The AI Engine Jewelry Ecommerce Has Been Missing
Jewelry founder Yevgeniy Makhmutov grew up in family stores and now leads AR Bling, an AI platform that turns product photos into 3D try on and powers a smart sales agent that boosts online conversions and cuts returns for jewelers worldwide.
Turning product photos into confident buys with AI-powered 3D and virtual try-on
Jewelry Retail That Never Really Went Online
When Yevgeniy Makhmutov talks about jewelry, he is not speaking as an outsider chasing a shiny vertical. He grew up in his parents’ stores in Kazakhstan, watching them build a thirty-year business that now spans Central Asia, Hong Kong, and Italy. By the time he was managing dozens of locations, he knew the industry inside and out.
What he saw worried him. Jewelry is a three-hundred-billion-dollar market, yet online sales remain a small fraction of that total. Conversion rates are often under two percent. Returns can reach thirty-five percent because what customers see on a flat product page does not match what arrives in the box. Rings do not fit. Metal and stones look different in real life. Retailers eat the cost.
At the same time, the cost of going digital has been brutal. Turning a single ring into a high-quality three-dimensional model can cost hundreds of dollars and take days of specialist work. For a store with a thousand unique pieces, fully digitizing an inventory is simply out of reach. Even big brands tend to digitize only their bestsellers, leaving the rest behind.
Makhmutov understood that if nothing changed, many traditional players would continue to sit on the sidelines while sales shifted online around them.
Turning a Family Pain Point into an AI Platform
Before he was a founder, Makhmutov was a retailer trying to solve his own problem. Together with a longtime collaborator who had already built and sold a software product, he began collecting data on real jewelry pieces. Over two and a half years, they assembled tens of thousands of examples and trained their own AI models.
The result is AR Bling, a platform that lets a retailer upload a simple photo of a ring and receive a fully usable three-dimensional twin in minutes—the economics flip. Instead of paying hundreds of dollars and waiting a week, a store with a subscription can digitize hundreds of products each month at a cost per product that drops to cents.
On top of that, the team built what Makhmutov calls a smart sales agent. A retailer connects a product catalog, adds a small snippet of code to their site, and a conversational assistant appears. Shoppers can drop in a photo of a ring they saw on a friend, type that they want something similar under a certain budget and in a specific metal, and receive highly accurate matches from that retailer’s own inventory.
The experience stays inside a single chat window. Shoppers can explore a three-dimensional view, use augmented-reality try-on through their phone camera, share the piece with friends, and complete the purchase without bouncing between multiple pages and forms. For retailers, it means less time answering repetitive messages on WhatsApp or Instagram and more sales completed while buyers are still excited.
Opening the Door for a New Generation of Jewelry Brands
Makhmutov’s view is that jewelry will follow a pattern already visible in other sectors. Brick-and-mortar will remain important for high-end luxury, yet growth will come from digital-first brands that know how to convert online. AI is the missing infrastructure that lets that shift happen in a conservative industry.
He also sees a cultural change. Independent designers and small labels can now enter the market with far less capital. They can lean on AI tools to explore designs, create production-ready files, and present collections with the same immersive experience once reserved for global names.
Even 3D designers who initially feared losing work are starting to come around. For those who adopt the tools, AI halves the production cycle, freeing them to focus on creativity and higher-value projects.
Makhmutov may be taking meetings in Milan and Toronto today, but his vision remains grounded in the same family counters where he started. He wants a world where a shopper in any city can see how a piece truly looks on their hand before buying, and where a talented jeweler with a fresh idea can compete with legacy players.
In his words, technology is already here. The question is who will use it to turn static catalogs into living, wearable stories.
About Flashpoint POV Spotlights
Flashpoint Global produces each Founder POV Spotlight using its proprietary category leadership framework. Every Spotlight begins with a Future Narrative session, where a founder’s POV is clarified and operationalized as the lens through which new categories are built. The result is content that moves founders beyond product messaging and into the role of category leader, helping the market understand the problem, the stakes, and the future being created.
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