Today we’d like to introduce you to Carla Cavalcanti and Andrea Ocejo.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
We are two childhood friends that grew up in the sunny beaches of Key Biscayne. After high school, we both went our own ways, Carla moved to Los Angeles and Andrea stayed back in Miami. During this time, we each pursued our independent goals and struggled along the way to find our purpose, as everyone does. After many years, Carla decided it was time to move back to Miami to be close to friends and family. Upon Carla moving back, we reconnected deeply during the summer picking up right where we left off. We realized how much our lifestyles aligned with each other’s and being that we always wanted to create something of our own, we decided to come together and create our jewelry brand, LINK’D THE LABEL. Despite the difficulties of 2020, we were able to use this time to focus on building our business from the ground up. We worked together on everything from the development of the website to designing every piece in our collection.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Being a two-person has definitely had its pros and cons, but despite the challenges, we can both agree that it has been a pretty smooth journey so far. We have taken on all of the tasks and responsibilities of starting a small business including website developing, photography, product design, and marketing. It’s safe to say that it has been a huge learning experience for both of us and we continue to learn new things every day. One of our biggest struggles to this day has been establishing reliable partnerships with manufacturers that both aligned with our brand ethics and our quality standards. A main objective of our brand is to make sure that we can provide the highest quality materials which called for months of materials testing from different manufacturers until we found one that met our quality requirements.
As we continue to grow as a business, we know that more challenges will come our way but we will take each challenge as a learning opportunity. From both of our past work experiences, we each bring a set of skills that compliments one another’s helping us work in harmony as a team.
Link’D The Label – what should we know? What do you do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
LINK’D THE LABEL is a Latina owned jewelry brand that focuses on creating timeless, everyday styles without the traditional markups. We created LINK’D to bring together our personal desire for everyday luxury jewelry that was both fairly priced and consciously made while still aligning with our active lifestyles. We specialize in working with gold-filled materials because it offers the perfect balance between quality and value.
The fashion industry is the second largest pollutant in the world and we wanted to do our part as a brand to minimize our footprint. When doing our industry research, we learned that the average consumer wears a fast fashion piece about seven times before tossing it, which is why we choose to work only with the highest quality materials to create timeless styles that are designed to stand the test of time.
Major brands in our industry markup their products 8-10x the actual cost and we wanted to do things differently. At LINK’D, we prioritize transparent pricing because we want to make luxury jewelry accessible to everyone. All of our jewelry is handcrafted with the same or even better quality materials as other luxury jewelry brands but without the traditional price tag.
We are also working on developing a program in which our customers can mail in their jewelry pieces to be restored through a process of gold electroplating. This new layer of gold will get rid of most wear and tear giving their pieces a brand new look! By doing this, we eliminate the customers’ need to repurchase, saving them money and minimizing our footprint in the long run.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
One of our proudest moments so far would definitely be seeing all these months of behind the scene work come to life on launch day. As brand owners having your vision become a reality is an extremely exciting milestone to achieve. During the time of our launch, we hosted a small event to introduce LINK’D to friends and family and just being able to receive feedback and have people we care for interact with our brand is an extremely gratifying feeling.
Getting your small online business recognized can be difficult but through marketing and making use of social media platforms, we were offered an exciting opportunity to host our first pop-up shop which will be located inside of Brickell City Centre for an entire weekend starting December 18th. Being an online only business and not having a storefront location, it is a huge opportunity to make a name for ourselves within the local community and get to know some of our customers which we are very excited about!
Pricing:
- Rings range from $36- $50
- Earrings range from $18 – $64
- Bracelets range from $38 – $72
- Necklaces range from $42 – $164
- Sunglass Chains $58 – $136
- Mask Holders $58 – $136
Contact Info:
- Website: www.shoplinkd.com
- Email: shoplinkd@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shoplinkd/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shoplinkd
- Other: https://www.pinterest.com/linkdthelabel/_created/
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