Transparent Diamond Pricing Grows a Brand Organically with Juan Rodriguez of Calavera New York
Juan Rodriguez is CEO of Calavera New York, a loose diamond and fine jewelry e-commerce retailer. We sat down with him at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville, where he came to look at SaaS companies and ad agencies and to learn what he could about GEO and SEO, with one goal in mind, growing the brand organically.
A Reddit Ad With a Price and Nothing Else
Juan said the organic growth started partly by accident. When Calavera New York launched, it ran a lot of ads on Reddit, and a community formed around the brand.
“They talked a lot about our brand and suggested our brand to other people and that had a positive impact on GEO but also SEO as well,” he says.
Reddit users are sophisticated shoppers who know when they are being ripped off, so the ads stayed plain.
“Most of our advertising on Reddit has been, hey, this diamond was this price on Calavera New York dot com. And that’s it. That’s our ad,” he says.
The brand started in niche communities for jewelers and people interested in lab and natural diamonds, and they appreciated a place to get a large discount.
From Jewelers to D2C
Calavera New York began by selling loose diamonds, which leaned B2B, because jewelers could buy from it for less than from their usual supplier. As the business grew it pushed into D2C, upgraded the user experience, improved customer service and made the site easier for someone shopping for an engagement ring for the first time. Today about a third of revenue comes from finished jewelry, and the line is expanding from engagement rings into bracelets, necklaces, pendants and wedding bands.
The traffic mix has shifted too. At launch it was all paid social. Now the site sees more visitors on the same ad spend.
“According to Google Analytics, a lot of it is coming from LLMs and also directly from search,” he says.
Two Million Unique SKUs
Every diamond is independently graded, so no two are the same product.
“So we have over two million SKUs on the website and it causes a lot of friction,” he says.
Third-party fulfillment is out, adding context to each listing is hard when about a hundred thousand SKUs move in and out every day, and shipping insurance matters more when every order is a high-value good. Calavera New York learned early to require a signature.
AI Labeled as AI
Juan has an engineering background and likes the technology, but he keeps it out of the brand’s voice.
“I’ve never used AI for organic content on social media or for advertising,” he says.
With an average order value over a thousand dollars, shoppers worry about scams, and customer service stays with real people. The one exception is an AI gemologist, trained on gemological information and labeled as AI so customers know what they are talking to.
Sales and Discounts Are a Scam
Juan’s hot take for Shoptalk was that he will never run a sale. Discounts add operational overhead, make revenue hard to forecast, and in his view are not fair to the customer when the cost of goods has not changed.
“Once you start you can’t stop and that’s that’s why I’m extremely careful to ever do that. We don’t even have a somewhere to enter a coupon code on our website,” he says.
Find Calavera New York at calaveranewyork.com, and learn more about our at-event interviews at talk-commerce.com/events.