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Hedda Schupak

Word on the Street: Diamonds
November 8, 2006

Today I overheard an interesting conversation. I was standing in the pouring rain in a cab line outside the Time Warner building, listening to two thirty-something men discussing diamonds. Obviously from the investment-banker class of spenders, they were talking in five-digit diamonds.

"A two-carat minimum, you want a D-F, and don't settle for IF" was one's advice to his friend. He himself had gone to Tiffany's for his own wife's ring; his friend responded that Tiffany "really marks things up." The already-married fellow advised, "all diamonds are totally false value anyway; they're all controlled by two companies. So go to Tiffany's because you know what you're getting. Or I know this guy who can get you a deal."

He fairly accurately guessed his friend would have to spend in the neighborhood of $35,000 ("$15,000 a carat for D flawless," he reported). The "guy who could get a deal" didn't meet with the friend's approval (a snake, apparently), but I was once again horrified at the common picture of our industry in the minds of the public--and, in this case, the high-spending public.

I was about to open my mouth when a cab pulled up and they vanished into the afternoon.

But until we stop this culture of hondling over our product and start building an image of a coveted, desirable, gotta-have-it product, the razor thin margins and the mistrust of the public are only going to continue.

Posted by Hedda Schupak on November 8, 2006 | Comments (1)

Industries: Diamonds, Fashion Trends

November 9, 2006
In response to: Word on the Street: Diamonds
James commented:

There was an article I read on a web site recently that was talking about a relatively new company creating diamonds. The discussion that took place after the article was pretty surprising to me. The majority of it was about the DeBeers "cartel" and how they have warehouses full of diamonds that could last them 400 years if the mines just quit putting out stones. In almost everyone's mind that was discussing it, diamonds were artificially rare, and that they were worthless once purchased. No one, absolutely no one thought of a diamond as a desirable product. The people that had purchased them for their significant other, did so because it just sort of, expected. This was a technology web site that generally had nothing to do with jewelry/stones/diamonds. The article was there due to the technology involved in creating a diamond in a lab. Seems to me that the desire to buy diamonds is thinning due to the fact that more people are finding out that they are rare just because one or two companies say so.