Verichannel Opens Consumer Market To Suppliers—While Supporting Retailers

New York, NY – January 31, 2013 – Verichannel announced today the opening of an online gateway that will allow diamond and jewelry suppliers to showcase product to consumers, while supporting, not competing with, retail stores. The patent-pending technology that makes it possible has been added to the consumer-facing site gemfling.com, and provides the ability for diamond and jewelry suppliers to offer non-branded product directly to consumers, with the nearest authorized retailer appearing as the contact point for the consumer.

An IP-detect system is used to identify the location of the consumer. The supplier pre-loads their affiliated retail stores into a database, along with the supplier's diamond or jewelry product. When the consumer sees a particular item, the nearest "authorized" retailer is shown along with it. The supplier is thus promoting the product directly to the consumer, while helping drive new customers to the retailer.

"Suppliers of branded product have always been able to market directly to the consumer," explained Verichannel CEO Jacques Voorhees. "Non-branded product suppliers have had no way to do this. As a result, they have been left to compete largely on price, with resulting erosion of profit margin–especially in the diamond market. The new Gemfling technology provides an alternative: promotion direct to the consumer, while still supporting the retail store channel and/or a company's e-tail desk."

"Verichannel is deploying state-of-the-art SEO techniques, to ensure Gemfling itself ranks high in the search engines," explained Krista Olson, VP/Marketing. "Because we're building a directory structure for all product and companies in the industry, we are able to design the site in a way that will drive traffic heavily through search-engine ranking, especially for local searches which is where the real action is. This means both companies and product can more readily be found by consumers inside of Gemfling, than those companies could typically achieve as standalone businesses."

"Google lists 809 million links under the key word 'jewelry,' noted Voorhees. "Needles can be found in haystacks more easily than many jewelry companies can be found on the Internet. Gemfling, which is a specialty search engine with specialty filters, makes it far easier for consumers and vendors to find each other." Gemfling's directory-structure, for driving traffic, launches in March, 2013.

For more information, visit gemfling.com, or contact Krista Olson, +1-623-551-3338. ([email protected])

Background on Verichannel
Verichannel is a private company that operates jewelry-industry search engines. These include DailyDiamondReport, a database of stones recently graded by the primary gem labs; IJO Diamonds, a searchable database for jewelers sourcing from IJO suppliers; FMX, a private trading platform for Forevermark diamonds and jewelry, and Worldmart*E, a B2B search engine in China that is fueled by Verichannel's diamond feed. Gemfling.com is the company's consumer-facing search engine. Verichannel was founded by Jacques Voorhees, formerly of Polygon, and Bill Boyajian, past-president of GIA. I. Hennig & Co., the primary broker for companies seeking to source diamonds directly from De Beers, is a lead investor.