INDUSTRY MATTERS: The CMJ show jumper hitting the ground running
As a fresh-faced 19 year-old working with dressage horses, Patrick Turner would have accused me of being on Planet Zog if I’d have told him that he’d end up being managing director of the Company of Master Jewellers later in life. Although his equestrian days are behind him, Turner still has an insatiable appetite for jumping over hurdles that lie between him and the progress that he wants to achieve. He spoke with Watch Insider’s Daniel Malins about his vision for the future of the buying group, and more broadly about the necessity of reforming to preserve.
Watch Insider: What roads led to you becoming managing director of the Company of Master Jewellers? What made you want to apply for the job and why did you think you were well suited to it?
Patrick Turner: My background’s quite eclectic, and specifically so for the industry we’re in. You normally find people in this industry have been in it for a number of years, but my journey began in something completely different. I ran a competition yard with show jumpers, event horses, and dressage horses back in the day. I was only 19 at the time, and I ran that for about a year and a half. It involved a lot of high value horses, a lot of different customers, and some quite high value stakeholders as well.
What I was naive about in running my first business was the contracts that you needed in place if you started to do quite well. The owner of the yard where I was running this from saw that I was doing quite well with it and decided he could do it himself. So, I was kind of left in a limbo.
One of the owners of the horses I was looking after worked in print and asked me along for a week just to earn a bit of money at the time. I think I was 20, 21, and I ended up working in trade print for seven years. It was predominantly leafleting, small catalogues, but it was in a company that was very traditional. I had two big lithographic printers, but no digital presence — no internet, no email, no nothing. So, I built up a whole pre-press and post-press department there, self-taught graphic design to an okay level, but I mainly focused on customers incoming and the management of the projects after that.
I did that for about seven years before I decided with two business partners to open up a tack shop, which is an equestrian shop selling everything from bridles to clothes that you might wear for riding. That went very well for a couple of years, before we had to decide what we were going to do with it — business rates increased dramatically, we probably didn’t open it up in the best position. My role there was primarily to brand and advertise. We were breaking even but not making any drastic money, and one of the business partners decided to pull the plug. We moved that business into a franchise model that was taken on by a big farm shop and we walked away with very little loss.
I did a few sort of odd bits there [at the farm shop] — project management and things — but I was still involved in horses; I was riding and competing myself. I met the then brand manager of Longines — she had a role as a visual merchandiser and trainer. I didn’t know what I wanted to do next, but she gave me the opportunity. I’d never worked in watches or jewellery or anything like that, but she saw something in me. I went and had the interview, got the job, and that was the start of my journey in jewellery and watches.
I worked at the Swatch Group for two years, redesigned their training programme for Longines, because although it wasn’t horrific, it was death by PowerPoint! I redid all of that and got a lot of my first initial contacts in the industry, working across the south of the UK and then into Ireland as well. So, a fair amount of travelling, working with different Irish retailers from Matthew Stephens to Bannons — some quite high-profile retailers. But I wanted to get into the sales side, and at the time in Swatch Group, the brands you really wanted to work with were either Longines or Rado or Omega, and no salespeople were leaving any time soon. It was extremely rare for anyone in those roles to leave their post at that time.
So, I looked for a sales role, and one came up on LinkedIn for Thomas Sabo — I was a fan of the brand beforehand, particularly their gent’s jewellery or unisex jewellery side. I got the role there, where I worked for almost seven years as an area sales manager. Again, looking after a number of retailers in the UK and Ireland, some of the national accounts: John Lewis, Fenwick. That’s when I started getting more aware of the CMJ, and CMJ retailers in particular. One of those was Jason Allum, who put me forward as a potential for the director of membership development at the time. That was about two and a half years ago. I met with the then MD and took on the role of director of membership development. The role primarily was to bring in new retailers, which we did quite successfully with Ireland, and then we were expanding on what we could do in the UK.
We have an elected board of retailers, and they’re there to guide me and the team and make sure I am making the right decisions.”
The tricky thing about the CMJ is that we have a high level of due diligence. There’s a level of retailer you had to be to join the CMJ, and that’s to protect both the relationship with our suppliers, but also the level of retailer that we’d like to network. But it also meant that area exclusivity became quite an issue. So, trying to find good retailers who wouldn’t impact on members we already had became challenging, and so over that period I worked quite closely with the team to focus on what the value proposition of the CMJ was for both suppliers and retailers.
About two years ago now, the then MD left for a number of reasons, and we had a gap for a period of time. The board were quite careful in selecting who the next person to be MD was. I think they wanted to make sure it was a long-term hire, and that they understood what the CMJ was and what it could be. I think there was a period, especially after Covid, where contact and engagement with members — whether that’s suppliers or retailers — had weakened. We still had these massive shows that we were doing, but the engagement with those had weakened as well. It was about getting the CMJ back to a buoyant position that the members valued. So, I had about six months in an interim role. I primarily looked after the e-comms team, and in that period, I defined with my team what I felt the CMJ should be doing. We brought in a new initiative, which was ‘Access’ — the third day to our spring show — and then there was a strict interview process for the MD role.
I say to everyone, if it had been this time last year and they’d gone straight into an interview process, I probably wouldn’t have put myself forward. But in that interim period, I decided that this is what I wanted to do and I felt like I could bring a lot to the table. So, thankfully, they picked me. I think they picked me because of the work I’d already done with the CMJ, with the direction we’d started to turn it and the success of a couple of big shows — whether I was heavily involved or not, that was under my direction. I guess they thought out of everyone they’d seen — and I know they would have been a high calibre of people — that I was meeting the expectations and the priorities of the board. So, happily, I took the role on in November, and five months down the line things seem to be going in the right direction, and this really is a long-term project for me.
WI: Is it normal historically for the CMJ to hire people to be at the top who’ve gone through the churn of the industry and had multiple ‘real’ jobs? Or does it tend to be internal appointments who’ve generally only ever known a life working at a buying group or an industry body, for instance.
PT: If you’d said to me 20 years ago, “where do you see yourself in the future?” it [being CMJ MD] certainly wouldn’t have been the answer. With anything sales-driven, there’s always an element where it’s like: “Am I doing the right thing in selling this? How do I feel selling this? Am I behind the product?” I certainly had that element at Thomas Sabo, where you’re introducing a new collection: “Is this the right thing to be to be introducing to the customer?”
What I found in doing all that is the ability to work with the retailer rather than against them. Even when you were introducing a new product, it made it on their terms: “Are we going to take a punt on this together? Is this the right product for you?” And really working with them to identify that. That tied in with what the CMJ was trying to do — finding the right thing to support their business.
Ultimately, you could be a salesman that goes into the business, sells a load of rubbish and moves on to the next job, and that’s never something I wanted to be. Rather than what I did before aligning with the role, it’s what I was doing that made the role align with me. That experience in other industries gives a fresh pair of eyes on anything you’re doing. I think sometimes when you’ve been through just a step by step to the role, you haven’t got the experience elsewhere to bring to the table. That’s where I found I differed and brought a different look. But also, for me, there’s that creative background, which is problem solving, identifying new initiatives, and really thinking about how everything is run. I think that’s what touched with the board particularly, and maybe in the past I wouldn’t have been the right fit.
WI: Is there a part of you that feels like your passion and care in sales is partly what got you the job, but now that you’re in the hot seat you ironically might find yourself not doing much of the very thing that you love doing and that you’re good at? Is there a bit of a trade-off there?
PT: There’s an element of it, but there’s still sales involved. It’s more of a twist on what I’ve had to do — you’re selling bigger projects and I’ve got a board that I’ve got to answer to, a membership I’ve got to answer to, I’ve got suppliers that I need to answer to. So, that sales thing will be there the whole time because I’ll have to get their trust on my side that I’m doing the right job. And, ultimately, that’s what’s going to happen for the first few years, is to really convince them that I am doing the right thing. It’s not convincing them to hoodwink them, but it’s really to sell that this is the right thing for the CMJ, because it’s a very traditional company.
A lot of what we’re going to be bringing over the next few months is probably not necessarily going to be unexpected, but it’s going to be new and there will be change. Ultimately, you need to sell that to the membership as the right thing to do, moving forward. So, there’s always going to be that sales element.
I think the toughest thing for me is trying to let go of those reins a little bit, and the only way I can do that is to build a team around me that I trust. I want them to be autonomous in their role. We’re a small team and we’ve got big things that we want to deliver; I’m struggling with that a bit, but that will just take a little bit of time.
WI: If you strip it back, what do the members want from you? What is the CMJ for? What does success look like? Is that changing? Would your answer two years ago be different to your answer now?
PT: The principle hasn’t changed, as far as I’m concerned, and I’m quite happy to stand by that. The CMJ was founded in the 1980s simply to support independent jewellers in the UK. The biggest challenge at that time would have been multiples and the national stores. The main principle was to support them with marketing and to support them with better terms. By grouping together, they could bring their individual powers together and therefore demand better terms. That principle, in essence, hasn’t changed — the market has.
Back then it would have been the nationals, it would have been catalogue ordering — that’s what we were up against. Catalogues have turned into the internet, and the nationals continue to be a dominating force. But independent jewellers still make up around 70%–80% of jewellers in the UK and Ireland. So, it’s still a dominant force, but it is, as always, under threat, and particularly on the high street, with bricks and mortar stores and the challenges that they have.
I have been involved in the CMJ for more than two and a half years, and I think a lot of things that have been done have been done in the right way, and that’s great, and we can learn a lot from that. But even when they’ve been done in the wrong way, there are elements that we can take that we can look at and reformat and bring back to the CMJ — much like regional meetings — which had a pin put in them for a number of years. For me, looking forward, it still maintains the principle: how do we support that? But now it’s about engagement, it’s about how we show our members and how we show the wider industry that the CMJ is still a relevant group within the industry. We’ve got a lot of characters, a lot of passionate members, and that’s a good thing because it shows you the real value of the CMJ. The biggest challenge moving forward, and also what I want to show the membership, is the reason to be a member, the reason to remain a member, and the reason if you’re not a member that you may want to be a member. There are three different avenues that we’ve got to touch on, but for me it’s about that message and how we go about doing that.
I’m very conscious in this role to not promise the world and be very transparent about what we’re trying to do.”
We’ve got a few things happening over the next few months, but it will all lead back to that point so any retailer, hopefully within the CMJ, can turn around to me or to anyone else and essentially say being a member of the CMJ means this, this, and this: it’s the value that it gives us, and it amplifies anything that we do as an independent business that we wouldn’t otherwise get elsewhere.
WI: I’ve always felt with a company like the CMJ that there was an element of you being damned if you do and damned if you don’t. You recently announced your internal awards and you launched Access in March, for instance. If you didn’t do these types of things, members would say: “They’re resting on their laurels — what are we paying our membership for? But when you do start doing them, some might say: “They’re wasting our money!” It’s such a hard task to please all the people all the time.
PT: I stood up in front of the membership at the show back in March and I said to them that our biggest asset and one of our biggest strengths is the eclectic range of retailers we have. It’s also the biggest challenge, because how do you build something that is going to fit all of those different types of businesses? How do you build something that’s going to be relatable to all of them?
We’re in a period of transition over the next few months, and I think it’s quite difficult on the whole. I do try to do it on an individual basis and have those conversations with retailers who are particularly vocal about where they want the CMJ to be or what they feel like it should be. I want more of that because I can shape things around that. It’s when people keep quiet and don’t say anything, I go: have we done something really bad here or is everything okay? And I don’t like that, so for me it’s about making sure that we’ve always got that feedback loop from our membership and our suppliers so that we can pivot if we need to change things.
I do, on the whole, try and consult as many people as I can on certain projects, but there’s that element where we do have an elected board of retailers, and they’re there to guide me and the team and make sure I am making the right decisions. You’ve got these great businesses as part of the board who are telling you whether you’re right or wrong, and they’ll be vocal about what you’re doing. So, I’ve always got that support and obviously the support of the head office team. But ultimately, you’re never going to please everyone all the time. I think in the grand scheme of things, most people are happy with it, certainly on the supplier side.
We have a platform that supports the industry now. For me, it’s about what can we give back, not just for CMJ members — they are the priority — but what can we give back to the industry that therefore lets people in as well. It’s very cyclical in everything we’re doing, but maybe from a membership point of view it’s not always that clear, but I’m quite happy to sit down with a member and go: this is what we’re doing, and this is why we’re doing it. Transparency and engagement are the priorities for us over the next few months.
WI: Let’s just dwell for a second on Access, which involved opening up doors to any independent jeweller in the UK and Ireland. Did I sense from what you were saying that maybe there was a bit of pushback from the retail members because of this?
PT: The CMJ event has always been an exclusive event for our members, but the realities of the pressure of commercially putting on an event like that, but also the pressure on our suppliers to continue to do that, meant that our own event was under threat. It was a game of cat and mouse as to who would move first. Would it be the suppliers leave us because they felt there were better options for them out there and therefore we wouldn’t hold on to that platform, or was it the other way around? Was it us going: “How can we commercially make this a better venue for our members?” And the reality is we need to cover our costs on these events. We don’t see it as a huge profit driver, but we can’t lose money on something that is so important for our members.
We introduced ‘CMJ Pay’ and that increased the number of retailers that attended, which meant that it was a better show all round. But there’s a ceiling to that with our membership, and I think hopefully there’s a bit of understanding with that, in terms of the suppliers seeing the same retailers over and over again. We’ve created a nice platform for them to engage twice a year, but really what we wanted to do was make it a really valuable proposition for our suppliers, so they choose our show so that we could continue to put on this event for our own members.
The other side of that is our suppliers feel like we’re supporting them in a different way without asking too much more of them, but also it is undoubtedly a pipeline to new members as well. So, for any of those attending on the third day, it could be that they see the benefit of the CMJ, or they see the kind of things we can put on and go: “Maybe this is something we’re looking at.” Hopefully for those who are frustrated by it, I’ll have that conversation with them individually, and have on a number of occasions. I think the value will be shown over the next couple of years as to how this event can support the CMJ members alone, not just the wider industry.
WI: I think all buying groups suffer from situations where you play a part in helping elevate a new brand that might be new, but when they get to a certain scale they can decide that you’ve served your purpose and that they’ve outgrown you.
PT: Access does create a new commercial platform that is of interest to them. They’re getting access to this group of members, which we’ve spent a lot of time making sure that you need to be a certain level of retailer to be part of the CMJ. They get access to that as part of the CMJ show, and then to add on an additional day where potentially they can do new business and there’s no real strings attached to it other than a small investment for the third day, I think it makes sense for them. We’re in competition with a lot of other shows in the UK and Europe. So, if we want to keep doing it for the CMJ members, we had to think differently about what that might look like.
WI: What’s the mood out there at the moment? Are there one or two common questions or issues that are coming up? And how does CMJ try and help with those issues?
PT: There’s no illusion on the number of issues facing our members at the moment, whether you’re talking metal prices, minimum wage, business rates — every single thing you could think that would be a threat to our members is a threat. There’s a halo effect on that: it affects our suppliers, it affects all the other supply chains involved, the service providers, everything. But what we’re fully aware of is that we — the head office — are not the experts at CMJ. We have a board of retailers that we would lean on for more expertise, but the reality is they are the experts. So, what we try to do is link their expertise together and understand them individually on what those challenges are, how they solved them or are looking at solving them, or is there a common challenge that they want us to investigate.
This is about listening to what the common problems are and controlling what we can control, because we can’t control the price of metals, we can’t control business rates. There’s a bigger piece in the industry which we’d look to collaborate with other bodies on to battle more government policies to support the industry.
But really, it’s about focusing on the positives, focusing on what has worked, what we can continue to educate our members about, what the challenges on the high street are that other industries are doing well at battling that we can bring into our own industry.
Over the next few months, we’re spending a lot of time really reviewing what our members are asking for, but also what they’re not necessarily asking for yet, but we know could be really beneficial to them. It’s about looking through their eyes, listening to them. You could have one business in the south of England who’s having trouble with marketing, they can’t get their head around social media, and we can connect them with another business in, say, Northern Ireland, who absolutely smashes it on social media. It’s about using our network and focusing on the individuals in it who have the expertise so that we can support individuals who are struggling. There’s not one business in our membership that has all the answers. There are great performing businesses and some who are struggling, but not any single one of them will have all the answers, and that’s where we can really focus on the network and creating those platforms.
WI: What are the mistakes or strokes of genius that crop up over and over again among your members? Are there patterns of behaviour that are easy to pigeonhole as ‘good’ or ‘bad?’
PT: From a customer point of view, and whether that’s with retailers to the end consumer or whether it’s a wholesale partner to the retailer, I’d always be wary of over-promising and under-delivering. I think you can see that clearly on a retail level when things start to fall apart when they’re not meeting their customers’ needs or demands. I’m very conscious of that, particularly in this role as well, to not promise the world and be very transparent about what we’re trying to do. Hopefully what I’m seen to be doing, what the team is seen to be doing, and what the membership is seen to be doing, are with the right frame of mind and the right moral compass that people can get behind.
It’s a tricky one because where things go wrong normally is not having the foresight of how quickly things can change, particularly in this industry. We’re very conscious of the shift in digital technology. I’m not going to bang the drum of AI — I think it has as many good qualities as it does bad qualities. Ultimately, for our retailers, if you stick to the principle of service and providing good service and having the right product, you’re not going to go far wrong.
WI: What was the thinking behind the CMJ Awards?
PT: It’s about celebrating our membership and the individuality. I think if you’ve looked at the awards titles, you’d see that it’s not your average awards event. It really focuses on the individuality of our members, and we’re rewarding the collaboration and the supply chain.
I would say probably 80% of our categories are both for suppliers and retailers, because,
at the end of the day, this is the ecosystem of the CMJ, and we want to celebrate both of those. So, it really is an opportunity, and given we do something on that Sunday evening anyway, it felt like a good time to reward our membership as a whole. I think it really puts some of our members on a platform that they should be on and shows the rest of the membership best practice. It’s a bit of benchmarking and it’s something to look forward to. It quite simply is about engagement and really working with our membership to identify who’s doing what well.
WI: If we fast forwarded a few decades to when you’re receiving your golden handshake, what would you like your legacy to look like? Would you like to have been known as the ultimate steady hand or would you like to be remembered for having been a bit of a revolutionary? Or somewhere in between?
PT: Definitely somewhere in between. I’m not going to say we’re not going to do anything revolutionary over the next few years, but the framework of the CMJ is there and it’s more about how we reinforce that or how we fast forward that for the long-term. A big piece that we’re looking at is focusing on the next generation of retail and the next generation of retailers. A lot of our members are legacy businesses. So, how do we make sure that they’re still here in 50, 60, 70 years’ time? For me, it’s about establishing the next generation of legacy businesses who are still going to be there on the high street. If I can be a small part of that, and some of those businesses can turn around in 20 years’ time and say: “I may not be here if it wasn’t for Patrick and the team or the CMJ,” then as far as I’m concerned I’ve done my job well.
This article first appeared in the May 2026 edition of Watch Insider.
