.”
Levine joined the family business last August, after leaving a career in finance. The branding initiative was among his first orders of business.
“The first thing we did was we talked to a handful of our strongest and closest customers,” Levine says. “We spoke to sales reps, particularly ones who’d been with us for two decades plus, and we talked to people we know who have marketing backgrounds and brand experience and basically triangulated that into words, pictures, and ideas.
“It became an iterative process that eventually turned into the new icon that we unveiled, new typography choices for our literature, having that be more feminine and unique—not just fonts you could download from Google,” he adds. “We now have a custom font we worked with a designer to create.”
The new “Shine On” brand campaign is a nod to Sylvie’s heritage and “the bright future ahead, given the company’s growth plans,” according to a brand statement. Steeped in the company’s new visual identity, the campaign features women who “radiate youthful femininity, no matter their biological age, and are elegant, confident, and complex,” Levine said in a statement.
In order to create the campaign, and fine-tune the brand’s strategy, Levine worked with his team to create fictional personas based on the customers who buy Sylvie’s products.
“Every time we make a decision on marketing or the product side, we talk about, basically, the fake people we created,” Levine says. “We came up with where they shop, who they follow on Instagram. That’s what we did, and what you see is the product of all that.”
In terms of actual products, however, much remains the same. “The design hasn’t changed at all, materially,” Levine says. “That’s what’s been superstrong and has helped our company grow over the last 15 years and remain on trend.”
At Luxury this year, buyers should expect to see many of the company’s popular bridal styles displayed in yellow gold—“because it’s so hot,” says Levine—bigger center stones to compete with the rise of larger lab-grown center stones and a dedicated focus on the small details that set Sylvie’s designs apart.
“Particularly taking existing styles we had and creating peekaboo or subtle details, which we find extremely popular these days,” he says. “It’s the kind of thing you can only show a customer in a store and they find it amazing. We’re trying to achieve those kinds of reactions and achieve the limits of what’s possible in those small spaces. That’s really the crux of our new designs.”
Top: Brianna ring in 18k yellow gold with 2 ct. pear-shape diamond center stone and 0.32 ct. t.w. diamond accents, $2,720 (center stone not included); photos courtesy of Sylvie
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