Chris Learey/Selected work/Case study

New Product Line · Design Lead

One back office, every way to buy the ring

Jewellers configure their shop once. Their customers build a custom engagement ring from over a million diamonds, online or across the counter in a showroom. Same catalogue, same engine, every surface.

Choice is the enemy here, a million stones, every metal, every setting. The design job was to turn that into a calm, guided build, and to do it twice: self-serve on the web and assisted in the showroom. I led the line as design lead, a designer to each surface, and we took it from $0 to ~$1M ARR in the first year.
Exhibit 01, Live & interactive

The ring builder

The real configurator, production code, embedded here on mobile. Pick a diamond, a setting and a metal, and watch the ring resolve. The same engine runs inside the Shopify storefront and the showroom tablet.

live · interactive · mobile Build a ring
My role
Design lead for the product line. I set product & design strategy, hired and led a designer for each surface, and owned the cross-surface system and the configurator UX, end to end
Context
Nivoda, a global B2B jewellery marketplace, productising its catalogue as SaaS for the jewellers it supplies
Duration
First year, $0 to ~$1M ARR
Stack
Shopify app · web ring builder · iPad showroom app · Nivoda catalogue API (1M+ stones)
What shipped
Back-office configurator · Shopify app with embedded ring builder · showroom tablet consultation app · one shared configurator engine
Three surfaces, one spine. Configure in the back office and it propagates, untouched, to every place a consumer can buy.
~$1M
ARR in year one, from zero
~$800K
of it recurring SaaS subscription
1M+
diamonds, gemstones & melee a consumer can build from

A million stones is a curse at the point of sale

Nivoda's edge is supply: over a million diamonds and gemstones, natural and lab-grown, white and fancy colour, plus settings, metals and melee. For a jeweller, that's inventory they could never hold. For a consumer at the buying moment, it's paralysis. And jewellers had no good way to put that catalogue in front of their customers, online or in store, without rebuilding it themselves.

  • Overwhelming choice. A million SKUs is a spreadsheet, not a shopping experience.
  • No shared surface. Each jeweller's website, and their showroom, was a separate, manual build.
  • Two opposite buying moments. Self-serve online and assisted in-store want very different things from the same catalogue.
The asset and the obstacle were the same thing: the size of the catalogue. The whole design problem was making that size feel like range, not noise.

Configure once, sell the ring everywhere

One back office, owned by the jeweller, curates the catalogue: the stones, the metals they'll sell, the settings, the markups. Everything downstream inherits it. Consumers never meet a million options; they meet the jeweller's curated shop, with a guided build on top of it.

And the build itself is one engine, embedded in two consumer surfaces, so the experience is the same whether someone configures a ring at midnight on their phone or beside a sales consultant on a tablet.

Back office jeweller curates the shop Curated catalogue & config stock · variants · metals · settings · markups · 1M+ stones propagates, untouched, to both consumer surfaces Shopify app D2C storefront · consumer, online Showroom tablet assisted sales · consultant, in-store Ring builder · configurator one engine, embedded in both surfaces A custom ring configured, then checked out
One back office powers two consumer surfaces, online and in-store, both running the same configurator. Configure once, sell the ring everywhere.

Three surfaces, one system

1 · The back office, where it all starts

The jeweller-facing tool, on Nivoda's core platform. It's where a jeweller curates their digital shop: which stones and jewellery they'll carry, which metals and variants they'll offer, and the markups they'll charge. Set it here and it flows, unedited, into every consumer surface. This is the surface that makes the other two possible, and the reason the catalogue's size never reaches the customer as noise.

Screenshot to add Back-office configurator, curating selection, variants and markups
What I believe: the most important screen in a consumer product is sometimes the one the consumer never sees. Curation upstream is what buys calm downstream.

2 · The Shopify app and ring builder

The online surface. The Shopify app pipes the jeweller's curated diamonds, gemstones and jewellery straight into their own website, and the ring builder lets an end consumer build a fully custom engagement ring: any stone from the million-plus catalogue, white or fancy colour, natural or lab-grown, plus gemstones and melee. It was designed mobile-first, because that's where most people first meet the ring.

Choose stone Setting Metal Review Checkout
The same five-step build runs on the phone and on the showroom tablet, themed for self-serve or assisted sale.
What I believe: a custom configurator should feel like narrowing, not searching. Each step removes a million dead ends and shows one beautiful thing.

3 · The showroom tablet, assisted sales

The in-store surface, a tablet app built as a consultation tool for assisted sales. It runs the same configurator, but the experience is more immersive: a guided question flow, big imagery and video, the kind of glossy, shared screen a consultant and a customer lean over together. It augments a human sale; it doesn't replace it. Same engine as the web, opposite posture.

Screenshot to add Showroom tablet, the guided, immersive consultation flow

The decisions that shaped it

A handful of calls set the whole line, the opinion is the artifact:

  • One configurator engine, two surfaces. I resisted building separate web and tablet flows. Divergence is a cost you pay forever; one engine, themed per context, is paid once.
  • Curation over search. The back office decides what a shop sells; the consumer gets a curated build, never a million-row search. The catalogue's scale is a backstage asset, not a front-stage burden.
  • Mobile-first for the storefront. Most consumers meet the ring on a phone, so the web builder was designed mobile-first and scaled up, not the reverse.
  • Assisted, not automated, in the showroom. The tablet is glossy and immersive on purpose, big stones and video, so consultant and customer look at it together. The goal is a better conversation, not a self-checkout.
The throughline: push complexity upstream, into the back office and one shared engine, so every consumer surface stays simple by construction.

A designer to each surface, one direction

Beyond the screens, what the role actually was:

  • Led the line. Design lead for the product line, I hired and led a designer for each surface and held a single direction across all three.
  • Strategy to pixels. Product and design strategy at the top, hands-on configurator UX at the bottom, and the system that connected them in between.
  • Built the spine, not three silos. Shared patterns and one configurator engine kept the surfaces feeling like a single product, not three apps wearing the same logo.
  • Anchored to the commercials. I designed against ARR and GMV, not just usability. The configurator is the revenue surface, so its conversion was a design metric, not an afterthought.

What it became

  • $0 to ~$1M ARR in year one, a new product line stood up from nothing.
  • ~$800K of recurring SaaS, plus marketplace GMV and commission on the stones worth multiples more.
  • Three live surfaces from one back office, back-office configurator, Shopify app + ring builder, showroom tablet.
  • A configurator real enough to ship, and to play with, embedded live at the top of this page.

And the subscription line undersells it. The SaaS is the visible tip; the business underneath is the marketplace GMV and the commission earned on every stone the configurator sells:

Marketplace GMV + commission earned on every stone sold through the build multiples of the SaaS line (placeholder) SaaS subscription ~$800K ARR waterline visible below the surface
The subscription is the tip. The business underneath is the GMV and commission on every stone the configurator sells, worth multiples more. (Figures placeholder.)

Configure once. Sell the ring everywhere.

Shopify app Ring builder / configurator iPad showroom app Nivoda catalogue API 1M+ stone inventory React TypeScript Figma PostHog