GEM - by The Clear Cut

The Clear Cut is a fast-growing natural diamond and Jewelry company based in New York City. Founded by Forbes 30 u 30, 4th generation GIA diamond expert Olivia Landau, The Clear Cut is a startup known for its unique crafting approach to engagement rings. Our exponential growth and success result from a pull of young minds that together thrive and foster new creative ideas that constantly aim at elevating the diamond purchasing experience through a unique proprietary software - GEM.

  • Throughout my two years at The Clear Cut, I have worked alongside the branding team and released a new website design, refreshing all pages, including the Homepage, Products page, Learn, and My account sections. On top of that, I have handled the maintenance of the Shopify account. Duties include Product, Themes, Blogs, and Analytics management.

  • Alongside a third-party development firm, Authentic, I have managed the development of the first-ever NFT for diamonds. The Clear Cut thrives on innovation, and we were proud to release a product that allows people to store and safe keep all documentation on the blockchain.

  • GEM was, by far, the most interesting and complicated part of my job at The Clear Cut. GEM is proprietary software owned and invented by Kyle Simon & Olivia Landau. It was created with the purpose of allowing people to purchase diamonds remotely. My responsibility was to further develop and manage the platform. Over the two years, I have scaled and allowed the platform to substantially improve with over a hundred new features and updates.

Product Development Process

  • User Research

    The first step toward the release of a new feature or update is User Research. Whether it is a problem or a need the customer or the gemologists have, the first step is to seat down and understand what exactly we need to solve for. The strategies implemented were: Focus groups, Interviews, Observation, and Testing.

  • Conceptualize

    Once the need is identified, I would work on mapping out the logic of the new feature flow. It was very important, at this stage, to create a clear path that would explain to both the stakeholders and the developers, the solution to the problem. Strategies used were: User case maps, User Journey maps, and Personas.

  • Design

    Working alongside the Seasoned design team, I have identified and designed over a hundred of features and updates for GEM. This stage was very collaborative and included multiple drafts and attempts that were ultimately presented to the developers, who are going to provide an estimate, and approved by myself and the owners.

  • Implement

    The success of a feature’s design did not depend only on its functionality, but also on its cost. As the lead Design Strategist and Project Manager on the TCC team, it was my responsibility to understand how to make a feature as cost-efficient as possible. That meant understanding timelines, development hours, how complicated it was to create something, and what alternatives we had.

    Once everything was approved, it was my responsibility to stay on top of the development team, Seasoned, and guarantee the delivery of all features on time.

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