By Virginia Halevi

 

Bright and early on a Wednesday morning in July 2000, the leaders of a company no longer to be known as De Beers took their seats across a huge table from the world’s diamond journalists. The setting was an executive suite high above Charterhouse Street, and the scene was a call to quorum to announce changes in the way diamonds were henceforth to be traded. New terms, which have since shaped the dialogue of the trade, were introduced: Supplier of Choice, the DTC, Forevermark, the Sightholder questionnaire. Words never heard from the ex-cartel made their first appearance: added value, vertical integration, downstream partnering, a visible supply-chain, sales-to-advertising ratios, unique selling proposition.

 

Amid this tidal wave of a sea-change in corporate policy, image, and intent, there was only one discernible ripple of internal conflict. It regarded a new, largely American diamond current, known as branding, and it came on the two occasions the Tiffany name was invoked. De Beers Managing Director Gary Ralfe, citing Tiffany as the “diamond’s leading brand,” noted that the chain enjoyed “only a 1 percent market share.” A few minutes later, Marketing Director Steven Lussier cited a very different statistic, however. During the years of Japan’s economic collapse, he noted, “Tiffany increased 10%.”

 

“Brands are small,” Ralfe later said. “A relatively low percentage of diamond sales,” noted the rising star Gareth Penny, citing the 50-80% brand-sales of luxury items like perfume and watches. “If, however, branding initiatives are undertaken,” he added, he hoped they would involve the DTC. So was branding good or bad? Real or imagined? Charterhouse Street didn’t think much of it, apparently. They were shedding the diamond’s real leading brand, after all, the De Beers name. Right?

 

Wrong. As we now know, they valued the name so much they saved it for their retail initiative. And, it’s clear now, the DTC had an eye focused equally on their clients’ branding initiatives. As sightholder responses to the dreaded questionnaire came in, time after time the answer was a branding strategy, often well supported by the DTC. Two years later, at the 2002 Diamond Conference in Antwerp, Penny spoke not of perfume and watches but of water. ‘If Evian can brand,’ he said …

 

So, is it just the big boys? Nope. Small manufacturers are branding. Wholesalers are branding. Large and small U.S. chains are branding. Single stores in Arkansas brand. Cutters are offering customizable, discount, even generic brands and strategies. Generic brand? Read below.

 

So, it’s an American thing, this branding? Nope. At the 2002 Diamond Conference in Antwerp, sightholder Chaim Pluczenik offered this skeptical future for the strategy. “Less than 5% of business.” But most diamantaires taking the stage in that traditional city—bankers, cutters, wholesalers, from the HRD to sightholders—did so to sing branding’s praises. Malaysians brand. Canadians brand. Australians brand. Do Russians brand? Yes, they do: The Sakha and the Kristall. Can the Chinese be far behind? Or a more appropriate question: Which brand will be first to that immense market?

 

At last count, there were 100+ branded round-brilliant and modified round-brilliants cuts, and a quarter that number is “brand-new” fancy cuts. Five years ago, most people in the industry had never heard of branding. Now everyone is talking about it. One pioneer has gone so far as to say that, soon, everyone will brand. Why? They’ll have to. “Differentiate,” he says, “or die.”

 

So what is a branded diamond? And who is a brander?

For most of the world, brand means name, indistinguishable from the word mark. Did the French Blue become a new brand when it became the Hope? For most of the diamond world, brand means cut. But does every new facet on a round brilliant make it yet another branded modified round? Gabi Tolkowski has cut new shapes for decades. Is he a brander?

 

Brands must be big. Is Schachter & Namdar a brander because of the Leo, or because they’re Schachter & Namdar? Brands must inspire confidence to fetch premiums. But do you brand in the mind, or in the mine? Silly question? Remember, Canada will reach 11% of world production by 2005, and if you don’t think Canadian diamonds are a brand, read below about their effect on consumers. And what is the diamond’s real leading brand, in that end-consumer’s mind? Is it the DTC? The Forevermark, after all, is what people see in the ads. Is it De Beers? That’s the name they read in the papers. Tiffany? That’s 150 years of recognition. Or is it Hearts on Fire, the relatively small Boston-based company currently spending $30 million advancing the brand?

 

It all seemed so simple, 20 years ago, when Lazare-Kaplan branded and laser-inscribed the Lazare Diamond. It was the first branded round; the Trillion and Henry Grosbard’s Radiant were the first “branded” diamonds, though original cuts were patented in the U.S. since 1890. The Lazare was a “store” brand, but it had consumer appeal as well, and Lazare advertised in consumer magazines. It was the birth of a distinction with a small difference: consumer vs. store brand. That difference, as we’ll see, grew more pronounced as both consumers and stores became better educated.

 

Two other seeds of the branding revolution were planted at roughly the same time. The Princess cut was unbrandable as such (the half-dozen or so men who claim to have invented it all failed to patent), but it did change the market from mostly round to round and fancy, opening the floodgates for new cuts to meet (and create) demand. The Princess awakened the pre-branding world to the idea of a proprietary shape, but also to the notion of increasing incremental sales of non-rounds. Diamonds had moved, glacially, over two millennia, from being talsimans for warriors (the Roman’s principal use) to signifiers of royalty (Europe and the subcontinent) to the symbol by which 85% of contemporary marriages are consecrated (De Beers). In each incarnation, of course, diamonds were worn, but it took the straight-sided, affordable Princess, set easily in rows and invisible channels, to increase sales for fashion applications.

 

Straight To The Heart Of The Matter

The second change went more unnoticed, at least to Western eyes, though it impacted the round-brilliant market. The Hearts and Arrows, a cut whose creation is as disputed as the Princess’s, gave even greater impetus to branding. Coming out of Japan and Armenia in the mid-1980s, its impact was catalyzed (on the supply end) by a seemingly endless flow of Russian rough to the factories and Japanese-trained cutters in Armenia, and (on the demand end) by the seemingly bottomless pockets and brand-allegiance of the Japanese during their ten-year financial bubble.

 

“Bubble” is a word not used lightly. “We were kings,” remembers Antwerp’s Mickey Weinstock, who sold hearts and arrows in Japan. Lots and lots of them. “Anything we could source double-pyramids for, at Rap-plus-30.” He had millions in inventory when that bubble burst. Though he was quickly back in the hearts and arrows business (his Love Diamond has 50 U.S. customers and he is today the leading seller of loose ideals in Hong Kong), his is a cautionary tale for today’s branders. The notion of putting your name on a billion-year-old rock did not begin with branding, but it did flourish in lockstep with the U.S.-led bull market of the fin de siecle. Will its future be any more bulletproof?

 

To help predict that future, it’s important to contextualize the recent past. Branding came of age with the “four legs” of the bull market: a mass-proliferation of information, the high-tech explosion, a wave of mergers and acquisitions and globalization. All four spelled the end of the insular diamond market that had held so steady for five centuries. The prior decade had also seen breathtaking peaks and valleys, where sightholders flourished and went bankrupt year to year, where 1980’s $60,000 1-carat D Flawless was priced at $16,000 10 years later, and likely went for 10- to 30% below that.

 

“Below that” (as in “Rap Minus 15” signs down Jeweler’s Row) was the first goad for branders. By the early ’90s, Commoditization had become the true Fifth C, and not only because of Rap. It was also an early dividend of global high-tech, and it paralleled the commoditization and fall of gold as that market became a 24-hour, pole-to-pole business in the early 1980s. For diamonds, that raised some serious questions. If a certain make at X weight sells at Y price in every corner of the globe, potentially even to consumers, how is profit made? If we’re all selling the same thing to each other at the same price, how do you protect margins? What’s left but to cut cheaper, put the discount sign in the window, and get the memo pad out? Enter branding. Its answers, slow-going at first but now evolving at an amazing rate of speed, may or may not be the right ones, but they are far more attractive than lowering unit-prices on clone-grams of generic crystal.

 

Cut cheaper?

No. Cut different. New cuts; modifications of the old; composite cuts: The Ashoka, Asprey, Baguillion, CrissCut, Cushette, Diallenium, Diapearl, Diastar, Elara, Flanders, Flanders Brilliant, Gabrielle, Leo, Lily, LadyHeart, Lucida, Millenium, Third Millenium, J.C. Millenium, Millenial Sunrise, Phoenix, Princessa, Princette, and the Printillion, Quadrillion, Regent, Royal Aascher, Royal Brilliant, Starburst, Starcrest, and Tycoon cut. And make the name unique. GE/Lazare ran into trouble because a “Pegasus” was already out there. Or at least make it unique to diamonds. CrissCut is also the name of a French fry. And don’t forget to patent, remembering not only the failure of the Princess’s “inventors,” but the triumph of the Radiant’s. Mr. Grosbard had sole rights to the shape for 20 years until the patent expired.

 

Cut with lasers, use software and special scopes to cut better, and let the world know. Make scopes, viewers and optical tools to let the consumer see yours is different, rounder, brighter, firier, more symmetrical. Invent a machine showing that superiority in real time, with multiple views, like the Isee2, by Overseas Diamonds of Antwerp, or issue a document delineating those differences, as with the Rand Diamond by Codiam, or the Aglaia by Izakov. Change labs (speaking of documents), or lobby for them to change, if yours doesn’t recognize your cut as unique, or uses parameters that don’t advance your message. After all, they’re branding too: ads and advertorials in consumer magazines, 30-second network TV spots, putting their lab’s name beside images of Rolls-Royce, Dom Perignon, Steinway.

 

Cut prices?

No. Raise them. Brag about how expensive you are, and that you go no lower than SI or I. And make sure none of your customers discount.

 

Offer memo?

No. Establish minimum monthly or yearly purchases. COD.

 

Worry when Rap goes down?

No. Add value to your own diamond. Provide free or discount laser inscription, viewers, Sarin machines, counter displays and tools, packaging, customizable TV, radio and billboard ads, videos, in store events like diamond cutters and sales-associate tutorials on selling the brand. Hold seminars and conferences. Run a yearly “university” in Las Vegas. Choose a color and stick with it in every application of your brand. Where would Tiffany be now without the blue box? Increase your diamond’s value by offering incentives to everyone in your clients’ employ, from CEO to sales associate. Give them trips, pizza parties, or diamonds, anything so they sell yours rather than the generic stone 14 inches away. If you have no ideas, hire a pr firm.

 

I already have a cousin who does my ads.

That’s advertising; pr’s different.

 

And what about mergers and acquisitions?

Merge. Acquire.

 

Run from globalization?

No, embrace it. Hire Russian scientists. Set up partnerships spanning three continents. Sell your internationalism. Let the world know that you’re a Belgian/Brit/New Yorker cutting and selling Canadian, or an Israeli using Armenians to mount African-cut goods.

 

Fear the Internet?
No, use it. Enable consumers to learn, shop, register diamonds online at your site. Spend the money it takes for search engines to lift your name up next to Blue Nile’s.

 

Protect margins?

No. Raise them.

 

How?

Marketing.

 

It’s An Expensive Business

“But branding,” as Lazare’s late and lamented Bob Spiesman once said, “is more than putting a few facets on a crown, your name on a girdle, and then taking out an ad.” As branders have learned, it’s a lot more, and a lot more expensive. As one sightholder put it: “These people think they’re cutting licenses to print money, not diamonds.” To brand successfully, one must add, rather than anticipate value. That may mean identifying new markets, increasing incremental sales, forging new partnerships, devising new strategies for “taking the fear out of buying diamonds,” absorbing a link (or two) above or below you in the supply chain. You may go into a new business altogether. Hearts on Fire CEO Glenn Rothman, thought by many to be the branding guru, advances that point unashamedly: “I used to sell diamonds. Now I sell a brand.”

 

Rothman’s 2002 partnership with sightholder Eurostar is an excellent example of value-added movement along the supply chain, but it came after seven hard years of building the brand. “Any company that thinks it can slap a name on a product and call it a brand is wasting the time and energy of everyone associated. Branding is a full time, obsessive mission.” Mega-sightholder Rosy Blue partnered with New York-based Beny Sofer & Sons and London’s Backes & Strauss to market Canadia brand diamonds, cut in Yellowknife by Arslanian. It is “a diamond company,” as Rosy Blue CEO Dilip Mehta puts it, “the likes of which the industry has never before seen.” It may well be the most global, proof of the phrase one hears often from branders: Think globally and act locally. That union alone represents four countries (twice that if you throw in the branders’ countries of origin), bonding to market the diamonds of a single mine in Canada.

 

Why would they bother? Perhaps because the Canadia diamond isn’t a brand so much as a sub-brand: of Canadian diamonds. It’s been argued, variously, that Canadian stones sell as everything from a provenance to a new category. Across the American Northwest, which is both particularly Canada-aware and conflict-sensitive, many customers no longer ask for GVS1, marquise, or yellow. They ask for Canadian. That’s halfway toward being a consumer brand, maybe further. Why? Think of Kleenex. The bobby pin. The Frigidaire. The last coke you ordered. The ketchup on your last burger. They’re all brands you ask for without thinking they are brands.

 

People buy diamonds while on vacation. A thoroughly unexpected hot area for Canadian sales is Florida, where many Canadians winter. They’re supporting Canada, without paying Canadian taxes. Or again: Sales of Canadian diamonds went up dramatically after 9/11. People wanted to at least buy North American. How’s that branding? you ask. Simple: it’s a unique selling proposition. Discount patriotism. That’s branding.

 

Still, you say, Canada is a country, not a brand. We know that, but does the consumer? Remember the Lazare. Until a year or two ago, most European diamantaires thought branding meant laser inscribing. A year ago, Canadia shoppers may well have looked for a polar bear on the girdle or, if they had done some extra research, a maple leaf (different Canadian brands). Today, they open the Wall Street Journal, read about “Political Correctness by the Carat,” and learn that “Oren Sofer … the diamond wholesaler marketing Canadian diamonds under the brand name Canadia … wants Canadian diamonds to become the Rolex of precious stones.” “If you can put water in a bottle and sell it under a brand name,” he said [remember Mr. Penny’s comments in Antwerp], then trust me, you can brand a diamond. It just takes time.”

 

Just Who Is A Brander?

Nothing changes in a vacuum. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. A rising tide lifts all boats. These are a few of the cliches branding detractors invoke in discounting the impact of the strategy on the diamond. It may be too early, and in some cases too late, to determine what is a result of branding and not. Well, here is another cliche: Branders swim in the same stream as non-branders. While hardly the first to identify such challenges as taking the fear out of diamond-buying, adding value, increasing sales incrementally, and identifying new markets (AW Ayer undertook those tasks 50 years ago), branders are, by definition and job description, the ones who get, or at least try to take, credit. Which leaves it progressively unclear: Who or what is a brander? As sightholder questionnaire responses come in, branding strategies seem to be as numerous as there are branders. Some played to existing strengths in the supply chain: cutting expertise, their fancy shapes and colors, market savvy, client-knowledge, or plain old-fashioned understanding of the bottom line.

 

In last year’s Vegas Show, W.B. David unveiled a branding plan to join retail clients in a value-added chain. Called Preferred Jewelers of the World, it is akin to the Leading Hotels of the World platform, in which participants meet strict eligibility criteria qualifying them as the diamond’s “Ambassadors-at-Large.” At the business end, it means financial responsibility: high sales-to-marketing ratio (5-7.5%), with 60% minimum for advertising; membership fees, a minimum purchase of $75,000, activity in local charitable and civic activities, etc. At the consumer end, it means luxury, defined by guidelines of everything from store location to the condition of countertops, floors, and windows to handling customers: “Five Star Service,” everything from sales associate behavior to the napkins accompanying complimentary coffee.

 

Among the benefits to participating retailers is access to highest-end stones, seasonal promotions, aggressive regional pr, access to exclusive jewelry lines, and a significant expenditure by David. In some respects, the plan is similar to Supplier of Choice: Supply tied to performance, measured by marketing, advertising, identifying targets for adding value and demand. David announced Preferred Jewelers as the current downturn manifested its worst face, but the response from dozens of leading stores and chains was immediate. It was a further sign the insular diamond world had opened to new strategies. “Other luxury product manufacturers have always known that you don’t cocoon yourself in hard times,” said the DPS’ Diane Warga-Arias, a branding proponent David had consulted. “But diamantaires have always behaved that way in the past, and that’s what has to change.”

 

That willingness to change, given five centuries of stasis, has been nothing short of remarkable. Sightholders are reinventing themselves, in whole or in part, and if they have looked to the past for ideas or guides they have nonetheless seen dividends of branding unimagined going in. Remember the Princess, and its fashion applications. Some of the first Princess “branders”—Betz Ambar and Izzy Itzkowitz of Ambar Diamonds, for example, which sells the Quadrillion—were manufacturers who noticed while out on trunk shows that many of their clients were as interested in the settings as the diamonds themselves. They went into the jewelry business.

 

Joining With Jewelers

While not itself a branding strategy, jewelry is the path a number of sightholders have traveled: Through partnerships: Pluczenik and Escada. Through new lines: Tre Stelle (with an as yet unnamed sightholder partner). By creating new categories: Premier Gem’s “BOC” Category, a line of diamond jewelry celebrating the birth of a child. Or by branding their famous names, as in Kwiat Couture.

 

The massive triple sightholder Julius Klein explored many responses before partnering with Ritani, a former top Tiffany vendor with whom Klein shared unexpected likenesses and synergies, principally a traditional-ness that was fast giving way to technological advance. Ritani was designing and fashioning exclusively on computers, after years of blueprints spread out on a jeweler’s bench. Klein had begun using laser diamond-cutting machines. A triple-sightholder, one would imagine, experiences periodic gluts of certain shapes, colors, weights, clarities, fancies. Now Klein has a world-class jeweler-partner and his world-class client-base using that abundance in a line specially designed (branded) for those diamonds. And again: Rather than inferring the end-client’s immediate needs and general market through information gleaned from manufacturers, wholesalers, and salesmen, all the middle-men they sold to for decades in their offices, they’re now standing in the jewelry stores themselves with Ritani, doing trunk shows, tutorials, etc., the business of branding. And while there, they’re writing business for their generic diamonds as well, leaving one of their well-known huge rocks in the window, perhaps, raising the image both of Klein and the store. Perhaps more important, from the perspective of Supplier of Choice, they’re also forging new partnerships with chains that have in-store brands, but not the means to source, cut, and independently market.

 

Think about the links thus removed from the supply chain: Remember the “Spaghetti Junction” of the CSO? Short of Nicky Oppenheimer walking into a buyer’s office in Michigan with a parcel of rough, in less than three years we’ve hit as straight a line from mine to finger as could be navigated.

 

And what of the stores themselves? They face that same decision as sightholders, manufacturers, wholesalers, cutters. Do business as usual, or ride the wave? As we are seeing with sightholder responses, the answers may be as numerous as there are stores. Tiffany, as always, was among the first to move. The Lucida, in many respects, is the store-brand equivalent of the Lazare: a name for its finest makes, though Tiffany updated with refinements of new cut. In the last year, they have also joined the Canadian branding process, investing hugely (over $100 million) in Canada’s Diavik mine, set to open this year, thus securing its place as that mine’s leading “sightholder.” While not a branding strategy in and of itself, it is the first time in 150 years this brand name has gone to a mine to source. And whether intentional or not, Tiffany will be making a major statement on branding when it unveils if it will reference the conflict-freeness (or any other attribute) of its Canadian-sourced goods. The name has always enjoyed quiet confidence in the fineness of its makes, quiet being the operative word, and this is very Canadian. There are beautifully cut diamonds coming out of Canada, but that property is rarely high on the list of bullet-points. Good cut, so far at least, is more a B2B selling point than a store’s likely approach, if only because jewelry stores hire far more female sales associates, who are more likely, inclined, and successful selling on romance than pavilion angles.

 

Thus, it is probably no coincidence that Diavik’s “second sightholder” (in partnership with Aber), is Antwerp Overseas, the sightholder behind the ISee2 branding initiative. Among leading cut brands to de-emphasize the cutter, ISee2 advances “the store as the brand” in all its marketing, which is customized to individual clients, and they keep their name off their diamonds and their applications. Likewise, with another important Canadian brand, the Ikuna, sold by the powerful Ben Bridge chain: The miner’s name is withheld. The Ikuna is Ben Bridge’s Canadian diamond, end of story: a pure consumer brand connecting Ekati to the Ben Bridge customer without a whisper of a middleman.

 

The Premium Of The Origin

This, by the way, is a consistent difference between Canada-related brands and diamonds oriented to the world’s older centers. Marketing of traditional-center brands tend to emphasize the brander, be they African (the Rand, the Katz Ideal); Australian (BHP’s Aurias); or Russian (Sakha). Before, when an American jeweler branded his own store diamond, as did Sid Sather, of Preferred Jewelers of Colorado, he called it the “Antwerp Diamond,” signifying to his customers his ability to source in a well-known center. These are brands playing to tradition, but also to the miner-cutter-manufacturer-wholesaler-store supply chain, long in and of itself a “brand,” as it was the sum of public consciousness. The first-time, engagement-ring buyer understood that Tiffany didn’t mine diamonds; those came from far away and went through many hands, each making them a little shinier and adding X percentage to the cost. If you bought a diamond called “Antwerp” or “South African,” you were probably getting a deal.

 

While it would be unfair and off the point to say such brands (and their centers) represent the old way, the path from mine to finger always seems to be a bit faster out of Canada, as if diamonds come out of frozen grounds without skins or octohedral configuration. And this is branding in a nutshell. Neither, of course, is better, or necessarily more effective. Both are simply playing to strengths. If you have a billion-year-old volcano in South Africa or a tradition of mining, cutting, or selling, the message is of history, knowledge, experience, insiderness. From Canada, the message (at a business level) is of an imminent 11% of world production, of the conflict-free freshness of certificates from the Northwest Territories, the wide-openness of “arctic-mined diamonds.” At a consumer level, the image is closer to a diamond so new and unfettered, it just got up on its own two feet and ran to the store.

 

Whether this, and many other branding styles and initiatives, will play out or fizzle out remains to be seen. Branding, at this level, is a relatively new phenomenon, and the final verdict, as measured by consumer dollars, may be years down the road. Jewelry storeowners, however, must answer that question sooner rather than later. They can enter into a partnership/client relationship with any number of branders, and the American store-owner fields many a brander’s phone call these days: Some carry branded rounds and generic fancies. Others do the opposite. Some have followed the example of Tiffany and branded their own diamond. Globalization, for all its faults, has made it easier for jewelers of more modest means to source internationally, be it of rough, finer makes, or even of melle, for making in-store jewelry brands: Brand-conscious labs now grade entire sealed parcels of one-grainers, even smaller (down to 30s, in some cases), a practice begun largely with cheap labor producing Indian smalls, but which may soon extend to Chinese goods: The lower margins of small goods require such savings at the labor end, but make it hard to brand, short of such mass, or “generic,” grading. Combine that globalization with the ability to “act locally,” the jeweler’s knowledge of his own market—and you have a powerful force.

 

The exact number of stores and or chains to have done this would be hard to come by, but it is clearly growing, and likely to accelerate. Much as the DTC supports sightholder initiatives, a growing number of stores are receiving marketing/advertising support/expertise from vendors, in the form of co-op advertising, discounts or memo; they are getting it from cutters and manufacturers not much larger than themselves or from those at sightholder level. And storeowners are paying their own first visits to Charterhouse St., or at the very least are talking about them for the first time.

 

Branding A La Carte

The proximity of the words “generic” and “brand,” just above, would have seemed nonsensical a year ago. The New York-Antwerp firm of Horowitz & Atlass, long specializing in hearts and arrows, last year debuted a new cut, the Regent, a squarish shape that achieves the hearts and arrows pattern. But they also offered an intriguing, extremely affordable “menu” of options for customer stores or chains: Branding a la Carte, which offers any and all of the applications and extras by which branders brand, from scopes and inscriptions to fliers and performance documents. All are more or less customizable, varying with the customer’s budget, but a store or chain can field a fairly convincing branding initiative for thousands, rather than tens or hundreds of thousands, not to mention the $200 million one sightholder has used as a ballpark figure at what a truly successful brand would require.

 

For Horowitz & Atlass, the two strategies feed off each other, with Horowitz finding his Branding a la Carte customers among the first to write business for the Regent, and vice-versa. Thus, through two entirely different branding strategies, the firm achieves a form of limited vertical integration. If any business-end dividend of branding is free from the nay saying of its detractors, it would be the economies and efficiencies vertical integration afford. Those economies tighten the supply chain, under your own roof, have a profound effect on the way you do business in general—because branding becomes a way of life—and they feed off each other. Again and again, the sightholder/branders are the ones whose factories have modernized: be it in the technology seen on New York or Israeli cutting floors, or in the vast new shops in Guangdong Province in China.

 

ODI’s Victor Weinman, scion of a line of sightholders, strengthened an existing bond with Antwerp’s double-sightholder Tach? Alliance to form what may be the world’s largest single-shop vertical integration, just outside New York City: Four different businesses (including the LoveFire diamond, a branded Hearts and Arrows), in 7000 square meters. Over 200 employees sorting, polishing, setting, designing, fulfilling, selling, sourcing, packaging, etc. Everything is there, from executive offices to employee locker rooms, the diamond’s equivalent of Detroit, Michigan: Base materials go in, then a finished product comes out.

 

It is interesting to note that these changes echo those that came to Lazare-Kaplan’s Puerto Rico factory at roughly the same time the Lazare was branded in the early 1980s. If you’ve visited Schachter & Namdar in Ramat Gan, or Eurostar in Antwerp, or Klein in New York, if you’ve seen integration and globalization function at the highest level, it will come as no surprise that they were among the first sightholders to unveil a branded diamond, to partner downstream with a leading brander, or venture into the brand-new business of jewelry.

 

But again: Are they branders because of the Leo, because of Hearts on Fire, because of Ritani? Or just because they’re the biggest there is, and branding is what everyone is talking about these days?