Signet Jewelers, seeking to strengthen the luxury positioning and level of service at its Blue Nile brand, is purchasing The Clear Cut.
The Clear Cut is a small, New York-based, digitally native natural diamond jewelry brand known for its bespoke bridal and fine jewelry, and personalized service. The company creates custom rings with diamonds, and guides customers through the entire shopping journey from initial conversations with gemologists, to the appraisals, down to the shipping.
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The Clear Cut will be integrated into Blue Nile, which is one of Signet’s four core brands along with Zales, Kay and Jared. Blue Nile has been undergoing a major repositioning to what the company describes as “elevated luxury jewelry anchored in natural diamonds,” and to differentiate itself from the other Signet brands, at the highest price spectrum of the portfolio.
A definitive agreement with The Clear Cut has been signed and the deal is expected to close in a matter of days. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
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Joan Hilson, Signet’s chief operating and financial officer, told WWD the acquisition, while not financially material to the $6.8 billion Signet business, is all about integrating The Clear Cut’s capabilities into Blue Nile, specifically its personalized service and gemological expertise. Such features are geared to make it easier and less intimidating for customers choosing an engagement ring and other expensive diamond jewelry, ultimately generating better conversion rates.
“Thirty-nine percent of Blue Nile’s bridal transactions in 2025 were $10,000 or above, and with The Clear Cut acquisition, our aim is to grow that,” Hilson said during an interview.
According to The Clear Cut, its average order value is nearly $30,000. The business generated more than 21 million TikTok views last year with no paid media spend. More than 75 percent of its audience is under age 35 and 88 percent of the social audience is female.
“We have a shared vision for the future of natural diamonds,” Olivia Landau, cofounder and chief executive officer of The Clear Cut, told WWD.
She said she’s a fourth-generation jeweler and Gemological Institute of America graduate gemologist. She met Kyle Simon, TCC’s cofounder and chief operating officer, at the GIA, where he studied diamonds. Simon also has experience working in mining and supply chain jobs.
“We started as an educational blog and through social media, started making engagement rings for friends, classmates, and then people following us online,” Landau said. “We realized there was a big white space in the market where people needed to learn more about natural diamonds and wanted a customized experience. So we did everything very painfully and unscalably to build our proprietary software ‘Gem.’ Our goal was to democratize the private jewelry experience using technology alongside human expertise to really help curate and guide the customer with a white glove experience.”
Added Simon, “We specialize in the higher-end customers, higher average order values, and all-natural diamonds with larger carat weights.”
Blue Nile will be benefiting from TCC’s AI engine called Eunice, which was built on TCC’s proprietary Gem software. Eunice — named after Eunice Miles, the first female gemologist — helps predict demand, optimize pricing and analyze conversations between TCC gemologists, equipping them with insights on market behavior and customers so they can curate with greater precision and speed for a bespoke digital experience and efficient customer engagements.
“Eunice is actually a back-end tool, so she never interacts with the client directly,” Landau explained. “Our clients are first matched up with a gemologist. They usually have an initial phone consultation so we understand their preferences. We set them up in their personalized Gem ‘portal’ matching them up with GIA graduate gemologists, and they’re constantly talking directly to their human gemologists.
“On the back-end, we handpick and curate a selection of diamonds specifically for what they’re looking for…This industry is not the most technologically advanced, so we had to build a lot of the tools ourselves.”
“One of the things that attracted us to The Clear Cut,” said Hilson, “was that among their clients who purchased, more than half of them selected a diamond from their first curated set of recommendations from The Clear Cut team. So the team, through their software and technology, has been able to curate and make strong recommendations, and with that, purchases have averaged nearly $30,000 with a median of two days from offer to selection.”
Asked what are The Clear Cut’s bestsellers, Landau answered, “Two-and-a-half to four carats is kind of a sweet spot. We’re seeing people lean towards more warmer tones, more champagnes or light yellows in the natural diamonds recently. In terms of styles of engagement rings, solitaires are always going to be very popular, but we’ve seen people embracing more unique designs, more sculptural, more organic, and more interesting bridal designs. And in terms of our fine jewelry, we really focus on the classics — natural diamond tennis bracelets, tennis necklaces, studs, and statement rings.”
“We’re most excited to be having access to Signet’s diamond inventory and we’re already talking about how to best enable those opportunities,” Simon said. “We have had a very small amount of inventory and we mainly worked on a consignment basis, which has its pros and cons.” Blue Nile and TCC will further benefit by being able to share customers.
“This acquisition comes at a moment when [Signet’s] Grow Brand Love strategy is in high gear. Signet is gaining momentum, and Blue Nile is ready to take its next step, bringing in proven expertise via The Clear Cut team,” Hilson said.
“Kyle and Olivia will allow us to accelerate in our natural diamond leadership and invest in a more elevated and differentiated customer experience for the Blue Nile customer. We recently shared our intent to up-tier Blue Nile, as part of our broader Grow Brand Love strategy, with a clear focus on natural diamonds and attracting higher value customers. And as we looked at what it takes to do that, it became very clear that we needed to move quickly and thoughtfully to build or buy the right capabilities. And this is where The Clear Cut brings the capabilities we believe Blue Nile really can benefit from.”
“Today’s luxury consumer is seeking a more concierge-led personalized experience, particularly in a category that can be complex or intimidating,” Hilson added. “Olivia and Kyle and The Clear Cut team have deep gemological expertise, a highly curated fine jewelry assortment, and technology built to simplify the diamond buying journey. So we believe that this idea of curation, diamond expertise and their software bringing a concierge-type experience to lead the customer through the journey is really what’s going to help elevate the Blue Nile brand and bring more customers to Blue Nile.”
Hilson said that over the balance of this year it’s expected that The Clear Cut would be “fully integrated” within the Blue Nile business. She said The Clear Cut name will be maintained.
She also said no other acquisitions are currently being pursued.
Signet’s “Grow Brand Love” transformation strategy is in its second year. It involves efforts to differentiate the four core brands, bring greater style and design-led items to the assortments, pump up bridal jewelry, and centralize certain functions and consolidate some brands in pursuit of operating efficiencies and greater agility.
Through these actions, Signet saved $60 million last year, and expects to save $40 million this year.
Among the maneuvers, James Allen has become a proprietary brand within the Blue Nile website and jamesallen.com is being discontinued. Also, the Rocksbox private label fashion assortment became a proprietary collection within Kay. The four core brands account for about 70 percent of Signet’s total volume.
Blue Nile itself is expected to be “relaunched” sometime this year. Blue Nile has 20 showrooms in high-performing malls, and an e-commerce site.
