So Blue Nile has released its own iphone app, and this is what it does:

[Blue Nile] says people for years have been printing out diamond pricing sheets from its website and taking them to brick-and-mortar jewelry stores to comparison shop and, in many cases, haggle with merchants. Blue Nile hopes the new app will let people do that with their phones, and, if they can’t find a better deal in the stores, buy with Blue Nile.

By all accounts, Blue Nile is a well-run company and their enormous success is well-earned. Maybe they plan to add to their app, but for now, what a wasted opportunity. Compare this to the Stuller “Live Diamond Try On” iphone app. That app takes a picture of a person’s hand, and then lets users choose a diamond, and then mixes the two. You can even superimpose the picture over your real hand to see how the stone looks on you.

Now, obviously this is meant to drive sales of Stuller products. But it’s also a fun conversation piece that gets people excited about diamonds and jewelry.

The Blue Nile app includes some pages of education, but it’s fundamentally all about price and comparison shopping. There’s not even something fun that would appeal to its core audience, like “cool ways to get engaged.”

And such is the difference between a company that cares about the industry that it’s a part of, and another that has never really seemed to.

Rob Bates

JCK News Director