We started building OpenBlue back in 2004 with the mission of providing independent retail jewellers which beautiful, powerful sites that could compete with, and better, the selection of online retailers.  A great web-site combined with the great in-store service jewellers have always provided would be an unbeatable combination.  And you know what?  It is.  Leads generated by their OpenBlue site has a much higher close ratio than straight walk-in traffic; in most cases it's 100%.

One of our competitive advantages is that we don't stand still.  We are constantly looking to improve and innovate.  As part of that mission, we built an industry-first geomarketing system which allowed suppliers and retailers to track where their products where getting traction online using a mapping system.  It was an innovation shown first in an article in Canadian Jeweller.

Since we launched our first retail site in 2006, we done six major upgrades each of which represented huge leap forward in design and functionality.

One of the coolest projects we've done is developing the technology for live 3D on the web.  Project 360 as we called it, was the product of OpenBlue Labs where we build new features for our retailers.

Sometimes what we do is dramatic, like Project 360, but more often it is more subtle.  For example, when Apple first launched the iPhone we realized that our sites had to work on mobile devices.  Our sites at that time had some features, like the software that zoomed in on rings, that was made using Flash technology from Adobe.  Well, the iPhone and iPad don't support Flash so consumers browsing our retailers' sites on Apple devices wouldn't be able to see the images of the jewellery.  Within 30 days of the iPhone's introduction, we had removed all of our own Flash code from our sites and replaced with with Javascript that would work on these devices.

That's the kind of expertise and attention to detail you get with OpenBlue.  Even today, many jewellers' sites built by other companies still have Flash.  Some of them are all Flash and don't work at all on iPhone/iPads.