It was Day 2 of the Ambani wedding in July, and Julia Hackman Chafé, a social media influencer who works in her family’s wholesale gemstone business in New York City, was on the verge of blacking out — or at least she thought she was.
Ms. Chafé, 25, and her husband, Bruno Chafé, were in Mumbai, India, as the guests of Anant Ambani, the younger son of India’s richest man, and Radhika Merchant, his longtime girlfriend, who were marrying in a spectacle of wealth and celebrity that had captured the world’s attention.
But it wasn’t the heat or the crowds that had pushed Ms. Chafé to the edge. It was an unexpected meeting with Kim Kardashian, one of her idols, who also was at the wedding. According to the anecdote Ms. Chafé shared the following morning on her social channels, where she covers the intersection of jewelry and pop culture, the first thing Ms. Kardashian said to her after being introduced was, “‘Oh my God, I totally watch all of your stuff.’”
Weeks later, Ms. Chafé described the effects of the encounter on a video call from her office in Midtown Manhattan, where she manages social media content for Intercolor USA: “I couldn’t see straight after she said that. My tongue was falling out of my mouth. My eyeballs were no longer in my face.”
In her own mind, Ms. Chafé may have been incapacitated. On social media, however, she was on fire.
During her six days in Mumbai, Ms. Chafé — who had scored an invite through an Ambani family friend she knew on Instagram — nearly doubled her Instagram followers to 639,000 from a pre-Ambani level of 337,000. Across all of her platforms combined, including TikTok and YouTube, she now has nearly a million followers.
While Ms. Chafé said the spike was fueled by a slew of new followers in India, members of her growing fan base might attribute her popularity to Ms. Chafé’s personal mix of deadpan and hyperbolic style.
The jewelry designer Lorraine Schwartz, who had made the Chafé-Kardashian introductions, said Ms. Chafé’s genuineness was what set her apart from other social media personalities.
“The world of influencers who are all pay for play — I don’t find a lot of that authentic,” Ms. Schwartz said on a call last month from London, where she was traveling on a business trip from her home base of New York. “But I love Julia because she is. I want people to appreciate the fact that she’s talking about jewels in such a passionate and authentic way.”
Whether Ms. Chafé is speaking to followers while prepping a breakfast of fried eggs on toast, walking along a Manhattan street as she shares her jewelry “hot takes” (“Chokers are here to stay”) or dissecting Kris Jenner’s jewelry on the Met Gala red carpet, her online persona is a combination of self-deprecating best friend and celebrity fashion sleuth.
“Julia’s content is timely, quick and raw, so you feel like you’re gossiping with your friend,” said Jen Cullen Williams, a luxury communications consultant who has worked with Ms. Chafé. “Who she is on social media is who she actually is in real life.”
Ms. Chafé posted her first TikTok video on Oct. 1, 2021 after trying, and failing, to find a jewelry influencer on the platform who could help promote her family’s business, which specializes in rubies, sapphires and emeralds. “My husband, Bruno, said, ‘You could be that girl.’”
She said one of her later videos, about the sapphire engagement ring of Diana, Princess of Wales, was the first to gain attention: “That got, like, 10,000 views.”
The experience helped her hone her content strategy. “I started doing more Princess Diana content because I saw that’s what the audience wanted to watch,” Ms. Chafé said. “And then from there, it turned into celebrity content.”
Now, Ms. Chafé, a self-described pop culture obsessive, knows precisely the kinds of posts that will resonate with her followers. “If I mention Kim Kardashian, that’s it, the video is performing well,” she said. “I don’t even have to say anything. I could just make a video of Kim Kardashian wearing a gem, post it and it’ll do well.”
During her time in India, Ms. Chafé discovered the same was true of the Ambani family. “If I just say two words, Ambani and diamond, and post it, then it’ll be automatically a million views,” she said. “They just perform so well.”
But to credit Ms. Chafé’s following to simply the power of celebrity is to miss the point, Sally Morrison, a business associate, said.
“Historically, people have looked to Instagram for inspiration and now they’re increasingly looking to get educated,” said Ms. Morrison, the director of public relations for natural diamonds at the De Beers Group (Ms. Chafé has signed a contract with De Beers for some future work). “And Julia’s one of the world’s natural teachers. She’s fun and accessible, but she also knows her stuff. She shares the details about the jewelry and brings it to life in this populist, hip way.”
Despite having grown up in a Persian Jewish family that has been in the wholesale gemstone business for 43 years — Ms. Chafé’s father, Afshin (“Alan”) Hackman, is the president of Intercolor USA, and owns the company with his three brothers, all vice presidents — Ms. Chafé resisted the gem trade when she was younger.
“I thought that anything my dad did was obviously, like, not cool and pretty lame,” she said in a “get to know me” video posted in July.
Ms. Chafé grew up on Long Island, east of Manhattan, and in 2021 graduated from New York University with a bachelor’s degree in media studies and a few marketing internships under her belt. “I would come to the office every once in a while, and it was just so boring in here because as one might guess, a dad and his three brothers are not gossiping all day,” she said. “I was just like, ‘How does a male business run?’”
But that August, after graduation, Ms. Chafé had a change of heart. “I decided it was the responsible decision to go into my dad’s business,” she said.
She and her father struck a deal: Instead of sticking with her original plan, of attending classes at the Gemological Institute of America, Ms. Chafé would accompany him on a buying trip to Bangkok in February 2023 “as a kind of crash course in learning what our family business does,” she said.
“It was the best decision I’ve made so far,” she continued. “The trip really changed the way I thought about jewelry. The picture my dad had always painted for me is that it’s really hard to negotiate. And it was. But then you saw between all these people from all these different backgrounds 40 years of deep friendship with one another. And it’s something I don’t think you can find in any other industry.”
Since that trip, Ms. Chafé has worked with other jewelry brands, including Tiffany & Company, to create social media content. In March, she was the red carpet correspondent at the Gem Awards, an annual industry awards ceremony in New York City. And she has been posting more personal videos about her background and tastes.
“I’m trying to expand my horizons as a creator and move more into lifestyle things, and part of doing regular lifestyle things is including your life, which I wasn’t comfortable with before,” Ms. Chafé said. “But I’ve seen a shift in the way my audience speaks to me. I think that everyone responds well to authenticity.
“So even if it’s just my life as a girl in New York City, it’ll be more about me and less about what Kim Kardashian wore last night.”
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