zoy.co.il
Lab grown diamonds are gaining popularity. But clients have a lot of questions on how they differ from natural occurring diamonds and what their benefits are. Building a brand that answers these questions and an online store that shows the value and affordability of jewellery made from lab grown diamonds, was a unique challenge we were happy to tackle.
It was clear from the beginning that the logo needs to be a jewelry brand designer logo and not a diamonteer logo. This is because the business is a B2C one and based on an ecommerce and lead campaign. A wholesale diamonteer business would enforce a low end bulk price attitude which lab grown diamonds are already associated with by skeptics. Going for the designer look will enforce the notion that there is no distinction quality wise between Lab grown and naturally occurring diamonds.
Regarding the luxury scale of the brand, it was decided that the brand should be approachable and mid tier meaning that this is a brand that is affordable to anyone yet recognizing that this is not an everyday purchase, It’s still symbolic and meaningful and taste and aesthetics do have a big role in the positioning.
As for the logo, we took the wordmark and used the letters to convey the three main jewelry types (staying away from spark and diamond facets cliches): The Z is a folded bracelet, the O is a ring and the Y is a pendant.
Building the brand story, it was clear that the main benefit of lab grown diamonds is that it makes diamond jewelry more affordable and so into the hands (or fingers, necks, wrists and ears) of more people and in more diverse occasions than traditional diamonds. People can buy diamond jewelry more often, for (and by) younger people and can allow themselves to buy jewelry with bigger or more stones for special occasions.
Images were art directed to convey everyday people and occasions, and stay away from fashion and glamorous aesthetics that dominate the luxury diamond jewelry market.
Some online stores really do not need that much content to sell. The products are self explanatory and usually we are much more focused on reducing friction and helping users to make a purchase. But lab grown diamonds require a lot of explaining and there is a whole market to educate as consumers are just now starting to be familiar with them.
Much of our work was designing and building layouts that can act as flexible receptacles for all sorts of content. Users do not like to read a lot and it’s important to present content in bite size scannable chunks.
Content pages helped users in three aspects of the purchase:
- Educating them on lab grown diamonds, the technology and characteristics. In which we claimed that product wise for all purposes a diamond is a diamond, No matter where it came from.
- Helping users with buying diamond jewellery. How to evaluate the price of the diamond (so you can see how you get much better value for your money with lab grown diamonds). How to measure the size of a ring so you know what size you need to order. And the meaning of diamond certifications and insurance.
- Giving users information about the brand, how the people behind the store see their clients, their offerings and values. Who do they want to sell to and on what basis do they connect to users. This is a personification of sorts in which users associate the brand with certain values and get a sense of its character.
As for the online store, we chose to build a shopify store. You get all the security and hosting, cdn for images and webp conversions out of the box. You also have more quality control on third party apps and plugins, better out of the box marketing and analytics tools and much better email templating and customization apps.
Yet one of the challenges of building a shopify store is that when dealing with a large number of products you need to plan more carefully your inventory management as shopify really encourages working with product variants. This means that for a store that has 300 products and wants to enable different sizes or customizations you can end up managing easily, more than 1,000 sku’s.
Each store and business has a unique set of business needs and constraints that we use to decide which platform to develop for. And often there is no clear right or wrong answer, but in this case it was really fun to build on shopify and this is a pretty easy store to maintain and further develop as needed.
Two things that usually fall between the cracks when planning and working on online stores.
One thing is the mailers, a typical store sends 10-20 auto mailers responding to different order statuses and scenarios predefined by the platform or the user. These mailers need to be both aesthetically and content wise honed, they are one of the most important aspects of a brand and have a huge influence on how the users perceive the brand. They are an opportunity to enforce brand values so a lot of time is invested in making them on par with the top sellers standards.
The second thing is the gateway page, usually a store will use some kind of gateway that will securely communicate credit cards info to the credit card company and authorize the transactions. Their pages have a tendency to be generic and giving the customer a weird feeling of leaving the store to make the payment. We looked for a gateway that could give us as much freedom in styling the page as possible (geographical reasons prevented us from using shopify payments) and we invested time in making the gateway page as close as possible to the brand and store so the users will not feel it has left the store.