Moissanite SA
The surface
A custom store built around light. Stones rendered the way they really behave, tried on at true size, explained by their own science, and sold through a shop that largely runs itself.
Loose stones, a direct supplier, a WordPress store, years of guides people already found on Google, and a real understanding of how light behaves inside a cut stone.
The story
This is the part a case study usually leaves out: the mistakes, the handover, and what it takes to keep a shop running once it’s yours. The result is live at moissanite.co.za.
01 · Referred in
The founder came to us through the Jewellery Council of South Africa. His agency at the time hadn’t been able to get the site working for him. We started with the basics: speed, search, and enough trust for someone to spend real money online.
02 · Years of working together
Product pages, guides, search, the odd emergency. Somewhere along the way we stopped being the people who fixed the website and started knowing the business: the stone, the customers, and the questions they ask before they buy.
03 · Failing forward: the Oshun range
Cheap moissanite had flooded the market, and loose stones were becoming a trade business. We thought finished jewellery could win customers back, so we designed a ring range, Oshun, drawing on African design without a giraffe or a sunset in sight.
AI made the concepts in an afternoon. Making them real took months, first with a CAD designer on the proportions, then with a jeweller on the materials. The enamel and resin inlays looked wonderful, and wouldn’t survive a lifetime of wear.
Then a customer asked for Nandi with a much bigger stone. The band was never drawn for it, and the extra bands added to bulk it up only made it worse; that ring was never made. The people who did buy were mostly visitors, ordering a week before they flew in, for rings that took three weeks to make by hand, often over December.
AI concept images from the Oshun range, now retired. None of them are photographs.
04 · The handover
In early 2026 the name and the brand passed to us. The advice we used to give became decisions we had to make, and pay for.
05 · Starting again, properly
The old logo had done its job for years, but it belonged to a distributor: a heavy outline, a sparkle and a tagline underneath. We kept the point of the diamond, the part people remembered, and redrew the rest with one clean facet line, open lettering and a deep navy.
Behind the new face: our own supplier, a new strategy, social channels from scratch, a store built from the ground up, and the same search work we’d do for any client, paid for ourselves.
New settings start as 3D models now, so stone sizes, materials and proportions are tested long before a jeweller sees them.
06 · The golden thread
We stopped selling moissanite as a cheaper diamond. It throws more fire than diamond and costs a fraction as much, so the question changes from which one piece to how many. Everything on the site, from the renders to the brand, is built around that first flash of light.
07 · How AI fits in
Stones are modelled and rendered in Blender, film music comes from ElevenLabs, and AI sits inside the build, the copy and the search work. After Oshun, it works behind the craft rather than in front of it.
What we built
Light, rendered properly
Every stone is rendered offline, once for each band of the spectrum at moissanite’s own refractive index, then recombined. That’s how the colour in the light comes out right, rather than painted on afterwards.
The science page lets people move the light themselves. Try it here, with the same frames.
Drag across the stones or use the slider. Same cut, same light, two materials.
The cuts
Each shape is rendered as a turntable in the same studio light, so people compare how the stones actually move and throw light, rather than reading how they’re described.
True size
Calibrate your screen once against a bank card, and the stone you’re looking at sits on a hand at life size. The same calibration drives a ring sizer and a printable sizing chart.
Eleven cuts, each sold by size along a slider rather than a grid of options.
Platforms
Built from scratch rather than on a template, so the store does exactly what this business needs, and nothing it doesn’t.
Leaving WordPress didn’t mean starting again on Google. All 151 of the old store’s links point to their new pages, and the thirteen long-form guides came across with them, so years of search traffic still lands.
AI systems
The store runs its own MCP server, the open standard AI assistants use to call tools. An assistant that supports it can search the stones, read the policies and hand a customer a filled cart. It can never set a price: every total is recalculated on the server.
A live guide for AI crawlers and a Google Merchant feed come from the same catalogue, so Google’s shopping results stay current without anyone touching them.
Works with assistants that support MCP, including
Brand
The pitch moved away from comparing the stone with diamond, towards how it plays with light. The mark is a faceted stone caught in two strokes, set beside a light, widely spaced wordmark.
The shop’s own range of stones has a name of its own, SOLA, with the stone drawn as its O.
Made of light.
Meant for forever.
08 · Still running
The store will soon sell finished rings, starting with a ring builder: choose the metal, the stone size, the setting and the ring size, within limits a jeweller can make well. A range of our own will follow, designed in 3D first. We’ll add it here as it happens.
Status: live at moissanite.co.za since 26 October 2026, and still being built.
