Jewelry Podcasts Pick Up Some Glitter

While the visual appeal of jewelry — the sparkle of a gem or the glitter of gold — isn’t visible in an audio-only medium, podcasters specializing in jewelry seem to be flourishing.

But then, the overall audience for podcasts is growing, too, with the number of internet listeners worldwide set to top 504.9 million by 2024 from 274.8 million in 2019, according to Statista. And as the Reuters Institute and University of Oxford’s 2023 Digital News Report noted in June, these “listeners tend to be richer, better educated and crucially much younger,” with most between 18 and 34 years old.

Little wonder then that podcasters, even on a niche subject such as jewelry, want to capture this audience. After all, its members are “not like flicking through like much of the internet behavior can be or like TikTok can be — just scrolling, scrolling through to the next bit,” said Rob Parkin, a London-based senior vice president of research and insight at Pulsar, an audience intelligence company.

Here are the stories of four jewelry specialists from Stockholm to Santa Monica, Calif., most of whom established their free podcasts to promote their businesses or institutions, and now are working on ways to grow.

“Gem Pursuit”

Dublin

As Ireland endured weeks of lockdown in early 2020, Matthew Weldon was trying to find a way to boost business for his antique and vintage jewelry store, Courtville, in central Dublin.

His answer was a podcast called “Gem Pursuit,” a name that he said was a take on his business goal: “to pursue the finest gems.” Since its debut that May, the podcast has offered 56 episodes, which are uploaded on alternate Mondays.

And as of early November, it had a total of 60,090 downloads across its platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The episodes range from about 30 minutes to almost 90 minutes, and have focused on gemstones, from diamonds to onyx; design eras, including Art Deco; and well-known houses such as Cartier.

Mr. Weldon, 34, and his co-host, Alyce Ketcher, “decide who takes what” in advance, so the discussion flows without a script. For example, when they planned the “Emerald” episode for December 2020, “Alyce would pick one emerald and I’d pick a different one and then we’d, kind of, tell each other the story of it,” Mr. Weldon said.

They also stage a little quiz competition at the program’s end, each fielding three questions. In the “Opal” episode in August, Mr. Weldon asked Ms. Ketcher which Shakespeare play contains the line “for thy mind is a very opal?” (Answer: “Twelfth Night”).

That time Ms. Ketcher, 37, won the game with two correct answers. She is a gemologist who joined Courtville in February 2020 as head of fine jewelry and has been the podcast’s co-host since its inception.

Planning is the toughest part, Mr. Weldon said. Each podcast series is organized two or three months ahead and each episode is planned two weeks in advance, he said. “A lot of our listeners are in the trade anyway or young people trying to get into the trade so it can’t be information that just anyone can tell them, it has to be researched” and has to be correct, he said, estimating that an episode could involve 10 to 12 hours of research.

Since Sept. 29, however, responsibility for that research has shifted to Dusty Rhodes, the series’ new producer and founder of DustPod, a podcast production house in Dublin. So, Mr. Weldon wrote in a recent text message, “Alyce and I really just have to turn up now.”

“Jewelry Journey”

Santa Monica, Calif.

Sharon Berman, a collector of art and pre-owned jewelry, became intrigued by the intense interest in jewelry that many of her fellow collectors showed at conferences and events. So in October 2018, she began “Jewelry Journey,” a self-funded podcast series of profiles. (She also was founder of Berbay Marketing & Public Relations, a company she sold in January 2022.)

As of mid-November, Ms. Berman, 66, had hosted 211 episodes, most about 30 minutes long. Many were two-part programs as, she said, they attract more listeners and provide more time to “really start digging into why somebody became a jeweler, or what keeps them creative.” (When she does a two-parter, the first segment publishes on Tuesday, and the second on Thursday or Friday.)

“I only pick things that I think the audience will find interesting,” she said, such as the jewelry career of Cameron Silver, founder of the vintage couture boutique Decades in Los Angeles and the fashion director at Halston. In his episode, he told Ms. Berman that he “was probably interested in jewelry before fashion,” as “my great-grandparents were in the diamond business in Chicago so it’s probably in my DNA.”

Once Ms. Berman completes a video interview at her home office in Santa Monica, she sends the file to her stepdaughter, Aleah Kramer, 36, a photographer in Los Angeles. Ms. Kramer edits the episode and uploads each audio file to podcast platforms such as Libsyn for Google Play and Stitcher and to the social media scheduler Later, for Instagram, Facebook and X, formerly called Twitter.

In addition to the podcasts, Ms. Berman posts bonus elements such as photographs and episode transcripts on the “Jewelry Journey” website. It also has a prompt that asks visitors to suggest future guests as, she said, “there are a lot of people out there I don’t know.”

“To spice it up,” Ms. Berman said, she now is considering requiring subscriptions so, for “the juicier stuff, you pay for it.”

“The Jewelry Podcast”

Stockholm

Even though there are only 14 episodes of “The Jewelry Podcast” — no new ones have been released since September 2021 — it still seems to have word-of-mouth momentum. There were five free downloads on Nov. 7 and 283 during the previous 30 days, according to Acast, the podcast’s distribution platform.

The episodes are translations of the Swedish-language podcast Smyckespodden (pronounced SMEE-kes-podden), founded in January 2021 by Cecilia Kores, the designer and chief executive of the fine jewelry brand Mumbaistockholm. And while she said she intends to do more English language episodes, she currently is concentrating on the Swedish version.

Its name “is a combination of the word ‘Smycken,’ which means jewelry in Swedish, and ‘podden,’ which means ‘the podcast’,” Ms. Kores, 34, wrote in a text message. She had said during an earlier video interview that the podcast was meant to help people build a fine jewelry collection in a fun, democratic way, as “you normally talk about fashion or clothes or sports.”

Topics of the episodes, which generally run 60 to 90 minutes, have included what to do with an old engagement ring and how to avoid what Ms. Kores called the seven sins of shopping, including: “Don’t get tunnel vision and get caught up on your specifications list because then you might miss all other beautiful stones out there.”

And, as of early November, the Swedish podcast had a total of 48,829 downloads, according to the podcast support business Acast.

Every other Friday Ms. Kores records a new episode in Stockholm at the recording studio of the financial news organization Finwire, paying 2,500 Swedish kronor ($235) for recording and editing. She then uploads the audio file to Acast, which distributes her podcast to international and Swedish platforms like Apple Podcast, Poddtoppen and Podtail.

Developing the Swedish podcast is a priority, Ms. Kores said, noting that she recently began a weekly series of 10- to 15-minute episodes on themes such as pearls.

“BAJ Podcast”

London

Artificial Intelligence, sustainability and “smart” jewelry have been just some of the themes of the newsy “BAJ Podcast,” the voice of the British Academy of Jewellery, a not-for-profit social enterprise with campuses in London, Birmingham, Sheffield, Nottingham and Leicester.

As of early November, the podcast has issued 52 episodes and tallied 13,100 downloads since its founding in April 2020 by Sofie Boons. She was the academy’s principal until 2019, and now, is the podcast’s host, a member of its board and working on a doctorate specializing in man-made crystals at the University of the West of England in Bristol, known as UWE Bristol.

Ms. Boons edits her own sound files at her home office in Bristol, and then the academy posts them on Fridays to the hosting platform Podbean, which automatically sends them to its website, Amazon and TuneIn, among other platforms. (Ms. Boons said she learned about sound and video editing in 2011-2013 while studying for a Master of Arts in gold smithing, silver smithing, metalwork and jewelry at the Royal College of Art in London. )

The podcasts, ranging from 20 minutes to more than an hour, offer conversations with academy tutors, artisans and jewelry specialists. In November 2022, for example, Tianne-Louise Simmons, an academy graduate, told Ms. Boons what it was like to compete last year in the second (and final) season of the BBC’s jewelry show, “All That Glitters.”

And in October, Rachel Church, an academy lecturer and a former jewelry curator at the Victoria & Albert museum, talked with Ms. Boons about the role of a curator.

“You might be typing up lists or ticking things off in a store or crawling around on your hands and knees, finding out why the light in the case isn’t coming on and how to get it fixed before the museum opens at 10 a.m.,” she said on the podcast.