How Vintage Jewellery Benefits from UGC | Case Study

 

This case study explores the results Vintage Jewellery has achieved through its partnership with Flowbox. Because every piece of jewellery they sell is unique, Vintage Jewellery cannot rely on traditional shoppable content. Instead, they have developed a UGC strategy that uses authentic content from customers and influencers as a powerful tool for building trust in the brand.

Over the past six months, Vintage Jewellery’s ten Flowbox flows have generated more than 61,000 impressions across multiple website touchpoints, creating a consistent and inspiring shopping experience at every stage of the customer journey.

A CTA engagement rate of 30% shows that almost one in three visitors actively engages with the gallery buy buttons, proving that this content goes beyond simply capturing attention and genuinely drives product discovery.

The Numbers

The Story

Since 1973, Vintage Jewellery has curated and restored unique jewellery, building a reputation as one of the most trusted destinations for vintage jewellery in the Netherlands. The brand has two boutiques — in Amsterdam and Bussum — as well as a webshop that ships throughout the Netherlands.

The brand’s two collections cater to different needs. The Vintage Collection consists of unique pieces with their own history, while the Atelier Collection offers new jewellery sustainably produced from recycled materials. In addition, the brand offers bespoke commissions, restoration services and bead-stringing workshops in store.

The Challenge

For Vintage Jewellery, selling high-value jewellery online brought specific challenges that most retailers don’t face. Since each piece in the collection is vintage or custom-made, it was difficult to generate the same level of trust online as with bulk products that other customers have purchased.

“As a brand, Vintage Jewellery sells relatively expensive jewellery. That’s why it’s so important for us to come across as trustworthy, since customers often place orders with us worth more than €500. Trust has always been our number one priority. On top of that, all our products are unique. That makes it difficult to sell jewellery through photos, because a lot of UGC images show products that have already sold.” Fleur Harteveld, Content Manager at Vintage Jewellery

Before finding a solution, Vintage Jewellery collected UGC manually — both online and offline. However, managing all that content quickly became a challenge. The team had to manage influencer content alongside customer UGC, track rights manually, and update the website.

“In the beginning, before Flowbox, we worked with several major influencers in the Netherlands. It was difficult to add that content to the website properly. We uploaded everything manually and occasionally swapped out a photo. That was quite a lot of work.” Fleur Harteveld, Content Manager at Vintage Jewellery

It became clear that a more structured solution was needed. Vintage Jewellery was looking for a platform that brought UGC, influencer content and rights management together in one place, without demanding extra time from the team.

The Solution

Vintage Jewellery decided to use customer content primarily as a source of inspiration and trust, rather than as a direct conversion driver.

Through Flowbox, the brand can showcase happy customers wearing jewellery similar to pieces in the current collection. This helps build potential customers’ confidence in Vintage Jewellery’s quality. Rather than building trust around a specific product, the focus is on building trust in the brand itself.

“By adding similar rings and showing inspirational imagery, people are inspired to have a bespoke ring made or to buy a similar piece of jewellery. On top of that, working with influencers and showing familiar faces has become an incredibly important way for us to build trust.” Fleur Harteveld, Content Manager at Vintage Jewellery

Since implementing this approach, the brand has seen a clear effect on website visitor behaviour.

“You can really see that customers get inspired through the Flowbox carousels and go on to explore further, developing their own style in vintage jewellery.” Fleur Harteveld, Content Manager at Vintage Jewellery

Automation that saves time

On a practical level, Flowbox has helped Vintage Jewellery automate a large part of the UGC management process. This allows the team to focus on other areas of the business.

“With Flowbox, everything now runs automatically, which is great. The only thing we need to do is approve content. Before, we had to update the blocks manually every week or every month.”

Fleur Harteveld, Content Manager at Vintage Jewellery

Rights management also created extra workload. Approaching creators individually to ask permission to share their content was a time-consuming process.

“It takes quite a lot of time when you have to ask people for permission via a DM or a comment to share their content on social media. That took a lot of time and effort, and now that process is simply much easier.”

Fleur Harteveld, Content Manager at Vintage Jewellery

For a growing business with a small team, this time-saving is especially valuable. It allows the team to focus on strategic work while Flowbox automates repetitive processes.

“Because we’re such a fast-growing company and are basically always short-staffed, it’s incredibly valuable that we can easily add content to the website without spending a lot of time on it. That’s why Flowbox is really valuable to us.”

Fleur Harteveld, Content Manager at Vintage Jewellery

Whitelisting influencers and long-term partnerships

Customer UGC is not the only source Vintage Jewellery uses. The brand also works with influencers through long-term partnerships, and uses Flowbox to manage those relationships and automate content rights. This means influencer content can appear alongside customer content in the carousels without any manual steps.

“We also use Flowbox a lot for influencer content. We have quite a few long-term partnerships, and I think Flowbox really helps with that. It makes it easy to add content because the rights for certain influencers are automatically accepted. On top of that, influencers really enjoy seeing themselves featured on our website.” Fleur Harteveld, Content Manager at Vintage Jewellery

Flowbox supports Vintage Jewellery’s content strategy at a scale that wouldn’t be manually achievable, through automatic content collection, rights management and whitelisting. This feature allows the brand to whitelist the usernames of influencers from long-term partnerships and distribute their content without having to request rights again each time.

“Flowbox helps with that because we’ve already accepted the rights for certain influencers, which means we can easily push their content through to the website. Because we work with long-term influencer partnerships, this is really one of the most important tools within the system for us. It means we can very easily place content we have the rights to directly into our flows and then distribute it across the website.”

Fleur Harteveld, Content Manager at Vintage Jewellery

Extending the lifespan and ROI of content

For any brand working with influencer content, the short lifespan of social content is a challenge. Posts drop down the feed, stories disappear entirely, and content quickly falls out of view. For Vintage Jewellery, this is especially true, since their content often features unique pieces of jewellery.

“We’ve really rolled it out widely across the whole website. Because we work with unique jewellery, content on its own often has a short shelf life. But by placing it on the website through Flowbox, it stays visible and relevant for much longer.”

Fleur Harteveld, Content Manager at Vintage Jewellery

With various flows spread across the website, Vintage Jewellery can show content to the right audience at the right moment. All content comes into one centralised library, allowing the team to review everything easily and route it to the right flow.

“Content that quickly fades into the background on social media stays visible for much longer through Flowbox. By occasionally placing older content back into the Homepage Flow, that content stays relevant. It also makes things more sustainable.”

Fleur Harteveld, Content Manager at Vintage Jewellery

By reusing and redistributing customer and influencer content through the flows, Vintage Jewellery has increased the ROI of paid partnerships and extended the lifespan of inspiring, authentic content.

Encouraging direct submissions from the community

Another important part of Vintage Jewellery’s strategy is the Media Uploader. Rather than waiting for customers to post content on social media themselves, the Media Uploader gives them a direct way to share it with the brand.

Vintage Jewellery promotes this option both online (via a button in the flows) and in-store (via a QR code). This strengthens the connection between online and offline, allowing every customer to easily share content regardless of where the purchase was made.

“The Media Uploader is really important to us and gets used a lot. It’s also great that we can automatically send messages to get in touch with customers. We used to do that manually and had to keep track ourselves of what we were allowed to share where, because we were sometimes allowed to repost certain content on social media but not on the website. Now all of that runs much more smoothly thanks to Flowbox’s automated system.” Fleur Harteveld, Content Manager at Vintage Jewellery

The Media Uploader has since become a central part of Vintage Jewellery’s full UGC workflow.

“For us, the Media Uploader is truly a fantastic solution. We’re incredibly happy with it. It makes it very easy for customers to add content, especially within different flows. For example, if we run a workshop, customers can upload their photo directly to the workshop flow. It’s also really handy that we can set influencer rights so content is automatically forwarded. Honestly, that’s one of the features we use the most.”

Fleur Harteveld, Content Manager at Vintage Jewellery

The Flowbox Experience