Like its various competitors, Ritani sought to overcome one of the brick-and-mortar retail jewelers' most urgent dilemmas, i.e. these retailers' limited physical inventory as well as the usually high costs of managing transactions and the lack of access or familiarity with technological innovations. With Virtual Shelf however, these jewelers can gain direct access to - a digital - inventory of over 250,000 diamonds and jewelry items, along with full-service sales processing.
According to a Ritani, Virtual Shelf is designed to complement each retailer's existing inventory by making available a digital inventory of hundreds of thousands of diamonds and jewelry items available for immediate purchasing. "Should the customer choose to purchase a diamond or jewelry item from the Virtual Shelf, the retailer sets their margin and Ritani handles the entire back-end transaction for the jeweler, including fulfillment, credit card processing, fraud risk, and returns. In turn, the retailer immediately sees the transaction on their books. The customer receives the item quickly and safely via insured shipping."
—International Diamond Exchange
Filling An Industry Need
Like the products that they handle, diamond companies have been slow to implement new technologies into their supply chains. This has allowed for a gap to emerge between service and demand, where once people took longer periods of time for selections, showings and understood longer shipping dates to choose the perfect stone, people now have become accustomed to same day service and next day delivery, an expectation that not even diamonds can be considered the exception for anymore. At Ritani, with generational experience within the diamond industry, we understood this issue and knew that our Ritani business model would be the ideal template for what today we call Virtual Shelf.
Virtual Shelf is based off Ritani’s want to present our customers with every detail and option when it comes to selecting their diamond. From 2020-2021, I worked on multiple designs and tools throughout the Ritani website that focused on supplying our consumers with easy to digest data and tools to find good quality, best value diamonds. In the process, I created the Recommendations page that presented consumers with similar diamonds at the same or higher quality, at a better price, and also the compare page that allowed a side-by-side view of up to four diamonds that compared diamond qualities to one another in an easy-to-view format. All of this is paired up with an easy-to-navigate filtering system within product listing pages (PDPs).
Ritani’s success with bundling these tools together had the management of the company task the developer team with taking my designs and rebuilding it outside of the Ritani website. Now, interesting fact about diamonds is that whatever store you go to for such things like engagement rings or stud earrings, the diamonds are all sourced from the same locations; it is just through the companies themselves that the margins and accompanied customer support differs. So by developing Virtual Shelf from the original tools I designed, it allowed for the company to develop it into a white-label application for smaller diamond companies to subscribe to as a service. These companies can aesthetically alter the color scheme of the application and apply their logo to their portal. Where they receive the most control in the application is in developing collections, setting margins, and receiving data on diamonds with general margin data in the industry so as to easily set pricing and sale prices for their own stores.
Branding
