One of our main competitors did not fare so well over the 4th quarter - Charles and Colvard, makers of moissanite, had a sales decline of 35% and lost money during that period:
http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/1122918/
With their stock hovering above $1 (vs. $25+ a few years back) there is speculation they may be bought out.
We recently released our newest ring, our Halo micropave for round centers.
Due to the success of this ring, we are expanding the available centers and today are pleased to add 1.50ct and 2.00ct size centers as an option.
Details can be found on our halo micropave ring page here.
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We restocked our 8mm and 9mm cushion cut cultured rubies today. These had been sold out for about two months, so we are pleased to offer new inventory on these.
In order to handle our growth, we currently testing a new website with complete ecommerce infrastructure. The primary benefit of this change will be ‘live inventory’ meaning the inventory levels of various items will be updated and shown real-time.
We have constantly had problems with selling out of various items and not having the ability to post they are out of stock before additional orders come in, and this feature would be a time savings for both us and our customers.
We’ll show a preview of the new site next month, so stay tuned!
Comments(0) We had a huge increase in sales of our Takara yellow diamonds during the holiday season, and we are doubling our production of our yellow diamonds this year to keep up with demand. Our press release about this was published in Yahoo Financial news:
BetterThanDiamond in Yahoo news
We’ve also just completed two new yellow diamonds (asscher cuts) and a new pink diamond (round). Details on these are at our lab grown diamond subsidiary, TakaraDiamonds.com
(please note: some people seem to be confused by the fact our company offers two product lines - our Takara diamonds are real, lab grown diamond and come with independent diamond grading reports. Our Asha line is a diamond simulant that employs lab grown amorphous diamond, but it is still a simulant).
We’re happy to note that our message boards made the online news with a nice writeup as good source for information on diamond simulants. The full article is here:
http://www.buffaloathome.com/dct/54/id/3271/mid/1906/Getting-the-Dish-on-Diamond-Simulants.aspx
and of course, our message boards are here:
As sales have been growing, so has the amount of positive feedback we are receiving on our Asha diamond simulant. We’ve posted a number of these on our website in our feedback section, below are some excerpted comments:
As always, thanks to those customers who took the time to write us and share their feedback - its always human nature to write when you are unhappy about something, but not as common to take the time to write when you are pleased so we greatly appreciate it.
You can view our testimonials section here.
We were pleased to note that our sales for October were up 30% versus October a year ago. This was largely driven by increased loose stone sales, something that is much easier for us to grow versus jewelry orders (due to the setting labor and customization for jewelry).
On an interesting note, one of our main competitors (Moissanite) did not fare so well in the last quarter, with their sales revenue down 46% for their recent quarter. Full details here:
Charles & Colvard profit plunges 89%.
Asha is now being distributed under a different brand name by one of Moissanites largest resellers, and we are seeing steady growth in that channel as well.
Comments(0) We’re pleased to announce that our Halo pendants make their return - offered for 1.00ct and 1.25ct round Asha centers, these produce a stunning look of the center Asha floating on a bed of diamonds.
We had previously offered these, but they were entirely hand-made and took a long time to make and cost quite a bit. We’re remade them using our new CAD system, which allows us to cast them and have the high tolerances of computer design - the result is an identical look, but with a much lower price.
We are offering these as a pre-holiday special until November 21st. Details and online purchasing are here.
After two months of work, we are pleased to announce that we have completed a major restocking for princess cuts, asscher cuts, flanders cuts and emeralds. Many of these have been sold out during that two month wait as we had a lot more sales during the summer than we were expecting.
Here is the list of newly completed cuts now available:
Princess: 1.50ct, 2.00ct, 2.50ct, 3.00ct
Flanders: 1.00ct, 1.50ct
Asscher: 1.50ct, 2.00ct
Emerald: 1.50ct
We hope we have made enough to last us through the holidays. We are currently working on restocking our sold out pink 1.00ct rounds.
