How Helzberg Diamonds Achieved Digital Transformation — and Boosted Ecommerce Results

If you’ve ever lost half a day chasing down product images buried in Dropbox folders, spreadsheets, or someone else’s inbox from 2021, you might want to read on.

At the 2025 Digital Shelf Summit (DSS), Helzberg Diamonds shared how they overhauled their outdated, fragmented content operations into something actually usable, while achieving some impressive results in the process.

The session, “A Cut Above: Helzberg’s Journey to Brand & Ecommerce Excellence,” featured Jackie Arlotti, divisional VP of ecommerce at Helzberg, Brian Kavanaugh, former director of global revenue marketing at Bynder, and Benjamin Gournay, managing partner at Gournay Consulting, and offered a blunt look at how a legacy retailer with 160 stores and more than 10,000 products online got serious about digital transformation.

Below, we’ve captured the most useful lessons from their journey — from the operational mess that nearly stalled their ecommerce growth to the concrete results of streamlining content delivery across teams and channels.

Before the Fix: Disorganized Content Was Holding Helzberg Back

Before 2022, Helzberg Diamonds lacked a formal tech stack, leaving their marketing team reliant on scattered images, manual processes, and endless cross-department back-and-forth to get products live on the site.

Product images came from multiple sources — vendors, merchandising, marketing — and were stored in disconnected folders, emails, and spreadsheets. But with no shared taxonomy or version control, finding the right image (let alone the most up-to-date one) became a daily scavenger hunt. And the delays weren’t just frustrating — they were costly, especially around seasonal campaigns where speed and accuracy are everything.

“There was no real source of truth,” Arlotti says. “When you’re trying to strengthen your brand and get a beautiful product in front of the customer, it’s very hard if you’re storing images on networks and Dropbox.”

Centralizing Content Into an Anchored Ecosystem

After years of relying on scattered folders and inconsistent processes, Helzberg finally invested in a proper content ecosystem, anchored by a digital asset management (DAM) platform (Bynder) and a product information management (PIM) system (Salsify). More than just replacing outdated systems, the new layout gave Helzberg a clear, automated way to manage content from start to finish.

A Two-Way Flow for Data and Content

The key move was connecting both platforms with a bidirectional connector built by Gournay Consulting. That setup allows content and data to flow both ways:

• Images and assets move from DAM to PIM, complete with metadata
• Product info can also flow back to the DAM for use in other systems
• Teams can schedule syncs or push content manually as needed

The result? A single, searchable source of truth. Now, more than 180 users — including external vendors — can self-serve from a shared content hub. With over 80,000 assets in play, it completely transformed the way teams found and employed creative assets.

Additional Business Use Cases Drive Further Productivity and Efficiency

This shift didn’t just make internal operations smoother. It unlocked a number of critical use cases across the business:

• Product pages (PDPs)
• Media and ad content
• Seasonal campaign pivots
• Bridal storytelling
• Even customer care lookups using image search

Since making the changes, Arlotti says they’ve seen a 50% increase in productivity and efficiency.

Faster Launches, Better Results

With a structured content system finally in place, Helzberg wasn’t just more organized — they were faster. After the fourth quarter (Q4), their marketing team was able to pivot directly into Valentine’s Day campaigns with minimal friction and an ability to launch assets more quickly than ever before.

With everything tagged and searchable, teams got 30% more content live for seasonal campaigns, and site conversion rose by 4% as a result. And for a retailer that does the bulk of its volume in a handful of seasonal windows, that kind of turnaround speed is a big deal.

Search functions now go beyond file names. Teams can filter by product type, color, or campaign theme (think: “blue gemstone rings”) to build creative and marketing assets faster. Even customer care reps have started using the system to identify lost jewelry from customer photos — something that used to take days of internal email threads.

“We’re focused on acquisition, but retention matters too,” Arlotti says. “Now we can support both.”

Content Governance and Integration: Digital Transformation Growth Levers You Need to Pull

If your content pipeline is still held together by folders, spreadsheets, and “let me check with marketing,” you’re working harder than you need to — and probably leaving money on the table.

Helzberg’s story isn’t just about cleaning up workflows. It’s about what happens when your teams can move faster, launch smarter, and tell a consistent story across every channel. They didn’t just get more efficient — they converted more customers and responded to seasonal shifts without scrambling.

Content governance and integration aren’t just luxuries anymore — they’re growth levers. And if you’re not treating them like core customer experience priorities, you’re probably falling behind.