WSO Podcast: Sophie Kahn and Bouchra Ezzahraoui (AUrate New York): Disrupting the jewelry business

Some quotes with timestamps:

4:35 – Essentially we’re trying to democratize fine jewelry. Bouchra and I were in the corporate world with good salaries and we couldn’t afford real gold… that’s the start of AUrate. It’s where you can find real gold at honest prices. Made locally – so we make everything in New York. It’s ethically sourced. We give back. We give a book to a child in need for every piece that we sell.

10:26 – We started it on the side. So not as a lot of entrepreneurs, I guess, do – kind of quitting everything and going for it. We went for it for sure. But it was on the nights, on the weekends – just to see if we were crazy or not. We had no experience in jewelry. No experience in entrepreneurship, so it was very organic in that sense too… born out of our own needs.

17:48 – It’s funny because I used to be a trader – trading derivatives. And selling fine jewelry was so orthogonal to what I was doing in the past. There was no conflict of interest whatsoever. As long as I was doing my job properly on a daily basis. It’s quantified by my P&L, so it’s very easy to see if I’m slacking in terms of P&L or not. There’s a number at the end of the day. My team [at Goldman Sachs] was totally fine with it. I remember our first launch party with AUrate – I invited all these Goldman people who were there and they were actually proud. If anything, they found it very cool and atypical that someone in the team was just doing something creative.

28:53 – There is no right time for you to make the jump, quite frankly. I think that a lot of people are afraid of taking risk… You make mistakes. It’s okay to make mistakes. You actually learn from them and turn out so much better… it’s okay to fail. I really think that it is okay to fail.