Gemvara, the Richline-owned direct-to-consumer custom jewelry site, has shut down.
“We are sad to share that Gemvara is closing,” says a note on Gemvara’s homepage. “As we wind down our business, our team is working hard to ship every last custom order.”
Richline Group president and CEO Dave Meleski tells JCK via email: “In 2022, we migrated all of Richline Digital businesses (Rio Grande, Jewelry.com, Welry.com) to a new platform…. The Gemvara software platform was an expensive homegrown platform used mostly for custom manufacturing that we also used for the past few years on the other e-commerce businesses. The consumer-facing Gemvara site was not a focus for us during this process, and very little commerce was done.”
He adds: “We continue to look at B-to-B-to-C opportunities in custom with [Gemvara’s] software, as well as our new software.”
Gemvara director of customization Michael Schechter says, “Gemvara started with the retailer in partnership. We see a true omnichannel offering for customization as an unsolved problem. We want to work with the right partners to create the right offering.”
He believes consumers are looking for a site that offers true custom design. “You would be surprised at the kind of niche gemstone combinations our customers ordered,” Schechter says. “It is just hard to scale that kind of business.”
Boston-based Gemvara was founded in 2006 by two Babson College undergrads, Matt Lauzon and Jason Reuben. Originally known as Paragon Lake, it began with a business-to-business model that provided retailers with custom design stations for shoppers to create their own pieces.
“It was so much easier than we thought to sign on jewelry stores,” Lauzon, the company’s first CEO, recalled in 2013. “Before you know it, we had 10, 20, 50 [stores]. We were high-fiving each other.…. In retrospect, we were celebrating the wrong thing. We didn’t sell any jewelry to those jewelry stores. We wasted a lot of time, and we wasted a lot of money.”
In 2010, Paragon Lake changed its name to Gemvara and became a direct-to-consumer site.
Both incarnations attracted private equity interest, and the site raised over $50 million in funding. By 2012, it had more than 60 employees and was considered one of Massachusetts’ fastest-growing companies.
That same year, Lauzon stepped down as CEO. (He remained chairman until 2015.) His successor, Janet Holian, told JCK: “With $50 million invested, [we needed] someone with a little more experience.”
In 2015, Matt Nichols, a former principal at one of the company’s investors, Highland Capital Partners, took the top job. Jon Blotner, a onetime Bain and Company consultant, served alongside him as president and chief operating officer.
Both Nichols and Blotner left the site after it was purchased by Richline Group, a division of Berkshire Hathaway, in 2016.
Among the well-known industry people who worked at Gemvara were Susan Chandler, who is now chief merchandising officer for Citizen Watch America as well as president of the Women’s Jewelry Association; Tiffany and QVC veteran Roy Albers, who is now at Worthy; and former Modern Jeweler editor-in-chief Cheryl Kremkow. It also hired veterans of Zappos and Gucci.
Top: A peek at Gemvara’s customization tool (Photo courtesy of Gemvara)
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