From less than 20% of sales online to more than half, in twelve months.

Herff Jones built its business on a specific kind of customer relationship. A sales representative visiting a school could show a student a physical ring, walk them through the options, and help them arrive at a product that felt genuinely theirs. The purchase was personal, considered, and guided by someone with deep product knowledge. That model worked well for over a century.

The limitations of a static online catalogue were apparent to anyone who had experienced the in-person alternative. A class ring is configured from combinations of metal type, gemstone, side panel design, finish, and personalised engraving. The permutations across a full catalogue run into the hundreds of thousands. A student buying online could not see their specific configuration before placing an order. The result was lower conversion rates, lower average order values, and a digital channel that consistently underperformed relative to its potential.

Herff Jones had deployed a configuration tool from a previous vendor. It operated on fixed templates that could not accommodate the bespoke geometries and unusual option combinations found across the high school ring catalogue. Products that fell outside the template either required workarounds that degraded the preview quality or were excluded from online configuration entirely. The tool produced a preview. It did not produce a render that justified the purchase.

The evaluation Herff Jones conducted was not a search for a better configurator UI. It was a search for a rendering infrastructure that could handle products the previous solution could not. The distinction matters: a fixed-template configurator produces accurate output for products it was designed around and degrades for everything else. LiquiFire OS renders from the product's actual geometry, which means accuracy does not depend on whether a product matches a pre-built template.

The requirements were specific. The solution had to handle bespoke ring geometries and unusual option combinations without workarounds. It had to render at a quality level that made the online preview a genuine substitute for the in-person one, not a lower-fidelity approximation. And it had to be built to grow: an architecture that could extend to college ring products and additional categories as the partnership developed, without a separate implementation for each new product line.

LiquidPixels Professional Services led the implementation, working directly with the Herff Jones team to build the configuration tool against the specific complexity of their high school catalogue. For an organisation whose products carry real emotional weight for the buyer, the quality of the partner's implementation capability was as important as the technology itself.

LiquidPixels built a custom configuration tool for the Herff Jones bespoke high school ring catalogue. Students could design their ring in real time, selecting from the full range of metal options, gemstone types, side designs, finishes, and personalised text, and see an accurate rendered preview of each combination as they explored it.

As the project progressed through different product lines, the tool evolved to accommodate complexities that emerged from the variety of ring designs in the catalogue. Some products required rendering capabilities developed specifically for their design characteristics. Each of those requirements was absorbed into the platform rather than worked around, which allowed Herff Jones to extend coverage across unusual products without being constrained by a fixed template ceiling.

The initial phase covered approximately one hundred ring products from the high school catalogue. The architecture was structured for phased expansion from the outset: college ring products were identified as the next priority, with additional categories to follow. The implementation was not scoped as a project with an end date. It was scoped as an infrastructure rollout with a growth roadmap.

Within twelve months of deploying the LiquiFire OS configuration tool, Herff Jones increased online purchases by 60%, moving from less than 20% of high school class ring sales transacted online to more than half of annual sales through the digital channel. That shift was not driven by a marketing change or a pricing adjustment. It was driven by the quality of the online experience reaching a threshold where it could substitute for the in-person one.

The mechanism is specific: a student exploring their ring options online could engage with the same degree of personalisation that had previously required a face-to-face session with a sales representative. The render they saw was accurate to their specific configuration. The accuracy of that render removed the primary reason to prefer the in-person channel. When the digital experience is genuinely equivalent, the convenience of the online channel takes over.

Herff Jones continues to invest in extending the dynamic imaging capability across their catalogue, with a structured programme of phased rollout across additional product lines. The infrastructure that delivered the initial 60% improvement is the same infrastructure that will support every subsequent phase.