Get ready to unveil the future of diamond retail with Andre Woons, Co-Founder and CIO of Nivoda, as he sheds light on an app that's changing the game for jewelers everywhere. Nivoda's diamond marketplace makes it easy for retailers to find the perfect stone for a customer in real time, with millions of diamonds able to be sorted by size, shape, quality, Lab or Natural, and more specifications from the convenience of a mobile or tablet device.
Below is an excerpt from the interview transcript with In the Loupe host Michael Burpoe, Director of User Experience at Punchmark.
You can listen to the full interview through the embed below, or on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Michael Burpoe:
So what was the specific problem you guys were trying to address? Because obviously, diamonds are kind of like the backbone of the entire jewelry industry. It's kind of what pushes things into the next price bracket when it comes to pricing jewelry up a little bit more. What is it that you guys were trying to solve when it came to creating Nivoda?
Andre Woons:
Yeah. So Dave [Sutton], who is the CEO, was running an online retail store and as an online retailer, you want to be as competitive as possible on price, and what that means, given sort of the fragmented supply of diamonds globally, is that if you want to find the best price goods, then most likely those are not going to come from the same set of suppliers.
So, for example, if he sold 50 engagement rings in a day, then he had to go and buy those diamonds that would go into those rings from 45 different suppliers, and those suppliers were either in India, in Hong Kong, sometimes in the US, like all over the world, and that meant having to reach out to those companies, passing their checks, making international wires to 45 different companies and dealing with 45 different shipments and imports into the country.
So there's a lot of operational overhead and hassle and cost to fulfill those orders, and that's time that you then can't spend dealing with customers, making additional sales and doing what you'd like to do most as a jeweler. So that was the specific problem that he faced and he was like okay, we can solve this in a different way. Let's bring this into the 21st century, let's bring this online, let's build one platform where everything is grouped together and it's as easy as doing almost an Amazon checkout.
MB:
Wow, yeah, I guess centralizing things is definitely an important move. I never really thought of it for diamonds and I think that when I was speaking with your coworker ahead of time, kind of as I was sketching out this episode, I think you guys had mentioned that you were starting to consider going into colored stones and semi-precious stones as well. What's the status of that?
AW:
Yeah, absolutely so. Our vision is to be a one-stop shop for a jeweler, which means that any product that they sell or that they use is what we want to be offering on the platform. So at the moment, it's natural diamonds, lab-grown diamonds We've just started with melee, with very small ones and colored gemstones is what we're working on at the moment and in the future, later this year, we're also looking at test-running jewelry pieces to complete the whole scope of products.
MB:
Wow. And so you mentioned lab-grown diamonds, kind of a hot topic right now, and I'm always curious to hear it from your guys' perspective. Obviously, the price keeps fluctuating and changing. We have no idea what 2024 is going to end with the price of lab-grown diamonds. Is it going to level off? Is it going to continue to dip? How do you guys kind of see that? Is it just about staying nimble and updating your prices frequently, or do you have a different approach to it that allows you to kind of safeguard yourself from the changing price?
AW:
Right. So we update prices every five to fifteen minutes, right now, depending on the level of integration that we have with each of the suppliers. And you're absolutely right, especially on lab grown. You know, it's been trending down, although I must say that the last couple of months it's been tapering off a little bit. So obviously impossible to tell if that's gonna stay the same well into this year, but it seems that we are sort of starting to hit a little bit of a plateau, at least for some of the fast selling categories. But yeah, it's critical to make sure that the prices are accurate and they're supplied to natural as well as a global marketplace. We have to make sure that things can change on a whim and they have to be reflected accurately on the platform as quickly as possible.
MB:
So what I'm always curious about is that you obviously want to offer any product that someone is looking for. I think that that's one of the key things I've learned about vendors is that if there's a market for it, we need to have it, because otherwise they’ll just go somewhere else. When it comes to lab growns, is it just… we have that available if you're interested. Or do you find that it's about keeping them very separate, and separating Natural and Lab, with maybe a toggle to not show any lab grown if that's not something that they're not interested in?
AW:
Right? That's a great question. Yeah, I think it's very, very important to keep them separate. So what we've done early on when we added them to the platform, is make sure that they are in a completely different section and they are also indicated with a different color on them. So it's very clear for people searching that they're looking at either a natural or a lab-grown stone.
And, like I mentioned earlier, we also have physical quality control checks in place to make sure that if someone is buying a natural, that it is a natural and it's not accidentally, for example, swapped for a lab-grown stone. There are such different price points and different stories behind them. We find it very important to keep them completely separate. When you do a search for a one-carat GVS-1, you're not going to see natural and lab-browns mixed together. You're either searching for a natural one-carat GVS-1 or a lab-grown one-carat.
MB:
That's a great approach. I think that's one thing that we've seen as a solution is that when people go into it, they usually have that variable predetermined in their mind and I find that offering what it is that they were looking for, instead of both, is definitely one of those decisions that clears the confusion out.
Listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts!
Learn more about Nivoda here: https://nivoda.com/loupe
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