Articles and News
Customers Buy ‘Revenge Jewelry’ More Often Than You’d Think | December 08, 2021 (0 comments)
Merrick, NY—The jewelry industry is driven by emotion and romance, but sometimes jewelry serves as a brilliant, if costly, way to let someone know that you’re onto their sneaky behavior. Last year, for instance, a jewelry sales associate accidentally on purpose mixed up the gifts for a customer’s wife and mistress. Image: Email from a customer to jeweler Liv Portillo asking her to change the order for jewelry she'd ordered for two friends she discovered cheating together.
Related: Sales Associate Exposes Cheating Husband
So-called revenge jewelry is emotional, all right, if not exactly what we’re used to selling. In three similar instances this year, it wasn’t the sales associate, but rather the girlfriends, who got revenge on a cheating partner via jewelry.
Back in June, a retail jeweler with the social media handle @ceo.liv explained in this article how a woman used jewelry to get revenge against her cheating boyfriend. In a custom necklace order, she asked Liv to engrave their anniversary date on front and the names of the three women he cheated with on back. A video of the necklace being made went viral, while the customer reportedly presented the gift at a party in front of the man’s family.
More recently, a woman ordered a link necklace engraved with the names of all the girls her boyfriend was cheating with, and posted the video of him opening it on TikTok. The links appear to be bars and the engraving was obviously big enough for the boyfriend to read, because he quickly slammed the box shut.
According to Newsweek, the video garnered massive levels of engagement: 15.4 million views, 2.6 million likes, and over 16,000 comments.
Back to @ceo.liv the jeweler. Her real name is Liv Portillo and her business is DBL Jewelry. She also has a whole "Cheating Series" of videos on her TikTok page. This one, labeled “Thanksgiving Edition” is number 12. In the video, she details a how a customer had bought gold nameplate necklaces as gifts for her boyfriend and her best friend, which she was planning to give to them at a "friendsgiving" celebration.
Then she discovered her boyfriend and best friend were having an affair behind her back. Because the necklaces were already engraved with the recipients’ names and not returnable, the customer emailed Liv and asked her to engrave something additional on the back of each: “have my leftovers” went to the customer’s (presumably now former) best friend, and “dirty leftovers” went to her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend. Both were presented at Thanksgiving dinner, in front of their families. She also gave her ex-bestie a gold snake charm necklace instead of the butterfly she’d been planning on.
Portillo, a first-generation Filipino immigrant, opened her jewelry business at just 16 years old. With only $40 she saved up to invest in her business, she began bending wire into name necklaces and selling her jewelry to any customer interested in her art. After creating videos of how she hand-makes the jewelry, DBL jewelry became a social media sensation generating more than 300 million views and 2.5 million followers on social media.
Today, the online fashion jewelry brand is still a family-owned business, and normally has a more positive spin: Portillo prioritizes giving back with every order. With 50,000 customers across the globe, it has allowed Portillo’s aspirations of helping others come true for her family and many children in need in the Philippines.
Proceeds from the brand’s Mabuhay Collection are donated to Filipino charities to help children living in poverty and special-needs students at Pasong Tamo Elementary School in Manila. As of 2021, proceeds from the Mabuhay Collection has allowed DBL to fully renovate the classroom of the special-needs students at the school. The project aimed to fix the classroom's broken toilet, collapsing walls, and broken flooring, and order new school supplies.
The DBL team flanking owner Liv Portillo, center.