Anne Vedder woke up this morning to fifteen text messages from twin sister Esther. Just after midnight, he thought that things could be a bit more ambitious with that sales target for this year, and immediately started calculating. Luckily Anne had her phone on silent, otherwise they would have been booing each other all night. Because the founders of jewelry line Vedder & Vedder not only shared the same egg, but also share the same attitude: ‘Once we want something, we have to do it right away or yesterday.’
That attitude has done them no harm. At 33, the twins are at the head of a jewelry brand that will have a turnover of almost 8 million in 2021. If they are not in Los Angeles or Dubai for business, then in their spacious office in Amsterdam-East, which is located in Amsterdam East. with its marble tables, pastel walls and oat lattes in mugs seems to have run away from an Instagram feed. Just like the 65 woman in staff, by the way. This fall, the Nijkerk sisters even had their own Videoland series: Twins of Gold.
At one of those shiny tables, the twins routinely tell about their origins, occasionally drowned out by the thump of a hammer from the indoor studio. It all started with their mother, who used to give jewelry making workshops. Esther and Anne went with her on the weekends to sort the beads for five euros an hour. When they went to study (communication science, because Anne was ‘out of control’ and Esther was chosen by lot for medicine) they also started giving workshops to their student association, especially so as not to have to stand behind the cash register or bar.
Engrave handwriting
The plan for their own business became more serious after the twins finished college. They thought the ‘standard’ gold necklace their mother gave them for their graduation could be a bit more personal. ‘My mother had very beautiful handwriting, so we thought: what if we had her handwriting engraved on a pendant?’, says Esther. It turned out not to be possible. So the twins decided to try it themselves. Successfully. ‘We received so many reactions to it that we thought: we should do something with this.’
That ‘what’ became a line of personalized jewelry, now available in variants with gold initials, handwritten texts, engraved fingerprints and galaxies. Anne gave up her student room and went to live with Esther. With the money they saved, they rented an office. ‘For you mindset it’s better to have a workplace and not sit at the kitchen table in your pajamas’, says Anne. “So we went to the office at eight o’clock every morning. Dressed well, because that’s what you would do for a boss.’
Success did not come by itself. The sisters had scraped together their last student grant and borrowed 10 thousand euros from a family friend to pay for an engraving machine. It turned out not to be a fat pot. They quickly had to fire the hired intern because they could no longer afford her lunch. ‘We thought that the orders would come in automatically when the webshop went online,’ says Esther. “Well, we launched it and nothing happened for days.” Until Anne saw the first traffic on the site she built using YouTube tutorials. ‘I yelled, ‘Es, Es, there’s someone online!’
Anna Drijver
Call it luck, wisdom or, like the twins, ‘manifestation’ (the newfangled belief that everything comes your way for a reason), but when they founded Vedder & Vedder, Instagram was booming in the Netherlands. The twins had never heard of ‘influencer marketing’, but they were already putting it into practice. “At one point we were at a Vogue party drinking gin tonics and said to each other: we will address the first celebrity who comes in now,” says Anne. “So that was Anna Drijver.”
The actress thought such a personalized piece of jewelry was “a super cool idea” and wanted one with the name of her turtle. After Drijver, Chantal Janzen followed, to whom the sisters sent a necklace with the name of her son. When the presenter shared it in an Instagram story, Carice van Houten suddenly hung up on the line. She also wanted such a necklace, also with the name of her son, but in her husband’s handwriting. ‘Then the snowball started rolling, the number of followers on our Instagram grew enormously.’
Los Angeles
The twins decided to give two pieces of jewelry each month to a carefully chosen celebrity. Each gift was provided with a card that they really didn’t expect anything in return, with a reference to their Instagram page underneath of course. Thanks to Kathleen from K3, they crossed the border for the first time. Until they were suddenly in Los Angeles last spring, with top model Chrissy Teigen. They were suddenly there, in the house of her and pop star John Legend.
If you ask about their dreams, words like ‘world domination’, ‘America’, ‘Asia’ and ‘Jennifer Lopez’ are mentioned. In any case, not a hair on their carefully groomed heads thinks about listening to the advice their mother always gives when they visit Nijkerk. ‘She always says: you have to work less, otherwise you will never find a happy relationship’, Anne laughs. “But we just never think: I’m already there. But always: shit, we still have so much to do.”
- Since: 2016
- Located: Amsterdam
- Employees: 65
- Annual turnover: almost 8 million euros