Just 14% of Draco Diamond’s web traffic comes from returning users, but they account for 78% of the jewelry retailer’s sales, according to founder Garrett McMartin.
That includes users who navigate to Draco Diamond’s site multiple times, leaving and coming back repeatedly in their product-research processes. He gave an example that a consumer might come to his site to compare specific diamond products with other retailers.
“When it comes to a lot of these Prime Days and Cyber Mondays, for us, that’s not really the market we’re after,” McMartin told Digital Commerce 360. “We’re not looking for people that are trying to crunch in and get these sales. We’re looking for people that are researching.”
Research comes with the territory of having higher-ticket products such as jewelry, McMartin explained. Aside from a branded hat, the lowest-priced item on Draco Diamond’s website is a pair of earrings that costs more than $500. As a result, he said, “you don’t really have those impulse buyers coming in.”
Draco Diamond’s approach to pricing, discounting and sales
To attract deal hunters, McMartin created a collection he calls Founder Pricing. He puts four items in the collection every two weeks, stocking five of each. He then marks down the prices at a range of about 5% to 12% off.
That was the closest he could get to a discount without getting away from the luxury language associated with jewelry, he said.
“If you go in and you see, ‘Oh, this ring’s $1000 off?’ You’re gonna be like, ‘Well, it’s already a $2,000 ring, so why is it $1000 off? That’s really weird. It would be $1,000 [discount] when every other ring is $5,000. I don’t know, this must be a scam or something.’ So it’s a very fine line,” he said.
Draco Diamond promotes its Founder Pricing, a rotating collection with discounts of about 5% to 12%, according to founder Garrett McMartin. | Image credit: Draco Diamond website
Draco Diamond also lists prices on its product detail pages for comparable items from other merchants. In doing so, McMartin said, he’s giving consumers a better sense of how much the products cost.
He said he’s doing ” something that’s really not been done in jewelry before. I’m going to be transparent. I’m gonna show people what it costs.”
Although he still makes a margin on his products, it’s far lower than the $4,000 to $5,000 margin at other jewelry retailers, according to McMartin.
“I understand the concept of it, but it was a real opportunity for me to break down the walls, make a statement, and really brand Draco in a way that draws that organic traffic and it draws those organic sales, and that’s what we’re seeing now,” McMartin said.
Entering the jewelry industry
McMartin launched Draco Diamond in early 2025. The brand is McMartin’s second iteration of a jewelry brand. The first was a private brand with limited drops — one product per week — that he operated for nearly three years.
“It wasn’t generating the hype that I thought it was going to generate,” he explained. “We were getting the sales, we were selling out and it was working. But I thought it would take this Supreme path and would be this elusive, ‘Oh, what design is going to be next week?’ But it actually turned out it was preventing the brand awareness.”
To make up for that, he had to invest in ads that didn’t produce a feasible return on spending. He realized that Supreme benefited from decades of brand awareness before it began its product drops.
But he didn’t know if he could afford to wait decades as he worked to build a name for his previous brand. As artificial intelligence (AI) tools became more prolific, McMartin opted to strip down the predecessor website and start anew.
“I pretty much took all the data I had over there and built Draco,” he said. “And honestly, it was the best thing I’ve ever done because now we’re at a point where people are finding us. It’s steady.”
He said he didn’t even begin running ads until spring 2026. Instead, McMartin focused on answer engine optimization (AEO), an offshoot of search engine optimization (SEO) for agentic AI.
But now, Draco Diamond is running ads as well, seeing a consistent return on ad spend (ROAS) of more than 7%, according to McMartin.
“It’s just this fine-oiled machine now where thousands of dollars are going into this machine every week, but it’s pumping out hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales on the other side,” he said.
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