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Manufacturing and marketing in-demand high-end accessories

Rick Rose is the co-CEO of Roseark, a lifestyle and high-end jewelry brand and boutique. Headquartered in Los Angeles, Roseark sells the work of over 200 designers, including Jill Hoffmeister, Karma El Khalil, and Yakira Rona. Rick started the company with Kathy Rose in 2001, and its accessories have won acclaim from many of Hollywood’s prominent celebrities. Rick is also an actor, director, producer, and writer. Last year, the company launched the Roseark Showroom.

What’s your long-term vision for Roseark?

RICK ROSE: The longer term vision that I have for this company is a work in progress. It was when I got in full time; it was kind of a ten-year outlook. We signed a ten-year lease so with the retail—right there, automatically, you’re locked into a brick-and-mortar for ten. Through that time, we’ve progressed from being more of a strictly retail experience with the e-commerce component into now, with the showroom, expanding our purview, and then the next step is obviously into HQ. It’s taking all this experience in those markets, moving it into this tech component and then pushing it a little further long-term.

Have you looked into expanding elsewhere?

We’ve looked into doing additional retail locations. We’ve had multiple stores at different times. It’s never quite worked out. We had a deal going in Vegas. We’ve looked at opening in New York multiple times. It really ends up being about the focus. Because, essentially there are two of us who are running this business. We both have families, and so you really want to look at how thin you want to spread yourself, and more so where you can really focus your best energy. Any time that we’ve looked at expanding to multiple stores, there’s less time, less devotion to a singular effort. When we have had multiple stores, and the moment that we close that store you see a surge back and then you move into something new. So the wholesale side or the showroom side is definitely something has spawned from that.

We’ve come out of negotiating a lease in New York, and it fell out, at which point I said, “Forget it, let’s stay at home and focus at home,” rather than going every other week to New York and spending the time on a plane and doing everything else that that would entail. I think with touching each piece of this—we design jewelry, we’re on the showroom side, we’re representing brands to the world through our branding efforts, we’re furthering the brand expansion of designers of lines through our retail side—we’re obviously presenting something to the marketplace, to the direct consumer, that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. I think our brand is really about experience. It’s about a complete experience. And for me, stepping into the e-commerce was a big thing when we first had our first site in 2004, and trying to take our brand to world, furthering this singular location—the singular brick-and-mortar space in Los Angeles, and pushing that out so that anybody on this planet can look at it—the development of that forward to me has moved into this point of sales system, because in retail we try to find our niche, which was to do something better than anyone else is doing. On the showroom side, it’s taking these brands and getting them into stores that they wouldn’t necessarily be able to get into, and likewise into the point of sale, which is taking platforms that currently exist, which are typically developed by web developers or systems developers—they’re not necessarily developed by people who are in the market. And so taking that experience and really pushing it into something that will enable business owners who own brick-and-mortars, who have strictly e-commerce, or who have both. That’s more what we try to do: further experiences and find ways to do things better.

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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