Diamond Demand Trends

Diamond Branding & News

Throughout the history of the modern jewelry retailing era, diamonds have been, by far, the single most important product category for the vast majority of retail jewelers, both large and small. Since 1947, when De Beers cleverly authored the world’s most famous advertising slogan, “a diamonds is forever,” the U.S. fine jewelry retail market could, in many cases, fairly be referred to as diamond and diamond jewelry retailing. Indeed, loose diamonds and finished diamond jewelry have traditionally accounted for roughly half of annual fine jewelry sales in the United States. The market benefitted significantly from the intense advertising of diamonds by De Beers, which operated as one of the world’s few true marketing cartels. These ads created strong diamond demand, and upward diamond trends were consistently developed by powerful advertising messages from De Beers. Over the past decade or so, however, this situation began to change. De Beers’ grip on the world’s rough diamond supply began to slip as new sources of diamonds were discovered and exploited in places such as Russia and Australia. At the same time, the Internet began to apply downward pressure on gross margins for diamonds as the sales pipeline became more transparent and fluid. Large online players like Blue Nile could source polished diamonds on a large-scale and pass along price savings to consumers, who could browse products at their leisure online. The market began to develop methods to combat these pressures, including, for the first time, diamond branding. While diamonds had historically been a generic product, companies now sought to develop new faceting arrangements for proprietary stones or simply apply trademarked names to diamonds of specific qualities. This permitted retailers to offer market-exclusive products that couldn’t be as easily compared by shoppers online, helping to maintain margins. National Jeweler has always considered diamond industry news to be among the most important information we provide our readers. With connections in major diamond producing markets like Israel and India, we also work with partners like IDEX Online to bring our audience everything they need to know about this critical category.