The $75M Pivot: From Diamonds to Luxury Resale

What does it take to scale a luxury resale business when you have to win both the customer selling the product and the customer buying it? In this episode of The Next Nova Podcast, Matt Phillips sits down with Andrew Brown of MyGemma to explore how the company evolved from a wholesale diamond business into a curated luxury resale platform focused on handbags and jewelry from brands including Chanel, Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Tiffany, and Van Cleef. Andrew explains why MyGemma treats sourcing and selling as two distinct sides of the business, how years of SEO content generate consumer leads, and why the company chose to distribute inventory across MyGemma.com, more than 20 marketplaces, wholesale channels, and live shopping. They also discuss pricing luxury inventory using years of transaction data, customer retention, email and SMS, affiliate marketing, paid search, physical mail, and how MyGemma matches different products to different marketplace audiences. On the operations side, Andrew shares how Salesforce became the company’s internal source of truth and how MyGemma is beginning to use Claude and AI to make teams more efficient rather than simply reduce headcount. The conversation also covers seasonality, access to capital, live shopping, product mix, inventory turn, gross margin, customer service, and Andrew’s advice to founders: bootstrap as long as you can and retain as much ownership as possible without limiting growth. In This Episode • How MyGemma evolved from wholesale diamonds into luxury resale • Why sourcing and e-commerce operate like two businesses in one • Using SEO to acquire consumers selling luxury goods • Selling through MyGemma and 20+ marketplaces • Matching inventory to each marketplace’s customer • Pricing products using historical and current market data • Why more than 80% of inventory sells within 40 days • Customer acquisition through email, SMS, affiliates, and paid search • The performance of physical mail • Repeat customers on both sides of the business • Salesforce as MyGemma’s operational source of truth • Using Claude and AI to improve efficiency • Seasonality and capital constraints • Growing through live shopping and reseller partnerships • Why product mix and distribution matter • Customer service as a competitive advantage • Why Andrew recommends bootstrapping Chapters 00:00 Meet Andrew Brown 00:16 What Makes MyGemma Different 01:23 From Diamond Wholesale to Luxury Resale 02:38 Two Businesses in One 03:24 Expanding Distribution Across Marketplaces 04:15 Going Where the Customer Is 05:24 How MyGemma Prices Luxury Inventory 06:48 Moving Slow-Selling Inventory 07:23 The Brands and Products That Sell Fastest 08:10 Customer Acquisition Beyond SEO 09:39 Repeat Customers and Retention 10:11 Curating Inventory by Marketplace 11:03 Building the Salesforce Engine 12:01 Where AI Fits Into Operations 13:51 MyGemma’s Biggest Growth Challenges 15:19 Live Shopping and Reseller Partnerships 16:01 The Three-to-Five-Year Growth Strategy 16:49 What Is Driving Better Performance 17:45 Customer Service and Bootstrapping Advice Resources MyGemma: https://mygemma.com/ The Next Nova Podcast: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3T0bb1z... Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Vexnova: https://vexnova.com/ If you enjoyed the conversation, subscribe to The Next Nova Podcast, leave a review, and share the episode with another founder or business leader working to scale. #LuxuryResale #Ecommerce #BusinessGrowth #Entrepreneurship #CustomerExperience #LuxuryFashion #ArtificialIntelligence #BusinessStrategy