25 Years of Fancy Color Diamonds on the Internet

They say you can better understand the present by seeing where you’ve come from.

So, let’s do a little time travel, shall we? The year is 1999.

George Lucas has just released The Phantom Menace, another of his Star Wars franchises. Lucas’ latest space-opera released a decade after Return of the Jedi—cemented its cult-like status with movie buffs.

The Birth of www

The internet in its infancy found many curious users stumbling around the disorganized data and then giving up. It demanded a steep learning curve without a guidebook. Everything was being invented in real time. Simultaneously Google launched its search engine, although it didn’t roll out its now iconic logo for another 15 years. Yet, it provided some fundamental order for early info-seeking geeks.

Meanwhile in China

Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma developed e-comm Alibaba Group in 1999 from his apartment with 18 of his friends. By 2020, he stepped down after steering it into a global behemoth. It’s compared to but smaller than Amazon. Still, it’s the dominant e-comm force in China.

Going Online Meant Phoning (from) Home

You had to dial up ---using your landline telephone to access this mysterious world wide web. Dial. Up. And then your phone rang ‘busy’ to any incoming calls. Those were the days.

Our Diamond Dream

It was during these wild-west anything-goes days that we jumped aboard this new way of doing business. In 1999, we registered our first internet entity. www.fancydiamonds.net      

The reaction? Everybody said this idea was absolutely crazy. Of course we heard the incredulous inquiries, “How do you plan to sell fancy color diamonds over the computer?”

People were stunned by the craziness of this idea. But we believed in it. I was always thinking outside the box anyway and thought it just may succeed.

Our First Sale

The first stone we sold on the internet was an important one—1.10 carat deep pink Argyle stone. At that time there was no Argyle certificate—no Argyle inscription either.

That gorgeous stone just sold itself.

And nobody wanted to believe the sale was real until the money arrived in the bank. But it sure did.

Looking Back

On reflection, how the buyer found the diamond and us, I cannot explain to you.  Keep in mind, there was no SEO in those days—no nothing.

It took me most of the day to photograph that stone with a tiny electronic camera. The capacity of the disk was very, very small—it could take only 3 pictures. It also took an hour to take the camera apart and put the disk in the computer.

By the end of the day I had the picture on the internet – what there was of the internet 25 years ago.

The Journey

But every big enterprise and every big journey starts with a small step. That was ours.

And, you know what?  We are still around.

Join me in celebrating a Happy 25^th Anniversary to our courageous, imaginative, bold thinking, visionary pioneer retailers of luxury fancy color diamonds and gems---LEIBISH.