GemEx Systems Garners Innovation Award

Contact: Randall Wagner, 262-242-1111

or Jordan Fox, 414-352-2645

GemEx Systems, a 10-year-old Mequon, Wisconsin company that provides unique diamond evaluation equipment and services to diamond cutting facilities, wholesale businesses and retail jewelery stores worldwide, has won a 2008 Innovation Quotient Award. The Small Business Times, a business newspaper covering Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin, sponsored the awards competition. GemEx won the distinction by demonstrating superior innovation, creativity and profitability, according to Randy Wagner, company president.

In measuring a diamond’s light performance–both white and color — GemEx

utilizes the BrillianceScope imaging spectrophotometer, a technology that Wagner, an electrical engineer, helped develop for the jewelry industry. The BrillianceScope also separately measures a diamond’s scintillation.

In their first year of business, the privately held company generated under $200,000 in revenues. Their original business model concentrated initially on small buyers and directed them to grow that sector. But two of the largest jewelers in the world—Zale and Sterling—appreciated their service and sold diamonds that were evaluated by the BrillianceScope technology. By 2002 their revenues were at the $2.4 million mark. Today the company’s revenue far exceeds that. They have placed 150 BrillianceScopes in the field, located in the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Israel, Bangkok, Antwerp, Hong Kong, China and Japan, as well as the USA. Several years ago the BrillianceScope scanned their one-millionth diamond.

“Prior to the BrillianceScope, there was no precise way to quantify a diamond’s beauty,” says Wagner. “Consumers had to trust their own eyes. But the BrillianceScope scientifically verifies that they are purchasing an exceptionally brilliant and beautiful diamond.”

Several years ago, Wagner’s company introduced the GemEx Live Report, a new service featuring an eye-catching and powerful countertop sales, inventory, marketing and auditing tool. Once loaded into any computer or monitor, a touch-screen computer, a PDA, a Web PDA Phone or any web-enabled browser, it becomes an in-depth, interactive and comparative report of all GemEx-analyzed diamonds in a jeweler’s database. This helps consumers learn all they want to know about their diamond while seeing the elements that create its true beauty up close, under different lighting conditions. The Live Report brings the consumers’ buying experience to a greater level of involvement.