Friday, August 18, 2006
Angara Launches
A few months ago, I mentioned that I was helping create and launch a new luxury brand focused on a speciality area. This week, we launched Angara, what I hope will become the world’s leading online luxury retailer for diamonds and fine jewelry.
Angara’s value proposition is simple: diamonds are industry-driven purchases, and its hard to differentiate between all the offers out in the marketplace. Our research showed that consumers were intrigued by the concept of buying diamonds online, and loved the idea of lower prices, but they don’t want to compromise on the intangibles: feeling good about their purchase, great packaging, classy presentation, and friendly customer service. Angara, through all of its services and features (some are forthcoming) aims to provide the simplest, most inuitive and classiest way to buy quality diamonds and jewelry online.
From a marketing perspective, we ended up finding some really interesting mechanisms to make the value proposition come to life. For example, we convened a team of diamond experts and consumer novices to understand how to enhance the construct of the “4Cs”. Historically, the diamond industry used the 4C’s to set prices and create comparability. In reality, there are several other parameters used to determine the quality of a diamond: symmetry, polish, girdle, table, etc. That’s why two diamonds that have almost identical 4Cs may differ in price. Keeping all this in mind, Angara created a rating system for the quality of diamonds that’s based on the 4Cs (well, 3Cs since “carat” is an indication of weight and not quality) as well as a dozen other parameters that affect the quality of a diamond. The result is a Zagat-style rating on a scale of 1-100 called The Angara Rating.
It feels like I’ve given birth! Lots more work to do, but it really does feel good to have it out there and living!