CIBJO President Gaetano Cavalieri emphasized the importance of clearly distinguishing natural diamonds from lab-grown diamonds to maintain consumer trust and market stability. Speaking at the recent Global Gems and Jewellery Development Conference in Hainan, southern China, Cavalieri highlighted the challenges facing the industry, according to IDEX Online.
“The marketing strategies adopted for lab-grown diamond jewelry so far have only served to dent consumer confidence in jewelry in general,” Cavalieri stated, stressing the importance of transparency in separating the two categories. “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.”
CIBJO President noted that the rise of lab-grown diamonds has significantly impacted global diamond jewelry sales, with both values and prices experiencing sharp declines in many markets. He added that this situation has been further complicated by the sharp decrease in the cost of producing lab-grown diamonds in recent years.
“It should always have been apparent that the economic principles governing a natural product, where there is always a finite production ceiling, are different from those of a manufactured product, where there is no production ceiling,” he explained.
He also warned that conflating the two types of diamonds and using negative marketing tactics against competing categories have ultimately eroded consumer confidence. “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,” he concluded.
