Friday night and the president of BTD has posted his weekly update!

A quick aside – it did not appear that this update was going to happen as of yesterday b/c all of Washington was basically shut down this week. We had a large snow storm, then a big ice storm with up to .4 inch of freezing rain, and then even more snow on top of that. That led to mass power outages and 250K in our area are still without power now. Even our office has a tree down in front of the entrance.

BTD’s office will not re-open for shipping until 1/23 (Monday). Fortunately our websites and servers are all located in British Columbia, Canada and so these remained fully functional.

Hardness testing results for the Amora enhancement process:
The results, averaged from 10 different tests done on different parts of the stone (pre and post) – higher GPa means higher hardness:

C&C raw stone / pre-treatment: = 38.477 GPa
Amora enhanced / post-treatment: = 39.045 GPa

In other words, an approximate 1.5% *increase* in hardness.

And now, finally to unveil the Amora gem in its H&A cushion cut:

the full post - along with a video of the Amora gem H&A cushion – can be found on our message board, here.

We had a video made to showcase one of our newest ring designs, the Timeless Duality.

The video can be viewed on our message board, here.
The ring in the video features a 1ct, 6.5mm Asha simulated diamond.

Friday night and the president of BTD has posted his newest blog post with all the latest Amora and BTD news!

With regards to Amora production, the tentative plan, due to the rather overwhelming cost, is to move towards some limited production by not setting up with the ‘optimal’ configuration, but one that gets some basic production underway.
The tentative timeline for the limited production is thus late Summer at this point, but could move forward or backward as things progress.
But, some people have asked for the latest rough dates and that would be the current best guesstimate.

1 – Custom cutting will open up next week for Avarra sapphires, emeralds and rubies.
2 – We’re working on a new Asscher cut yellow diamond that should finish up between  1.6 and 1.8ct, so a larger stone overall.
3 – We have a very large amount of Asha H&A rounds currently in progress.
4 – We’re hoping to restock on Asha studs, and begin offering all styles with the Protektor back systems. The price on that option has actually held steady while the pricing for the friction backs has gone up. As a result, it makes sense to offer by default the Protektor systems for a bit more money but one that offers a lot more relative bang for the buck.

Hopefully next week we’ll have the Amora H&A cushion video and photo to show, so hope to see you then.

The full post, with much more news and information can be found on our message board, here!

The president of BTD has shared the newest batch of Friday Night News in the Amora Blog!

First Amora gem updates: mostly good news.

The first good news is that we have finalized the new cut for the Amora princess. It is a true princess with outstanding proportions and top notch appearance.

The next cut we’ll look at is likely the Asscher cut.

Also, hardness testing – we do have the new sample nearly ready for testing and hopefully that test will be done within the next two weeks and we’ll know where the Amora gem (and C&C moissanite) lie in the bigger scheme of hardness ratings.

For reference, the quick list of the worlds hardest bulk materials is roughly this:

  • Diamond
  •  Boron Nitride
  •  Boron Carbide
  •  Amora Gem / Moissanite by C&C (unclear on order until C&C hardness test)…both fall under ‘silicon carbide’ family
  • Sapphire (Alumina)

The rest of the update can be found on our message board, here!

Wishing all of our fans, friends and customers a very Happy New Year!

We had a great holiday season with record sales – approx. 21% increase in total sales revenue vs. last year.

Our web traffic and the message boards themselves have continued to expand at a rapid pace.  We recently set an all-time single day high of 6,714 unique visitors in one day in December.

So, to celebrate that, its time for another message board giveaway!

More news and further details of the contest can be found on the message board.

We now have some HD videos of our Amora enhanced Moissanite!

The video for the round brilliant is here:

And the Amora enhanced Cushion cut Moissanite:

Additional videos are posted on our message boards, which you can view here:

Heart, radiant, and other Amora enhanced Moissanite shapes

The president of BTD has posted his weekly Friday night blog post, with the latest news and updates.
This is the last official Friday Night News post of 2011!

This week was primarily focused on getting orders handled and shipped in time for Christmas, so not as much progress with the Amora gem.

However, we did acquire some very expensive chemistry modeling software that will be used to help optimize production of the gem itself. This is actually a very important piece as we can run simulations that would take a professional chemist many months to do by hand, literally in minutes.

So, the main goal for 2012 is to get the Amora gem into production…and we expect to have the decision on the patent situation for the US by Spring 2012.

There’s more!  The remainder of the blog post can be read on our message boards!
Click here to read the rest of this week’s news!

We had our final restock of 2011 today!

We’ve restocked and expanded our Krupps cut Asha offerings, including sizes from 6x4mm up to 12x10mm.

Asha Krupps cut

And we restocked the Asha Hearts & Arrows rounds in 4.5mm, 5mm, 6.5mm, 7.5mm and 8mm.
Asha® Hearts & Arrows Round

Customer feedback on an 8.5mm cushion cut Amora recently posted on our message board :

I ordered an 8.5 mm (3ct.) cushion cut amora moissanite stone (from moissyco) and took it to my jeweler to see what he thought of it.  He warned me that he might like a cz better because moissanite can look green/yellow.

Well I took it in and we when he took it out and placed it on a setting, he was blown away! He told me that it’s the best moissanite he has ever seen!

He also told me that he would be proud if I told people that the entire ring was from his store (which is the most high end jewelry store in my area). He also told me not to ever feel like anyone knows it’s a moissanite because NOBODY could tell it’s not a mined diamond by looking at it! My search is over! I finally found what I want and I hope this helps any of you who are unsure.

Hi all,
It’s already Friday again and time for another weekly update!

First, progress on the patent invalidation with C&C. Apparently the deadline for C&C to file an “owners statement” passed this week with C&C not filing anything (!). This is their one chance to present their side of the case regarding the patent being invalidated.

They also could have apparently extended the window for filing this owners statement by up to six months with some additional legal costs.
We had assumed this was likely.

The short version is that they neither filed to extend the timeline, nor did they even file anything in their own defense, both of which were quite surprising but positive (for us) signs.

C&C did have to file all of the info from the Korean patent invalidation, including prior art that was used there and that resulted in their patent being thrown out in Korea…so the USPTO now has all this info to factor in as well.

The net is that it appears we are on track for a decision at some point in Spring of 2012, and that contrary to C&C’s public claim of vigorously defending their patent, the actuality has been somewhat the opposite. They made these public claims however, *before* they even read the filing…so their opinion on it may have changed a lot after seeing the actual prior art (or evidence if you will) that we submitted.

A positive overall sign and additional progress in the potential outcome of the patent invalidation case.

Of course, the other explanation is that C&C has been too busy managing all their new trinkets they are stocking up on like this new $49 leather bracelet and other costume type jewelry:
http://www.luluavenue.com/bracelets

Lulu Avenue is their new ‘home sales’ program where they apparently plan to offload their included (stones with inclusions or badly cut) moissanite stones that don’t meet their normal “strict” quality standards.

Work continued extensively this week on what we are referring to as ”AMPS”, or the Amora production system. We’re narrowing down the final design and config and should have near final numbers for everything next week. The cost has however gone up now to over 3x what was first envisioned, and so we are going to have to seek external financing to help cover everything. But, that process has already started as well and the initial meeting for the financing went pretty well, but lots and lots of paperwork to fill out next to see if we can get the necessary funding.

On other news related to BTD in general:

1 – Record sales: November sales were up 7% vs a year ago and were record sales overall.
2 – Record traffic: Website traffic in November set new records – daily average of 5,200 unique visitors, and a new all time high of 6,258 unique visitors on Black Friday! We will soon have another message board giveaway to celebrate that!
3 – We are on the cusp of a potentially large supply agreement to supply Asha to a very large company. That may start in 2012 with expansion to all of their locations by the end of the year. We’re working on ensuring we will have enough ability to supply if that does complete.
4 – We have sent in an Amora enhanced round and Amora enhanced Cushion moissanite for video and photos, so we hope we’ll have those out to show as early as next Friday.
5 – Speaking of C&C’s strict quality standards – we’ve continued to process more Amora enhanced moissanite but the reject rate for the Amora enhanced program has become pretty atrocious, with rejects rates hitting as high as 70% in our pre-screening and over 50% for most rounds. This is largely due to cutting issues, but it does mean supply of Amora enhanced Moissanite remains tight simply b/c most Moissanites don’t qualify to enter the enhancement program.

We will work on the latest message board giveaway to celebrate the new website traffic records and try and announce that next week!

Have a great weekend!

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