How Startup BriteCo Is Streamlining Jewelry Appraisals and Insurance
May 2, 2019 by Emili Vesilind
"Dustin Lemick, a third-generation jeweler and gemologist based in Evanston, Ill., has done his fair share of appraisals and insurance-based replacements. The twin services once comprised a sizable slice of his business.
But at some point, his frustrations with the appraisal process, which he viewed as unnecessarily cumbersome for both jewelers and consumers, began to build.
“The appraisal process can be so manual,” he tells JCK. “And customers don’t know much about appraisals, so the policyholder ends up paying too much for insurance.”
The lack of transparency even led to the occasional nasty customer exchange. Lemick remembers a customer sent to his business by a major insurance company with a piece she wanted to replace. She felt she should get get the full value, but the replacement quote fell far short of that. “She was furious!” Lemick recalls. “She left us a bad Yelp review and the whole thing—and there was nothing we could do about what her insurance allowed for.”
The entire appraisal system, in Lemick’s estimation, was broken—or at the very least deeply ailing. And he felt compelled to fix it.
The BriteCo team, from left: cofounder and chief insurance officer Conor Redmond; founder and CEO Dustin Lemick; cofounder and chief technology officer Ben Mautner; cofounder and chief marketing officer John Ortbal
Partnering with veteran marketer Jon Ortbal, insurance expert Conor Redmond, and tech whiz Ben Mautner, Lemick founded BriteCo, a cloud-based appraisal management platform that allows jewelry retailers to offer customers a verified appraisal and insurance quote during the checkout process.
The coverage—through insurance carrier ... "
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