Posted by Bec Astley Clarke, Founder and Chairman, Astley Clarke

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to enable new, better ways of working in their organisations. Today, we hear from Bec Astley Clarke, Founder and Chairman of Astley Clarke, a leading luxury jewelry brand born and bred in London.

I started Astley Clarke seven years ago with a team of three people working from my flat. We designed the website from my kitchen table, photographed products in my living room, and even stored the actual necklaces and bracelets in a safe under my bed. Today, we have a team of 40 spread across London, Paris, Scotland and the U.S. We’ve built a successful online luxury brand by embracing the latest in technology, using tools like Google Apps for Work along the way to improve our creative process, communicate face-to-face, and build strong relationships with our extended team of global suppliers and vendors.

We started using Google Apps at the start of 2012, adopting Gmail, Docs, Drive and Hangouts and quickly making them a part of our daily operations. Since then, the tools have become a natural part of our creative process from scratch to sale. Now, we develop our jewelry faster by sharing concept sketches, images of gemstones and prototype photographs through Google Drive. We create and execute marketing campaigns more efficiently by meeting via Google Hangouts from our mobile phones and laptops. With Hangouts, our creative director in London, our graphic designer in Paris and our web developer in Scotland can all view the latest marketing collateral, discuss their feedback on the spot, and quickly make decisions — like which images we’ll use to showcase our Biography Collection on the website.



Because we make fine jewelry, it’s important to check in face-to-face to visualize how a product is developing and assure our brand is displayed consistently in retail locations. Hangouts help us understand the details of one another’s feedback so we can ensure a bracelet, necklace or ring looks exactly how our designer envisioned it at all stages of development. Our creative director also uses Hangouts to check in with suppliers across the world — something she used to do painstakingly via fax machine.

We have a big vision: to build a new kind of luxury brand on an international scale. Google Apps helps us work better internally as well as externally, with our suppliers and vendors, to bring the best in fine jewelry to customers around the world. It’s become natural to share large photo files internationally, edit the same document at the same time, and book meetings with people overseas in the middle of the night. It’s an organic process that fits our creative flow.