Lab-grown diamond companies are marketing their products in ways that could damage consumer confidence in the overall industry, World Jewellery Confederation (CIBJO) president Gaetano Cavalieri said during a keynote address to the 2024 Global Gems & Jewelry Development Conference last month in Hainan, China.
“The early decision to benchmark laboratory-grown diamond prices against the price of natural diamonds…proved to be a critical error over the longer term,” said Cavalieri. “It should always have been apparent that the economic principles governing a natural product, where there is always a finite production ceiling, was different to that of a manufactured product, where there is no production ceiling and where we inevitably would see a sharp reduction in production overheads as economies of scale were reached.
“So when decisions were made to conflate the two, and then worse, to differentiate the products by making negative marketing claims about the other, consumer confidence in both categories was undermined.”
Photo : Gaetano Cavalieri, courtesy of CIBJO
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