Posts Tagged ‘Babson College’
Business Success With Customized Bling
Giving a loved one jewelry is pretty special, but designing the piece yourself makes the experience all the more meaningful. So believes Matt Lauzon, who created a customized jewelry company called Gemvara (“vara” means “wish” in Sanskrit) with a classmate at Babson College in 2007.
“At the time, I was really fascinated by mass customization,” he says. “And, when I was introduced to the jewelry industry by a fellow classmate, I fell in love with it.”
The duo introduced their design-your-own jewelry vision to brick-and-mortar stores, where customers could access Lauzon’s software via computers. But the partners quickly realized they’d have more success working independently online. “To deliver a really unprecedented experience, we knew we needed to control everything, including customer care, what we were choosing to merchandise and how we were pricing it,” says Lauzon, whose partner soon went off to start another business.
Within months of launching the Gemvara website in February 2010, Lauzon, 27, had one of his biggest aha moments: “When we realized that the vast majority of our customers had never bought jewelry online before, it meant we had a shot at becoming the biggest jewelry company in the world online or off.”
How to achieve that? By delivering an experience that customers would find more pleasant than shopping in a jewelry store. “When we speak to customers on live phone, chat or email, we’re essentially providing customers the same personal experience a local jeweler provides,” says Lauzon, “but with a bigger selection, the ability to customize, and an approach that starts with providing a great customer experience rather than unloading inventory.”
Growth spurt: Since its launch, Boston-based Gemvara — which keeps no inventory and, instead, sources gemstones as needed from suppliers — says it has sold more than a million pieces of made-to-order jewelry. They are created from more than 1,500 designs, 26 gemstones and eight precious metals. Lauzon declines to discuss financial results but says the number of orders more than tripled in 2011, and similar growth is expected this year. Monthly page views — about three million in December — have increased 20-fold since Gemvara’s debut, according to Lauzon. And the company — which has raised more than $25 million in financing — has grown to 70 employees from 20, including a recent hire from Zappos who is Gemvara’s chief experience officer.