(Ep 11) THE CLEAR CUT -> Diamonds are forever 💍
Olivia Landau and Kyle Simon | Co-Founders, CEO & COO
Hey friends,
Back again with another edition of The Founder Newsletter - this is Episode 11. If you’re new here, my goal is to give you a quick synopsis of what got me thinking from this week’s episode of The Founder Podcast in 5 minutes or less.
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And who are you?
I’m Kallaway - a future founder trying to get some answers before I jump in the ball pit myself.
Let’s get it.
This Week’s Episode (Ep 11) 💍
Olivia Landau and Kyle Simon, Co-Founders and CEO/COO of The Clear Cut.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google
Listen to the podcast if you’re interested in learning about…
💎 The diamond industry
⭐ What it’s like being in Techstars or another top startup incubator
📈 How to build a viral brand online in 2020
💍 Popular engagement ring cuts and styles
💑 What it’s like founding and running a company with your significant other
Summary 🔍
What’s The Clear Cut?
The Clear Cut is a direct to consumer diamond engagement ring and fine jewelry company.
Traditionally, when searching for a ring, buyers would either look to a big box retailer (e.g., Jared, Kay, Tiffany’s, etc.) or a local mom and pop jeweler. The in-store experience would often result in a rather uninformed (on average) buyer paired with a pushy salesperson talking about clarity, length/width ratio and all sorts of other “jeweler-speak” that was hard to understand.
The experience typically ended up with a less than optimal outcome for the buyer. Without a deep understanding of the product or an unbiased guide to help navigate them through the process, buyers would often pay huge markups and not feel great about the experience.
The Clear Cut was created to solve that problem and introduced a direct to consumer, digital solution for ring buying. Here’s how it works as a buyer…
First, you reach out to Olivia, Kyle or anyone on The Clear Cut team and schedule an initial phone consultation. Next, Olivia or one of the other gemologists on the team will gather detailed information on what type of ring you’re looking for (if you’ve done your own research) or ask background questions to try and make a recommendation based on your significant other’s preferences.
Olivia and her team will take that information and source 4-6 diamonds for you to look at (either in-person at their Diamond District office in NYC or virtually over email/Zoom). During that meeting, the team will walk you through the different aspects of each diamond, transparently giving you pros and cons based on your specs and budget.
After you select a diamond, Olivia will help you design a custom setting and then work to create your custom ring. It’s that easy!
The simplicity and transparency in the process comes from the partnership vs salesperson relationship Olivia builds with her clients.
In addition to diamond engagement rings, The Clear Cut also sells their own collection of fine jewelry. They became extremely popular online after amassing over 100K followers on Instagram with weekly traditions like Clear Cut Couples (weekly feature of an engagement with their rings) and Clear Cut Classroom (weekly educational videos on diamonds and jewelry).
Who are Olivia and Kyle?
Olivia comes from a long line of diamond cutters and dealers from Antwerp, Belgium. She grew up around diamonds and gemstones her entire life, and while her parents urged her not to join the family business, she decided to enroll in the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) directly after undergrad at NYU.
Kyle, on the other hand, spent time in Sierra Leone, West Africa working in politics after undergrad and was on the path to start a Fair Trade Diamond Mining Company. His investors thought it was a good idea to send him to gem school, and that’s where he met Olivia.
A few years after graduating from gem school, they started noticing a lot of their friends were looking to get engaged and would often ask them for help, tips and even to design their custom rings.
What initially started as an educational blog to help people better understand the do’s and don'ts of ring buying, quickly turned into a frenzy on the internet, with people from all over the world wanting custom rings and jewelry.
Olivia and Kyle’s Startup Manifesto 📜
What’s a Startup Manifesto?
At the end of every episode, I ask my founder guests the same question:
If you had to write a Startup Manifesto with 5 of the most important key lessons or pitfalls to avoid when starting out, what would they be?
Here’s what Olivia and Kyle had to say:
If you’re not embarrassed by your launch, you waited too long.
Do more, faster (Techstars’s slogan).
Don’t wish for it, work for it.
Be authentic and believe in yourself.
Allow competition to help you craft your own voice. Don’t be consumed by your competition, but have it motivate you.
Olivia and Kyle’s Thoughts 💭
What are the differences between buying with The Clear Cut vs a big-box store vs a private jeweler…
“So there’s the online marketplaces, there’s traditional brick and mortar retail and then there’s “know a guy” mom and pop style situation.
The online marketplaces are very much Internet 1.0 companies. The whole thesis around them is complete optionality, total choice, hundreds of thousands of diamonds, which is really overwhelming and confusing even for diamond experts like ourselves. There’s no personalization and there’s no curation.
And then you have the brick and mortar retail which is dramatically overpriced, and often you’re just being pushed something that’s just in someone’s inventory by a salesperson who might not even be that sophisticated or aware of the product themselves.
With The Clear Cut everything we do is custom, it’s made here in NY and you deal one-on-one with a graduate gemologist.”
How does the buyer today differ from the buyer in 1980…
“I think it’s changed a lot in the past couple years. The longer we’ve been on Instagram making our educational content, our clients have become pretty informed. They know exactly what they’re looking for, they’ve been searching online, on social media and they want what they want at a price that’s fair.
I’d say it’s really the couples working together more than just a guy coming in with no clue and just getting something and hoping that his partner loves it. Right now, it’s a lot of the couples working together and the women know exactly what they want.
In terms of the historical evolution of the industry, it’s really interesting. Before the Internet, your choices to understand diamonds were either to trust a salesperson blindly, trust a family member or go to the library. Those were your actual choices.
Today’s customers are incredibly sophisticated and very aware. There’s almost too much information and we try to cut through the noise and tell them what does matter, what doesn’t matter and really empower them to make the right decisions for themselves.”
What are assumptions/facts that people come to you with that aren’t true…
“I would say that ‘diamonds are totally unaffordable.’ A lot of time’s we’ll get these funny comments where people are like, ‘That diamond is at least 1 million dollars!’ because whenever a celebrity gets engaged you always see these headlines on social media, when in reality it was like $30K.
We’re fed a lot of misinformation about pricing and quality. A lot of people are like, ‘Don’t I need a deflawless diamond?’ Not if you’re going to wear this ring everyday, and it’s not something you’re going to put in the safe. That’s also a misconception.
Just around budget in general. People say, ‘Is it 2 months salary? Is it this or that?’ It’s a totally personal decision and some couples value it more than others and there’s nothing wrong with either direction.
And, a lot of women are contributing financially to the ring as well, that’s changing too.”
What Got Me Thinking From the Episode 🤔
After reflecting on my conversation with Olivia and Kyle, here’s something that really got my wheels spinning:
Unlimited choices vs curation 🤯
As recently as 5 years ago, consumers on the internet had to hunt and search to create comparisons of different products before making their final purchasing decision. It was almost as if they “struggled” to find what they were looking for. Today, things have gotten a lot more noisy.
Let’s take buying a 6’ plant for your apartment as an example. Five years ago, your options were:
Go on Amazon [always the easiest option]
Go to your local Home Depot/Lowe’s brick and mortar store [you could buy at Home Depot or Lowe’s online but people weren’t doing that]
Go to your local flower shop
Early e-commerce brands [but you probably wouldn’t have discovered them. My 50+ year old parents definitely wouldn’t have]
I would venture to guess that most people 5 years ago either chose option 2 or 3, primarily because it used to be nice to go to the store and look at the plant with your own eyes before buying it.
Today, if I search “plant online,” I get bloomscape.com, the sill.com, thespruce.com, artiplanto.com, proflowers.com, rooted.nyc, plantshed.com, not to mention furniture stores like West Elm and IKEA, as well as the OGs amazon.com, homedepot.com and lowes.com.
The point is, there’s a lot to go through. A lot. I went from not having enough options to having so many options that I need to read a blog post titled “Best place to get plants for apartment 2020” just to help me narrow down my choices. And this is the problem we’re facing - we’ve got too much optionality.
When I talked to Olivia and Kyle, they compared the online diamond marketplaces (e.g., Blue Nile, etc.) with The Clear Cut and highlighted how those companies were built for Internet 1.0. Their strategy was to throw up as much inventory as they could possibly find on a halfway decent, plug and play ecomm interface, figure out how to take credit cards, sit back and let the cash roll in. Or so they thought.
The reality is that people won’t buy from a customer experience like that anymore because it’s too confusing - they suffer from choice fatigue.
The solve? Curation.
My hypothesis is that the brands that win over the next 5-10 years will be the curators of information, products or both in their space.
The Clear Cut is doing both for diamonds. By creating a curated experience, they help their consumers cut through the noise and make a more relaxed decision. They only show them 5-6 diamonds. The rest, they don’t need to see, and that’s exactly how it should be.
In addition to curating the diamonds, they are also the curators and knowledge hub for information in the industry. Because there’s so much misinformation about the diamond industry, The Clear Cut can create a home for transparent and real information that serves as a major lead gen tool for their business.
Curation is the key.
Wrapping it Up 📕
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Till next time ✌️
Kallaway