Wave Antiques
78% growth. No extra marketing spend.
How we helped a 130-year-old jewellery house defend its heritage business and scale a modern retail brand.
78%
YoY revenue growth, May 2025 to May 2026
£0
Additional marketing spend to achieve it
100%+
Growth targeted for Q4 2026 vs Q4 2025, currently on track
The company
Wave Antiques has been trading for more than 130 years across five generations. Its wholesale business sources vintage and antique jewellery and supplies retailers across the UK. In 2022 the family launched a direct-to-consumer arm, where customers discover pieces on Instagram and then book an appointment to try them on in an unhurried, trusted setting.
That combination is rare: five generations of accumulated knowledge in the sourcing, and a retail business growing at the pace of a modern brand.
The challenge
The business faced several interconnected challenges:
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A declining wholesale operation affecting overall revenue stability.
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Strong retail demand that exceeded the company's operational capacity.
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Internal processes that limited scalability and created operational bottlenecks.
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The need to grow revenue without increasing marketing expenditure.
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Preserving the company's heritage while modernising its commercial operations.
Rather than focusing on acquiring more customers, the opportunity lay in improving how the business converted and fulfilled the demand it already had.
Our Approach
Wave was profitable and well run, but sitting at an inflection point.
Wholesale, the historic core, was in structural decline. Fewer independent shops were buying, and the supplier base was ageing. Many of the key supplier and trade relationships were held by one person who is approaching retirement, and that knowledge had never been shared across the wider team. Meanwhile retail, after two years of rapid growth, had begun to plateau despite significant monthly marketing investment.
None of this was urgent, which is what made it difficult to address. The risks were slow-moving and easy to defer, and the leadership team was fully occupied running the business rather than working on it.
The mandate: protect and future-proof the core, unlock the next phase of retail growth, and reduce dependence on any single market, person or channel.
What we did
We set a five-year ambition built around a longer goal: protect the business so it can trade for another hundred years, and grow it while doing so. From there we worked back to three horizons, which were defending the core, scaling retail, and testing new models. The immediate priority was retail, where the constraint turned out not to be demand.
We made existing spend work harder
Wave was investing heavily in marketing each month. Rather than recommending more budget, we helped hire a senior marketing lead into the business and built a programme of rigorous, data-led experimentation to establish what actually drove appointments and revenue.
We expanded capacity to meet the demand already there
Retail revenue was gated by how many customers Wave could physically see. We opened up appointment availability, including Saturdays, and hired an additional private client manager capable of delivering to Wave’s standard.
We built a second showroom
The RUNG team led the conversion of part of Wave’s office into a second appointment space. It uses floor space the business was already paying for, and it roughly doubled the number of appointments Wave can hold in a week.
We put the operating foundations in
Data management, processes and administration, team incentives, and a CRM system that has now been rolled out and is being used daily. This is the less visible work, and it is what allows the business to keep growing without the wheels coming off.
Alongside this we scoped small, controlled experiments in online sales, virtual appointments, and borrowing stock from suppliers rather than buying it upfront. Each one is designed to give a clear answer before any real money is committed.
The results
Between May 2025 and May 2026, retail revenue grew 78% year on year, with no increase in marketing spend. The growth came from converting demand Wave was already generating, and from being able to see customers when and where they wanted to be seen.
Wave has extended the engagement to carry on with the wider strategy and deepen the operating foundations. The business is now targeting well over 100% year-on-year revenue growth in Q4 2026 against Q4 2025, and is on track to reach it.
Why it worked
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We looked for growth inside the business first. Before asking for more budget, we worked out what the existing budget was already capable of producing.
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We fixed the bottleneck, not the top of the funnel. Longer hours, a second showroom and another skilled client manager meant Wave could finally serve the customers its marketing was already bringing in.
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The customer experience did not change. Appointments are still unhurried and still personal. Damaging that may have delivered short-term results, but it would have harmed the brand in the long run.
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We stayed long enough to embed it. Systems, data and incentives only work once people are actually using them.
How we worked
We did not only build the strategy, we implemented it directly inside the business. We sat in on hiring, ran the showroom conversion, and stayed on to get the systems into daily use. Wave’s leadership got the strategic capacity of a full-time executive team without having to build and pay for one.