Hello and welcome back to Redirected. My name is Andrew East and this is a show we sit down with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, really anybody who has experienced a pivot or change in life. I call these changes

as redirections and at some point or another we all go through them and so I wanted to sit down with people who have made it through these changes well in order to yes clean their wisdom but also hear some pretty entertaining stories. And today we are continuing our Forbes 30 on our 30 series where we talk with young people who are redirecting the future and have visions of a better future if you will. And so we sit down with Olivia Landau who together with her husband Kyle Simon has co-founded this pretty spectacular company called Clear Cut Diamonds and this concept actually originated as a

blog with them just providing information on what is really in a fake industry. I don't know if you've ever bought a diamond before but it's not easy to navigate through and it's turned into a really spectacular business and currently have an amazing selection of highly curated engagement ring diamonds where you can buy direct online and so you go on.

They take your hand and walk you through every step of the process you're matched with an expert and they really make it a pleasant pleasant experience and so if you want to find out more about Olivia and her business the clear cut diamond will link information on both down below before jump into it if you haven't subscribed to the show and given an arraying on whatever platform you're listening on please do so it really helps us out.

Let's go ahead and jump into this one with Olivia Landau Olivia it's a pleasure to meet me. Thank you for joining me this morning.

Thank you so much for having me I'm so excited.

So I know you just kind of recently got married what do you at your like year and a half anniversaries that right.

Yeah we actually got married last June so June 2019 in Italy which I guess could have happened this year.

What part of Italy?

We got married in Tuscanie and a really small town outside of Luka my husband Kyle his family goes there every summer since he was born so we kind of always be there.

I'm excited because actually of the interviews I've done I think you're the only one who also works with their spouse so I'm excited to give them details there but I would love to if you could start off kind of giving us the context within what you grew up kind of your foundation if you will the bridge version of kind of how you got to where you are today.

Yeah totally so I grew up in Miami Beach Florida I'm fourth generation in the diamond industry so my dad's side of the family comes from a long line of diamond cutters and dealers he's from Antwerp Belgium which used to be like the diamond capital of the world.

And my mom she's from Taiwan and they met and they work together actually growing up and they were in the anti-jewelry business so I kind of grew up around diamonds and gemstones in a different capacity but I was always kind of around it but I never thought I would go into the business just because they always told me that it was like a dying industry there was like no future in it that I should you know.

I was like first generation like American and I should like go to college and get a corp for job and like live out there like dreams that way but I went to NYU and after graduating I really wasn't super passionate about sorry about that anything in particular.

I was always kind of interested in jewelry and just wanted to extend schooling a little bit so convinced them to let me go to GIA which was the gemological in suit of America there was a campus here in New York and it was like a six month program to become a gemologist so they agreed and once I went there I really fell in love with diamonds and gemstones is kind of I think in my blood all along.

And what is there also met my now husband and co founder Kyle so it all kind of works out.

I started working at Tiffany on the engagement floor right after school and Kyle comes from a really different background in the diamond space he had started a fair trade diamond mining company in Sierra Leone and his investors at that time sent him to GIA just to learn more about the actual diamond aspect.

So he went back to Africa and we were long distance while I was working at Tiffany that's where I fell in love with engagement rings of bridal jewelry specifically and wanted to get my hands like have like more hands on experience and not so much just sales so I started working at a large diamond wholesaler at that time at the same time the Ebola epidemic was going on in West Africa so.

Kyle was kind of forced to come back on his operation was halted in Africa and he decided to go to business school at Columbia here in New York and at that time I was really strained there was this weird phenomenon where like all of his classmates wanted to get engaged around the same time and they knew he had worked in the jewelry space in some capacity and like would always be like hey do you like no guide they can help me get a good deal on a ring.

And at the time I was a whole set in the whole cell industry so I was that guy so I work with a lot of our friends on his classmates to you know educate them help pick up their diamond and create a custom ring from there I kind of realized that most people don't know the first thing about buying a diamond so I decided I decided start the clear cut it was.

January of 2016 just as an educational blog for like our friends to read about you know the do's and don't buying a diamond before coming to see me and then I just started posting some of the designs on Instagram and that's where kind of took off and strangers were following the account DMing me asking if I could help make their rings and I turned into this kind of side hustle and at the time I was a gemologist elsewhere but I was still trying to balance.

You know making these customers on the side and I was running back and forth to the diamond district like the four work after work during lunch and it was just unsustainable and Kyle is you know entrepreneur at heart and he was graduating from business school at this time and he was like you know I see an opportunity maybe we should quit our jobs and just try doing the clear cut of the full time which I thought was kind of crazy and so did our parents.

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