Diamond Industry Tries a New Message

A $12 pair of diamond studs at Walmart is giving De Beers a very expensive headache. At Bloomberg, Stacey Vanek Smith charts how impeccable lab-grown diamonds—once industry oddities—are now flooding the jewelry market, driving prices down and forcing the old-school diamond industry into a full-blown rebranding campaign. De Beers and allies including Signet (Kay, Jared, Zales) and the Gemological Institute of America have rallied around a new pitch: mined stones as "natural" and rare, forged over billions of years in the earth's mantle, versus cheap—but flawless—man-made competitors that can be grown in a week.

The pushback isn't just slogans. De Beers is selling $5,500 scanners to spot lab-grown stones, funding glossy documentaries, and turning once-unfashionable brown-colored gems into "Desert Diamonds" now seen on Rihanna and Taylor Swift. They're also making the case that natural vs. engineered are entirely different markets. "If people can buy a pair of $12 lab-grown diamond earrings from Walmart, I feel nothing but delight," says Al Cook, CEO of De Beers. "I applaud Walmart. That has very little to do with our business." Meanwhile, some lab-grown players are moving into memorial jewels made from human and pet ashes, and shoppers—especially younger ones—are gravitating to them. Read the full story, which describes an industry "shaken to its core" by the new arrivals.