"Lab Grown Marketing Damages All Jewelry Sales"
January 05, 25
(IDEX Online) - Lab growns and natural diamonds must be clearly branded as distinctly different products, Gaetano Cavalieri, president of the World Jewellery Confederation (CIBJO), told delegates at a conference in China.
The marketing strategies adopted for lab grown diamond jewelry so far have only served to dent consumer confidence in jewelry in general, he said.
"The early decision to benchmark laboratory-grown diamond prices against the price of natural diamonds, which, while maybe serving the short-term interest of laboratory-grown diamond producers, proved to be a critical error over the longer term," he said.
He was addressing the 2024 Global Gems and Jewellery Development Conference, in Hainan, southern China.
Cavalieri said sales values and prices of jewelry - especially diamond jewelry - were falling dramatically, in markets around the world, largely because of the advent of lab growns.
He said a delicate situation had been made considerably more complicated over the past two years as the price of producing lab growns had fallen sharply.
"It should aways 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," he said.
"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."
Pic shows CIBJO president Gaetano Cavalieri the 2024 Global Gems and Jewellery Development Conference.