Key Takeaways

What is employee-generated content (EGC)?

Employee-generated content, usually shortened to EGC, is content made by the people who work for a business, about the business they work for. Their job, their day, their expertise, the place itself.

It’s the opposite of how most marketing gets made. Normally a brand briefs a marketing team or an agency, or pays a creator to spend an afternoon with the product. With EGC it comes from people who are already there and already know it, which is why it looks less polished and lands better.

Think of it as the in-house version of user-generated content. UGC is customers talking about a brand. EGC is staff. Both work for the same reason: audiences can spot an advert in about a second, and neither of these looks like one.

It’s also cheap. An influencer partnership is a recurring cost, and what you’re buying is temporary access to someone else’s credibility. EGC runs on a tripod, a clip-on microphone and twenty minutes of someone’s working day.

People you can actually meet

Where it works hardest is customer-facing roles. If someone has been watching a shop assistant or a barista on their phone for a few weeks and then walks in and finds that same person behind the counter, the visit starts from a different place. They already know them, in the slightly one-sided way people know anyone they follow, and that recognition does something a brand account can’t. It turns a transaction into a reason to come back to that shop rather than the one down the road. Staff who serve customers all day are the most credible people you have, and they’re the only ones the audience can actually go and meet.

It isn’t the same as employee advocacy

Worth separating, because the two get used interchangeably and they’re different jobs.

Employee advocacy is staff resharing the company’s posts on their own accounts. The content comes from head office; the reach is borrowed from employees’ networks. It’s a distribution tactic.

Employee-generated content is staff making the content. They’re on camera, or behind it, and the material wouldn’t exist without them. It’s a production tactic.

Advocacy asks people to press a button. EGC asks them to have something to say. The second one is harder and works better.

One note on this, because it matters if anyone quotes numbers at you. You’ll see a figure repeated everywhere that employee-shared content gets eight times the engagement of brand content. It traces back to a LinkedIn study from around 2014, and it’s measuring advocacy — people resharing corporate posts to their professional networks. It is not a measurement of EGC, and it has nothing to do with Instagram, TikTok, or a jewellery shop. Most articles citing it draw the distinction above and then use the stat anyway.

Why it suits jewellery and watches specifically

Most EGC case studies come from software companies and media brands with in-house video teams. Ignore those. The argument for a jewellery retailer is different and, if anything, stronger.

A ring is a considered purchase. Nobody spends four figures on the strength of a nice flat lay. They spend it because someone explained the difference between a 2.0ct lab and a 1.5ct natural without making them feel stupid, or because they trusted the person who said the setting they’d picked would snag on everything they own.

That conversation is already happening in your shop, several times a day. EGC is just filming it.

The other advantage is tenure. Retail has high churn; independent jewellers often don’t. A goldsmith who has been at the bench for fifteen years is a genuinely interesting person to watch work, and no amount of budget buys that credibility.

Who’s already doing it well

Look at the UK high street rather than the American tech companies that dominate the write-ups.

Asda is the origin story, and it’s worth telling properly because it contains the whole argument. In 2022 Laura Fulgenzi, a professional dancer working part-time at the Gosforth store, jumped on a Strictly trend and posted a salsa dance with a tub of salsa, filmed in store by her boyfriend. It went on her own account. Asda’s marketing department had nothing to do with it. The press picked it up. Three years later she’s in an official Asda campaign, dancing with Peter Andre, hashtagged and tagged as an ad. The employee moved first and the brand spent three years catching up. That pattern is everywhere in this space.

Marks & Spencer are running two versions of this at once, and the contrast between them is the useful part.

The one that went viral is Kathryn Turner, Director of Product Development at M&S Food. She started posting in May and was past 50,000 followers inside a month. She’s now around 144,000 on TikTok with 1.7 million likes, plus roughly 80,000 on Instagram, built almost entirely on documenting her actual job: what’s worth picking up in the Foodhall that you’d otherwise walk straight past, how a product gets tasted and signed off, trips out to the farms. No format, no presenting background, just someone who knows the products better than anyone else in the building pointing at them. Note who it isn’t. It isn’t a 24-year-old from the social team.

The quieter version is Stores Social, running since 2020, where individual store accounts are made by store colleagues and now come to over a million followers between them. Stores get a weekly steer on what to cover and then interpret it locally: what’s new in, what the regulars are buying, what’s happening in that town this week. Tone of voice guidelines exist, but the colleagues choose the content, and it’s done on shift rather than in their own time. For most retailers that last detail is the one to copy.

Currys have made their staff the recognisable part of the channel. The technical knowledge is the hook — people watching actually learn something about a laptop — and the self-deprecation is what keeps them watching. Swap laptops for movements and you’ve got a watch dealer’s content plan.

Hobbycraft is the useful one for anyone convinced their customers are too old for this. They put older employees on camera and picked up a younger audience without alienating the one they already had. That matters more in jewellery than most sectors, because a large share of the spend sits with customers over 45 who are on these platforms and are mostly being ignored on them.

PerfectTed isn’t strictly EGC, which is exactly why it’s worth including. The matcha brand’s whole social presence runs on its three founders being the recognisable faces of it, rather than on a rota of staff. Founder-led content is a different thing with a different risk profile, but for an owner-run jeweller it’s usually the more realistic place to start. If you’re the person who buys the stock and talks to everyone who comes through the door, you’re already the most credible face in the building. The mistake is assuming you need a young member of staff to do it for you.

What it actually looks like

The formats that hold up on a shop floor are unglamorous:

• Someone at the bench, resizing or setting, with a sentence about what they’re doing and why it’s fiddly
• The question you get asked most this week, answered properly in forty seconds
• What came in this morning, unboxed by whoever opened it
• An honest comparison between two pieces at similar prices, including which one you’d steer a customer away from
• A watch coming apart for a service, which is reliably the most-watched thing any dealer posts
• The window change, sped up

None of this needs a script. Most of it gets worse with one.

Where it goes wrong

Forcing it. Camera reluctance reads on screen instantly. If someone doesn’t want to do it, they won’t be good at it, and asking twice makes the rest of the team wary. Start with the person who was already going to say yes.

Over-producing it. The moment it looks like an advert, it stops doing the job it was hired for. Decent audio matters. Colour grading doesn’t.

Key-person risk. This is the one nobody writes about. If your whole social presence rests on one charismatic member of staff, you’ve handed them a fair amount of leverage and you’ve got a problem the week they leave for a competitor. Two or three faces is more work and much safer.

No system. EGC dies in week three roughly every time it’s run on enthusiasm. Someone needs to own the posting, the editing and the nagging. Usually that isn’t the person on camera.

Leaving it unsaid. If you don’t tell staff what’s fine to film, they’ll work it out themselves, and in a jewellery shop that’s a live problem rather than a theoretical one. Customers in frame. A commission piece visible on the bench before the client has seen it. Enough of the layout and the safe on camera to interest the wrong viewer. A page of plain English on what not to film protects everyone, and it’s a five-minute job that almost nobody does.

Pretending it’s free. It isn’t. You’re asking someone to do a second job on top of their first one. Either it’s in their hours or it’s in their pay, and if it’s neither, it will quietly stop.

How to start without overcommitting

Pick one person, one format, one day a week. Buy a tripod and a clip-on mic; the phone is fine. Film four at a time so you’re not starting from zero every Tuesday.

Give it six weeks, then look at what happened. Not follower count. Look at saves, shares, and whether anyone walked in and mentioned it, because that’s the number that matters in a shop with a door.

If it’s working, add a second person. If it isn’t, work out whether the problem is the format or the fit, because it’s almost always one of those two rather than the idea.

What it doesn’t replace

EGC sits alongside your product photography, it doesn’t replace it. Someone who has decided they want an emerald-cut solitaire still needs to see the thing properly lit against a clean background before they’ll get in the car.

The staff content does the earlier job: giving people a reason to care who they buy it from.