Your mission: Find the perfect spokesperson to represent a luxury jewelry store’s line of Official Olympic accessories.
The ideal candidate must be a superior athlete, with two World championship titles, four World Cup titles, a gold medal and current status as reigning Olympic Champion and first female to win gold in her sport. As well, she must be a jewelry designer.
Mission impossible? Turns out that it’s really not. Recently announced as Birks ambassador, Olympian freestyle mogul skier Jennifer Heil is all of those things and more. And according to Tom Andruskevich, president and CEO of Birks and Mayors Inc., finding Heil was a stroke of serendipity.
“Last year, we were very discreetly evaluating several athletes as potential candidates for the Birks ambassador role. Then, last fall, the director of product development for Birks attended the Gold Medal Plates event in Montreal where he was introduced to Jenn Heil,” Andruskevich told Metro in an interview.
Thanks to her Torino win and commitment to community work with young people and other athletes, Heil had already hit their radar, but meeting her and “experiencing first-hand her incredibly positive energy and truly genuine demeanor” pretty much clinched the deal, he said.
And then the Birks team discovered Heil’s passion for designing and making her own jewelry, something she’d done from childhood. In fact, Heil had designed commemorative rings for herself following the 2002 and 2006 Winter Olympics; at the time the only options available were heavy and masculine.
“Jenn’s passion for jewelry and her natural sensibility in this area is a huge bonus,” said Andruskevich. “I would say the stars kind of aligned for Birks and Jenn.”
Part of a full line of Birks Olympic jewelry, the unmistakably feminine Jenn Heil Collection, (on which Heil collaborated with the company’s design team), features a bracelet, a necklace and earrings that spin on five circles, each with a different texture and surface. The circles represent key ingredients for success: team, joy, courage, focus and dream. A line extension that includes a series of stackable rings and bangles is already on deck for release in the near future.
“Jenn’s relationship with Birks will go beyond the Olympics,” confirms Andruskevich. “[She] is an incredibly talented young lady with a very, very bright future, and we expect our relationship with her to be a long-lasting mutually rewarding partnership.”
