Driven to create an entirely new type of diamond manufacturing and polishing company, devoted to serving its customers, its people and the beauty of each diamond placed in its trust, brothers Sevantilal and Ramniklal Shah founded Venus Jewel in 1969.

Between them, they saw an opportunity to take the Indian diamond trade to new heights of quality and craftsmanship. In the years that followed, Venus Jewel became an industry innovator, internationally renowned for setting new standards in ethical business practices, diamond cutting, polish quality, pricing and employee care. Today, Venus Jewel is respected around the world as a visionary leader in a timeless industry that draws on the past as it looks to the future.

The path to innovation began in the 1970s, when Venus Jewel not only elevated pay standards in the Indian diamond industry, but also began rewarding the dedication and drive of its most skilled workers with performance-based compensation. Over the ensuing decade, Venus Jewel introduced wide-ranging measures to ensure the welfare of its employees, leading to historically low attrition rates and unmatched commitment from its people.

In the 1980s, Venus Jewel was the first in India to regularly cut and polish diamonds of two carats and above, blazing a trail for others to follow and positioning the country as the world's leading source for large polished diamonds. In the same decade, a new generation of the Shah family - Anil, Rajesh and Hitesh Shah - joined Venus Jewel, adding fresh perspectives to a growing company and solidifying Venus Jewel as the world leader in Solitaires.

This new generation made their mark in the 1990s by creating the first business-to-business website for selling large diamond solitaires online. The site eliminated the need to create sales offices around the world and helped Venus Jewel focus on investing in its people and their communities close to home. Today, this pioneering e-commerce engine, which empowers customers fulfill their diamond demand online and offers customers a combination of detailed product information, auction sales and rational stock pricing. It powers more than half of Venus Jewel's sales and exemplifies the trust our customers place in us.

Throughout the 1990s, Venus Jewel continued to set industry trends with four key changes to the company's strategy:

• Venus Jewel renounced a global fad for large, low quality gems to focus on diamonds that met its high standards for cut, polish, color and symmetry.
• Venus Jewel introduced the Venus Grading System^® (VGS^®), which measures each diamond across twenty grading parameters, and 400 sub-grades, including details on any inclusions, to produce an all-encompassing Venus Grading report (VGR) on each diamond. This helps Venus Jewel's customers to purchase diamonds online with trust and confidence, as if they could examine the stone in person.
• Venus Jewel chose to sell diamonds individually, at prices driven by their VGS^® grading, as opposed to the standard practice of negotiating over packets of stones. The comprehensive detail offered by the VGS^® made Venus Jewel's pricing both rational and transparent. In addition, selling diamonds individually made it easier to trace the origin of the rough behind every diamond.
• Venus Jewel would no longer extend the long-term credits that are common in the Industry and began ensuring the sustainability of its customers by selling diamonds in cash or for very short terms.

Although initially viewed with skepticism, all four strategies led to tremendous growth in the 2000s, enabling Venus Jewel to dominate the nascent online market for large diamonds and ensure its financial stability during markets lean and strong.

In 2006, Venus Jewel became the first diamond manufacturer to publish a detailed report for every diamond they polished. The all-encompassing Venus Grading Report (VGR) includes the detailed results of a diamond's evaluation via the Venus Grading System, along with a complete mapping of the diamond's inclusions that is far more realistic and refined than conventional symbolic representations.

Reports like these are typically provided by third-party institutions that have gained the trust of the industry, such as GIA, HRD and IGI, but ours is the first report by a polished diamond manufacturer to be accepted as an unbiased standard by RapNet.com, the industry's leading site for diamond sales. We were also the first manufacturer whose standards were accepted in the search engine for the site, which has more than a million diamonds up for sale at any one time.

The key to the success of all of these strategies is the trust Venus Jewel has continued to build with its customers, a trust built on the company's demonstrated integrity in its business dealings, transparency in the detailed descriptions of its diamonds and fairness in its pricing. Consider a jeweler creating diamond jewelry i.e. a piece of necklace. Just by sharing the exact size and extent of every inclusion in each of its diamonds, Venus Jewel helps that jeweler select the gems that best suit the design. Through these efforts and many others, large and small, Venus Jewel continues to build on a legacy of trust, resulting in a loyal customer base that embraces the wide-ranging innovations initiated by the Shah family.

In 2008, as the global recession led many in the diamond industry to halt production and furlough their workers, Venus Jewel retained all its employees at full pay. While others cut back, Venus Jewel devoted itself to cross-training workers and strengthening the quality and precision of its rough diamond planning and polishing processes. As the economy recovered, Venus Jewel was once again poised to supply a market eager to enjoy diamonds.

Today, under the continuing leadership of Sevantilal Shah, Venus Jewel continues to grow and seek out new ways to offer the world's finest round and fancy diamonds, as well as the world's finest diamond buying experience.

A history of quality and innovation

Just as the planet Venus leads the stars into the evening sky, Venus Jewel leads the diamond industry, counting online sales of large diamonds, fair and transparent auction processes, detailed grading, rigorous pricing, value-enhancing computerized planning, standardized and regulated work weeks, employee retirement plans and clean, modern workplaces among its many innovations.

Venus Jewel draws on diverse inspirations for these and other advances, but all are focused on a single goal, providing the highest quality diamonds at rational, logically derived prices, with unmatched complete transparency and integrity. By striving to create brilliance in all that it does, we have become one of the most respected companies in the world, with a reputation for integrity and transparency that is second to none in the industry.