Renaissance Jewel
Speed and SEO work on the Shopify store of Renaissance Jewel, a New York lab-grown diamond jeweler on Fifth Avenue. I worked there full-time as their Sr. Shopify Expert, remote from India.
Renaissance Jewel sells lab-grown diamond jewelry, IGI and GIA certified, from a showroom at 579 Fifth Avenue in New York. Engagement rings are most of the business. I joined in September 2024 as their Sr. Shopify Expert, full-time and remote from India, and stayed until November 2025. My brief was to make the store faster and help it rank.
How the catalogue is built
Ring catalogues grow sideways. A solitaire is sold in platinum, silver, white gold, yellow gold and rose gold, in shapes from asscher to round, in several carat weights and diamond colours, and as a lab-grown or a moissanite stone. Every combination is something a customer can buy, and together they add up to far more than the 100 variants Shopify allowed on one product.
So a design is not one product. Each combination is its own product with a single variant. All products of a design carry the same style code tag, RJ- and a number. A black diamond solitaire, for example, is five products, one per metal, all tagged RJ-551.
Liquid cannot search for products by tag from a product page. So each product stores the handles of its siblings in metafields, one per option value, and the page turns them into switchers with all_products. A second set of metafields says which metal, shape, carat and stone this product is, so the right swatch is marked active. To the customer it looks like one ring with options.
Creating and linking that many products by hand is where mistakes come from, so products are uploaded by a Node script through a custom app and the Admin API. The details, with code, are in Past Shopify’s 100 variant limit.
Speed
The theme is Ella, a paid theme with a very long feature list. On top of it sit apps: Judge.me and Google reviews, a wishlist, two shoppable video apps, a chat widget, Instagram feed, financing and payment messaging, marketing and analytics tags. Ring pages can also load a 3D model.
The speed work was about order. Product images are served at the widths the layout needs instead of the original file. The 3D viewer stays out of the first load. Theme features the store does not use are switched off so their CSS and JavaScript leave every page. Scripts that nothing on the first screen needs load after the page has rendered. The patterns are in Speeding up a Shopify store that runs on a heavy paid theme.
SEO
Splitting designs into products gives every combination its own page. That only helps if each page is distinct, so every page keeps its own canonical, its title names the metal, stone, cut, setting and style, and its photos show that exact combination.
Broad searches like “oval engagement rings” land on a collection instead. There is a collection per diamond shape, and every ring collection shows a strip linking to all of them, so the shape pages are linked from everywhere. I wrote about the choices in SEO for product pages that are almost the same.
Features on the store
Beyond speed and SEO, I worked on the customer-facing features: engagement ring browsing by shape, style and metal, the ring builder that pairs a setting with a diamond, the Snap and Find visual search, the wishlist, Calendly appointment booking, the Bespoke Atelier custom-design page, and the sale and ready-to-ship collections.
Some of these are apps I set up and fitted into the theme: Calendly for bookings, the wishlist, and the reviews. The switchers, the ring builder flow and Snap and Find are theme code.