Last May, I had the great fortune of returning to India for the fifth time. I fell in love with the country over the course of four work trips that took me to Mumbai, Delhi, and Jaipur between the years 2004 and 2017. This time, I was a guest of Ben Bridge, the Seattle-based retailer who’d brought me to Bostwana the previous year on a mission to share the story of how its diamonds are mined and marketed.
Our May visit, which took place on the eve of prime minister Narendra Modi’s reelection, spanned 10 days at the height of the hot season (imagine walking outside straight into a 117-degree oven—oy!). We began the trip in Mumbai, ended it in Agra with a spectacular sunrise visit to the Taj Mahal, and, in between, spent time in the diamond cutting hub of Surat, the gem city of Jaipur, and Ranthambore National Park in the state of Rajasthan. To describe the trip as luxurious is like saying the Taj is impressive—true, but holy moly, what an understatement.
Our group included editors from Oprah Daily, Goop, Bustle, and Forbes, not to mention our lovely hosts: Stacy Speicher, Ben Bridge’s vice president of marketing; Angela Hope, vice president of merchandise; and, of course, president Lisa Bridge, whose travel-loving husband, Gilad Berenstein, tagged along for the ride.
Although the Ben Bridge team built plenty of perks into the itinerary—like the once-in-a-lifetime tiger safari we took at Ranthambore—the main purpose of the trip was to learn about the retailer’s Bella Ponte collection of personalized engagement rings and understand how the company is able to offer custom pieces at scale.
Manufactured by Shah Luxury, a family-owned company and Plumb Club member with a presence in Mumbai’s Santacruz Electronic Export Processing Zone (SEEPZ), the collection is described on the Ben Bridge website as “the ring that can be personalized exactly how she wants it to ensure it is as unique as the love it symbolizes.” Here’s how Ben Bridge brought the idea to life.
It started with a desire to make custom design accessible at scale.
As we sat in a conference room at Shah’s facility in SEEPZ, Bridge shared the Bella Ponte backstory. (Incidentally, the name means “beautiful bridge” in Italian and was coined by a Ben Bridge sales associate in Las Vegas as part of a company-wide naming competition.)
“We’re a 112-year-old family-run jeweler,” she began. “And we believe in being a part of people’s lives in meaningful ways. And we really believe in the engagement process, particularly because it’s the start of someone’s journey in jewelry. If we can establish a strong relationship with someone at this important moment, that continues throughout their lives.”
Bridge recalled a moment on an escalator in Las Vegas when she and Hope discussed the idea of a custom wedding jewelry collection. “Beyond just beautiful jewelry—that’s table stakes—how could we do something more?” she said.
“Seven years ago, we started talking about it. We wanted beautiful design that allowed for great customization, looking beyond what we saw in the marketplace as simple things that you could make slightly your own, which would be an engraving or changing a metal color or diamond shape. Those are really nice things, but how do we get to that custom place and at scale? How do we do that for everybody that walks through our door?”
That conversation prompted a search for a manufacturing partner with the chops to produce unique rings in volume, which is what brought the team to India. “The level of expertise you find here is unparalleled,” Hope said.
Most people need a foundational design before they can start personalizing.
One way Ben Bridge helps its customers trust the custom process is by acknowledging that “a lot of people aren’t comfortable starting from nothing,” Hope said.
“It’s very important that when we created this line, we created a platform, a foundation of strong design pieces that people could take elements from and then create a piece that’s their own,” she explained.
Ben Bridge gave all of its editorial guests a taste of that process in the weeks leading up to our departure for India. We received PowerPoint presentations of ring designs to peruse, then scheduled a one-on-one call with Hope to go over the base design and the custom touches we wanted to add. I chose a wide 14k gold band dotted with three graduated diamonds on the vertical—to represent me, my partner, Jim, and our son, Niko—a semicircle of diamonds on the profile of the band as well as an inscription on the inside (For J&N: My gems of the first water).
“We gave you a few rings to look at,” Hope said. “You chose the one that spoke to you most, and then we made those changes that were specific to you. Some people feel more comfortable making a change to an existing piece than starting from nothing.
“We have a whole line that exists, but we also want people to be able to take their dreams to the next place,” she added.
Hologram technology is an essential part of the custom process.
Since 2018, Ben Bridge has equipped its stores with physical hologram viewers—picture a shallow four-sided cone—that work in tandem with mobile phones to allow customers to see their designs from different angles.
“We can zoom in to say, ‘Is this your ring?’” Hope said. “And then if you say, ‘Yes, that’s definitely my ring, we say, ‘Great.’ And as we’re ordering it, we send people home with this little cone that you put on your phone, and then you can see your hologram. And you can look at your ring as it’s being made.”
Speicher noted the wow factor. “Instead of showing a picture of something you design, actually, let me show you in three dimensions,” she said.
Salil Shah, who runs Shah Luxury from New York City, along with his younger brother, Neil, piped up: “Imagine a customer having one of these cones and they’re at a dinner party,” he said. “Everyone looking at it will be wowed and everybody walking by will be, too.”
Shah Luxury borrowed ideas from tech providers to make the custom process more appealing for Ben Bridge’s jewelry customers.
Salil and Neil’s father, Natwar Shah, founded the company in 1975 in New York after learning the diamond business in his native India. To hear his sons tell it, he embraced finished jewelry long before many of his Indian counterparts.
“In 1996, we bought our first factory here in SEEPZ,” Salil said. “We’ve got a total of four spaces here in the SEEPZ zone, including three full production units.”
Salil and Neil were both born in New York, and attended high school, college, and business school in the States, the former completing his studies at the NYU Stern School of Business and the latter at Wharton.
Both brothers are tech evangelists and follow developments in the tech world on a daily basis. “Tech has really enabled Neil and I to be very productive in the jewelry industry,” Salil, a self-described tech geek, said. “We draw inspiration from Lyft, Uber, Apple, Disney—we want to use technology to democratize the experience of custom.”
“You can go into a Levi’s store and there’s a machine that measures like 20 different measurements, and you will get a custom-made pair of jeans,” he added. “Twenty, 30 years ago, it would have been impossible. But technology democratizes it. It brings it to the masses. We believe very strongly in this. We specialize in doing onesies. We’ve created processes, technology, internal, external, consumer-facing, so on and so on to make sure that every piece that we make is made correctly, hopefully.”
As we embarked on a tour of the factory, Hope emphasized another key detail about the Bella Ponte custom experience. “During this process that we just outlined, somebody stops and takes a picture of your piece along the way as it’s being made,” she said. “And so when the piece is completed and we deliver it, you’ll also receive what we call a ‘My Story’ card that has a QR code on it that will show you the journey of your ring being made as it’s gone through each of the steps of manufacturing.”
Salil said he borrowed the idea for the QR code and card from apps like Uber, Lyft, and Domino’s. “Think of when you ask for an Uber,” he said. “The app tells you where the Uber is. Or Domino’s tells you, ‘The pizza’s in the oven,’ or, ‘The driver’s on the way.’ You get to see your piece getting made along the way.”
The sky’s the limit with custom work—provided the pieces are structurally sound.
The Bella Ponte process is surprisingly fast. “Most of the rings are completed here within 10 to 12 business days,” Hope said. “So delivery for the clients is three to four weeks, depending on the complexity of the design.”
Customers are invited to dream big. “There are very few limits on what can be created,” Bridge said. “There are some interesting things that come through. From a design aesthetic, we’re happy to create anything as long as we feel like it’s going to be structurally sound and is going to be durable. Sometimes those are challenging conversations, especially during the era when everyone wanted the tiniest whisper of a band. We need to make sure that this is something that’s going to last and is going to work.”
Salil shared an anecdote about an “infamous piece” for a friend of Bridge’s that the team was able to make, despite the considerable production challenges it posed. “This ring was a hexagon halo with an Asscher center,” he said. “And the baguettes that went in the halo, they weren’t traditional-sized baguettes. So we had to custom-cut every single stone for that ring to make that happen. But that’s the extent we will go to make sure every piece is made perfect. Because if we just use baguettes cut off the market, you’d have gaps and it would just not look right.”
As we toured the factory and listened to the Ben Bridge team speak about their trusted partners at Shah Luxury, it was impossible to overlook the importance of their relationship to the success of Bella Ponte.
Hope used a fashion analogy to describe what the company does for Ben Bridge, and how unusual it is in the world of fine jewelry.
“You do a run of a bag, you don’t make one, right?” she said. “You’re making it to be able to sell. And the same thing is true for most of the facilities that are in this area called SEEPZ. There are not very many people that are willing to make one of each thing over and over and over again. It completely shifts the flow of your factory. It completely shifts the way that you do everything. And they were willing to try this and do it.”
Neil, who had let Salil do most of the talking during the presentation, echoed Hope: “It is a very complicated process, and it has taken us several years to build, and we are still perfecting it. But it’s eminently gratifying to be able to build jewelry that’s not just beautiful and pushes the limits of design and style, but also pushes the limits on engineering pieces that are truly meaningful and builds the technology to engage consumers and take the fear out of the process.”
I can vouch for that. In August, my very own Bella Ponte custom ring arrived on my doorstep. Jim and I aren’t married, but I wear it on the ring finger of my left hand, where it reminds me of our one-of-a-kind love—and the industrious, thoughtful people in Seattle and Mumbai who labored hard to make it just for me.
Top: The specs of my custom 14k gold Bella Ponte diamond ring (all photos courtesy of Ben Bridge)
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