The Diamond Girls

Oct 10

In their own words

“I always say that the closest thing we are, because we’re not your standard jeweler, is like a real estate agent. You sit down with them and say, ‘I want to buy a house. Here’s how many square feet I want, and here’s the price I want to pay.’ And it’s their job to find it. That’s what we do for jewelry. We’ve got a seating area with a bar and wine fridge, and we make cocktails. We make it fun and easy.”

-Lisa Zimowsky

Jason’s Interview with Lisa

Jason

We're back on Meet the Jewelers and today we're talking to Lisa from The Diamond Girls in Boise, Idaho. How did you get into the industry?

Lisa

I started in jewelry when I was sixteen years old in a little gold booth in the middle of the mall, back when Black Hills gold was so cool. The booth was owned by a jewelry store right next to the booth that told me, “If we're ever busy, you need to come in and help people.” On one occasion, I went in there and helped, and they were asking diamond questions. I didn't know anything because I'd never sold. I had people train me on it and I thought it was fascinating. I'm kind of a science nerd, so I love the science behind the diamonds and gems.

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Originally, I wanted to be a pediatric heart surgeon. I didn’t like that I would lose a lot of patients and I didn't think I could handle that. I went into sports medicine in college, but the entire time, I worked at a jewelry store throughout college. When I got out, one of my really good friends that I had worked in jewelry with had moved on to a wholesale company. She was traveling and doing vintage and estate shows, trunk shows with jewelers and loose diamonds, and she was like, “Well, we're looking to hire.” At twenty-two, that sounded like fun, traveling the world, so I went with her. She is now my business partner at this store.

Jason
What was the journey like?

Lisa
Oddly, it was from a bad scenario. The boss of our wholesale company embezzled and got put in jail. We had to shut it down and help prove the case. We were working with the forensic accountants and the district attorneys. Once we got through all that, Natalie just said to me, “You know, we built that company. I don't want to build anything else for anybody else. If I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it on my own. I want to start something.”

We started appointment-only in a little private office, we didn't even have a sign, just did some radio ads and word of mouth and grew from there. We moved to our downtown store about five years ago and it's been really awesome for us.

Jason
What does it feel like to go inside your store?

Lisa
We're very low-key. We have a good selection of inventory, but our whole concept is low overhead. Jewelry gets overnighted. Diamonds get overnighted. For us, it makes the most sense to meet with a client, find out exactly what they're looking for, and then order several options of that, rather than try to guess what somebody's going to walk through the door and want. We have a good selection to show people, but we try to focus, find out what they want, and then go find it. We’re not really your standard jeweler. We've got a little seating area, a bar, a beer fridge, cocktails, and we just hang out and make it fun. We're really not salespeople.

When Natalie and I met, we worked for a mall jeweler. When we worked there, we were not trained much about diamonds. We were not very educated. They trained us how to sell, how to turn over, all these sales techniques. I always felt so smarmy and pushy, and neither of us liked that technique.

Jason
Tell us about the causes that you support.

Lisa
Before we started our company, we actually looked into starting a nonprofit. Charity work is very important to us, giving back to our community. We met with an attorney to start a nonprofit, they said in the state of Idaho, we have more nonprofits per capita than any other state. He said, “You'd be better off finding a charity that aligns with what you want to do versus trying to start your own.” So that's what we did. At this point, we’ve given to over thirty local and national charities consistently. One of our favorites is American Cancer Society, the local chapter, because they do a lot for our local community, Leukemia Lymphoma Society locally. There's a local charity called Jayden DeLuca Foundation that does children's heart disease and heart research. Dress for Success, the Boise chapter, is huge because it supports women and getting women back into the workforce. We work with them every single year at their gala.

Our goal is to get the most money for the charity out of whatever item we donate.

Jason
Tell us what makes you different.

Lisa
The biggest thing that makes us different than a lot of brick and mortar stores is online sales. We started our business in the worst of the economy. We were appraising at the time and everybody was buying diamonds online and bringing them to us. They didn't even know if they bought a diamond half the time. They came to us because they were scared and needed verification. We thought, “We can match these prices and actually get them for people to look at before they buy. Our product process has always been Internet competitive. We do a huge custom business. We really love taking somebody’s design and making it a reality, rather than a stock piece that everybody has.

Jason
Tell us about your custom experience.

Lisa
It really depends on the type of piece. We have a designer that we work with that’s a wholesale private designer. He did J. Lo and Beyoncé’s rings for Lorraine Schwartz. He does high-end custom pieces. He's kind of a diva, but he's an artist and does everything by hand. If somebody has something super intricate that needs to be done by hand, we use him. We probably won't get a lot of CAD work done on it. We're probably not going to see much before it just shows up perfectly done. It's just how he works. If somebody’s more visual and they need to see it step-by-step, we have that option, too. We tailor the custom experience to what the person needs. Some people are more visual, so we have different designers that we use, depending on what the customer needs.

Jason
How long does the process typically take? And can you do in-person and online - a combination?

Lisa
We do a combination. Most of the guys coming in for engagement rings, they have pictures already of what the girl wants. So, if I can avoid that initial meeting, where they can just text me pictures ahead of time and say, “This is what she's looking for.” I can have everything there to look at, just to save everybody time. But if they're not 100% sure, then we set up an initial meeting, that's thirty minutes to an hour max to kind of get an idea. Then we go to work for them, order stuff in, and set a second meeting to look at everything.

Jason
Tell us a really exciting proposal.

Lisa
My favorite, and this wasn't necessarily the proposal, but we did Ronda Rousey’s ring. Her husband, Travis, flew into Boise to pick the ring. We custom-made it. She picked a very dainty rose gold ring, which I thought was so odd for someone so tough and rugged. I warned him, rose gold doesn't always wear the best and dainty rings don't always wear the best. I'm like, “She may lose side diamonds, she needs to be very careful with it.” And he's like, “Okay, I'll talk to her about it.” He did, and she decided, “Nope, she wants that style. If something happens, they'll deal with it.” Within a couple months she crushed it at a wrestling match. So we fixed it. At this point, it's time to put the wedding band on. So, I'm like, “Well, we're going to solder the wedding band together to make it a thicker piece and it'll hopefully not have issues.” When she was getting inducted into the MMA Hall of Fame, she was in New York City for a ceremony, and she was getting into a car, and her husband sat on her ring and crushed it. He went to rip it out from underneath him and completely bent it. We just completely remade it. I made it a little thicker, not width-wise because she still wanted it very dainty and narrow across the top, but I added more thickness underneath so that hopefully we won't have this issue. That's probably one of my favorites because she's such a tough chick and she crushed her ring twice.

Jason
This is your platform to share whatever you like.

Lisa
We try to be the best at what we do, the most educated. We're always trying to learn. We're here to be your advocate. It's kind of a confusing industry, you've got different labs that grade different ways and the consumer doesn't know that, they don't understand why one stone may be cheaper than another. It's our job to look out for the consumer. We have standards that we follow whether they want to know about the details or don't want to know about the details. It's always something that we're proud to sell and that we would personally wear. We definitely want what's out there with our name on it to be beautiful and reflect good on what we do as a business.