Lean Green Gems - The idea

Gemstones always come with an environmental cost and sometimes a human one. For people who care about the environment and don’t like supporting 3rd world conflicts, buying synthetic gems is the best choice. With glass (and other materials with a higher index of refraction) it’s possible to make beautiful gems in almost any color and clarity. Also, if you are picky at all, it’s possible go through a store and see hundreds of different rings, earrings, and necklaces without seeing anything you like. There are far more jewelry design possibilities than can be reasonably stored in a brick-and-mortar store.

The best solution is jewerly-on-demand. A consumer goes into the shop and goes to one of the kiosks to start browsing for jewelry.  Selecting a type of jewelry or a stone color gives the user a set of options to pick from. Selecting the best few and getting similar items is the next step. After repeatedly pruning for several rounds, a fairly small range of jewelry is shown. The last step is to fine tune any properties of the jewelry: cut, color, index of refraction and translucency of the stones, the material used, and any other details or small flourishes. Once the selection has been made, the customer will get to see a detailed rendering of what the piece will look like and how it will look in different lighting. If they are happy with how it looks, they checkout at the kiosk and get an estimate for how long the piece will take to make. The order then goes to the manufacturing facility.

At the manufacturing facility, the workers heat up the glass or other base material into their liquid state, add chemicals to change the color and translucency then pour the glass into the gem mold. After cooling, the ‘gem’ is then cut into the perfect shape and set into the setting (which was made while the gem was cooling. This entire process should take only a few hours. If there is no backlog, then customers could get their jewelry delivered the same or next day.