Earlier this year, it would have been hard to believe that anything could top the consolidation of the industry’s two largest players, Zale Corp. and Signet Jewelers Ltd., in terms of news for 2014.
When the shareholders quit squabbling and both parties signed on the dotted line in late May, I envisioned the acquisition topping this very list, my annual recap of the year’s biggest stories.
Little did I know what lay ahead, as 2014 would be the year the issue of diamond over-grading would erupt and Hearts on Fire would head overseas.
Here are what I believe to be the three biggest stories of the year, in order of importance.
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1. The grading report row reaches a boiling point.
I would say the first major over-grading headline of the year came out of Nashville when a flurry of local news coverage prompted multiple consumers to file lawsuits against an independent jeweler over EGL International-graded diamonds.
One of the attorneys involved later told me that he viewed the Tennessee town as the epicenter of the over-grading furor. It’s not an entirely inaccurate description, though I would compare those lawsuits more to the first domino in a line that was bound to fall at some point than to ground zero for an earthquake.
The lawsuits influenced Martin Rapaport’s decision to pull diamonds graded by any EGL laboratory (including EGL USA, even though it’s an entirely separate lab), which, in turn, spurred the EGL brand owners to bring in a new global manager, Menahem Sevdermish, and to say they were going to scrap the EGL International brand.
