De Beers' Neal Sussman enlists the help of Venda Inc. to bring class and clarity to the diamond company's website.

By Vitisia Paynich

"Good things come in small packages" is an adage often used to describe the most personal and precious gifts: diamonds. Or more to the point, a diamond engagement ring.

For De Beers, one of the foremost diamond companies in the world, helping customers to select the perfect piece of jewelry for that special occasion begins by creating an enhanced online experience.

When Marketing Director Neal Sussman joined the company in September 2006, he and fellow De Beers colleagues took a long, hard look at their website and recognized that changes were needed.

"We decided we wanted to gain e-commerce, and we wanted a more luxurious website," recalls Sussman. What's more, De Beers wanted to drive more traffic to the site and then to its boutiques located around the globe.

The next step meant finding a reliable vendor to take on the project. In October, Sussman and his team drafted a brief and distributed it to a number of vendors. The vendor list included companies in the U.S., Canada and a few in the UK. De Beers narrowed the search to three vendors during the second round. According to Sussman, it really came down to the company that had a one-stop shop.

He says, "In terms of a website, it's more important to have a backend with good functionality." Sussman adds that the team encountered companies "that had great design ideas but had no backend. They had never done it before, or they simply farmed it out to other people."

Venda Inc., a leading e-commerce solutions and service provider, offered De Beers the whole package.

Jeff Max, CEO of Venda, explains that his company's offerings are two-fold. One is an out-of-the box e-commerce platform that provides adequate capacity and flexibility. And the second is an "all-inclusive element of the service, which means that [we] deliver site design and the creative," he says.

The fact that he didn't need to rely on different vendors to handle various aspects of the website project definitely appealed to Sussman. Thus, in January 2007, De Beers signed the contract with Venda. One of the earlier challenges, according to Sussman, was the fact that the company not only wanted to launch its new European site by June 2007, but also its U.S. and Japanese sites simultaneously.

De Beers wanted a site that appealed to both online and traditional shoppers.

MAPPING OUT THE SITE
Venda and De Beers couldn't afford to waste much time, especially when working on three websites in a five-month time frame. "De Beers represents the pinnacle of a quality brand and sophistication," notes Max. "So, the challenge was communicating those brand values to the customer--not just in the visuals of the website, but in the performance of the website, in the display of the products and in the full front-to-back shopping experience."

Since shoppers would be making considerable purchases, their online encounter had to be elegant, smooth, intuitive and easy. "Conveying that sense of confidence and security was paramount," Max says, as was communicating the same richness of the purchasing experience shoppers would find when visiting a De Beers boutique.

He explains that there was a certain set of products that De Beers was very keen on selling through the online channel, but the company also wanted the site to direct shoppers to a De Beers store or boutique.

"De Beers certainly has a very explicit view of their brand identity. And, the challenge for us is: How do you leverage that brand identity in the most attractive and compelling and revenue-generating way," says Max, "because a lot of sites will veer too far into the brand identity and that takes away from the experience of what these sites are really about, which is sales." He adds that the De Beers site is a perfect example of blending a very unique and attractive interface and design with best practices around site construction, site layout, search and product display.

One of the major changes to the design was simply going from a white background to a black background to create a richer overall look. This would make the products displayed online more attractive and compelling.

Next, Sussman and his team addressed the products themselves. "We had to re-shoot all of our products we were putting on the web with a black background. Whenever you do something new, you kind of reselect everything--so we literally started from scratch," he says.

This entailed looking at each of the jewelry collections, including their bridal, and pinpointing the best sellers and new products they wanted to introduce, then photographing them.

In addition to the photography, notes Sussman, "we had to write all the copy for the products and the rest of the site, and we had to do all of this before we could really hand it over to Venda."

Despite all the changes that needed to be completed, he says that the five-month process went relatively smoothly. Much of that was due to Venda's account handler, who kept the project on course. "We'd see her each week and she would have a long list of maybe 500 tasks that she would gradually knock off one by one," says Sussman.

He distinctly recalls one challenging task that required translating all of the English text to Japanese for their other site. "You can imagine the time and effort it took," Sussman points out. "It was a huge amount of work from the whole team."

EASY NAVIGATION
Sussman wanted the site to serve as an extension of the De Beers brand and one that enabled visitors to navigate with ease. Sussman points out that as an e-commerce tool, the site needed to be user-friendly "so that our customers could come on, find information easily and purchase easily."

In addition, it was important to provide detailed product information and a regularly updated FAQs page. De Beers also wanted a place where visitors could register to receive new collection updates or a company catalog. While Sussman says there are plans to do more e-mail marketing, he quickly points out that they have no intention of abusing their customers' information.

De Beers: Looking Back

Following is an excerpt from the De Beers Group's timeline, which chronicles the company's early beginnings. In 1871, brothers Johannes Nicholas and Diederik Arnoldus de Beer sold their farm Vooruitzigt to Dunell Ebden & Co. The farm was to be the site of both the De Beers mine, as well as the Kimberley mine. Meanwhile, in 1870, a 17-year-old Englishman, Cecil Rhodes, had arrived in South Africa. He followed his brother to the "New Rush" diggings in 1871, where his ability to form successful enterprises found fertile ground. He realized that individual claims would become uneconomic at depth, and so he combined his brother's claims with those of his neighbor, Charles Rudd. In 1872, the two partners brought an ice-making machine from England and sold ice to the diggers working under the warm African sun. With the profits, they bought more claims. In 1876, all restrictions on the number of claims that could be owned by an individual were dropped, and the chaos of 3,600 individual claims was reduced to 98 syndicated holdings by 1880. The scene was set for an era of mergers and acquisitions on the diamond fields. The year 1880 saw the start of protracted battles for overall control of the diamond fields between Rhodes and peddler-turned-diamond magnate, Barney Barnato. In April, Rhodes and Rudd formed a company to amalgamate their holdings in the De Beers mine. In the same year, Barnato and his family formed the Barnato Diamond Mining Company, to build up their claims in the much richer Kimberley mine. Through a series of mergers, Barnato managed, by 1887, to engineer for himself a dominant position in the Kimberley mine. Rhodes, however, had meanwhile acquired 20 percent of the merged entity, and the battle proper commenced. Both sides ramped up production to destructive levels, and began buying up Kimberley Central stock, driving its share price up. Eventually, Rhodes' tactical prowess and the deep pockets of his financiers won the day, and Barnato was forced to capitulate to a merger with De Beers. De Beers Consolidated Mines Limited was established on March 12, 1888, with Rhodes as its founding chairman. Its assets included the whole of De Beers Mine, three quarters of Kimberley Mine, and a controlling interest in Bultfontein and Dutoitspan mines. Cecil Rhodes, Barney Barnato, F.S. Philipson-Stow and Alfred Beit, the major shareholders, were appointed life governors of the company. De Beers was granted an official listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in August 1893. Barnato died in mysterious circumstances in 1897, while at sea en route to England. Rhodes died peacefully in the Cape Province in 1902. Source: www.debeersgroup.com

"We don't want our clients to think that if they sign up with us, we are going to [inundate] them with information," he affirms. "We like to do it at a reasonable pace, not once a week. When we have an interesting launch, we would like to let them know what's happening, but it won't be a case where every week, they'll be bombarded by e-mail."

AN ONLINE GEM
On June 4, all three De Beers sites launched. "One of the significant challenges was saying in October, that we're going to launch a brand-new e-commerce site and have it ready by June. The timeline we set ourselves was daunting, but we met our deadline," says Sussman.

What he found most ironic was the fact that other vendors warned him that some sites might take anywhere from 18 months to two years to complete, which makes De Beers' five-month time frame absolutely phenomenal.

According to Max, any site that comes in within normal constraints--as long as there isn't excessive integration or custom development--can reasonably be completed by Venda in a 20-week time frame.

Overall, De Beers was very pleased with the work that Venda did on the site. Max points out that his company's work didn't end once the sites were launched. "The fees that De Beers pays us cover all of their software, maintenance, bandwidth hosting and site monitoring. So, all of those areas, where typically a merchant or client would have to go in and find different suppliers to deliver those pieces and make them all work together, was integrated and complete right out of the box," he says. Those services included the e-commerce platform, site search technology and the rich imaging zoom capability.

"Everybody who has seen it thinks it's a fantastic site," explains Sussman. "We had one person who did a lot of research on our site. He was looking for a ring. And after he finished his research online, he called up our store. The customer didn't want to buy it online, but wanted to actually see it. So, he drove to our New York store, which was two hours away, and bought the ring there."

Sussman says what's nice is the fact that there are a lot of people who use the brand-new De Beers site as a research tool to find out more about their products, and also to locate a boutique to make the purchase in person. He adds that there is an equal number of people who are comfortable buying product on the company's site.

Max says that working with Sussman and De Beers has been very gratifying. He adds that the De Beers project shows that the deployment of an e-commerce site has moved into a new dimension, where the process "doesn't have to be painful. Instead, it can be a beautiful, compelling and successful [experience]."