Responsible Jewellery Council Names Executive Director

By Rob Bates | November 19, 2025

The Responsible Jewellery Council (RJC) has named Purvi Shah (left), currently the head of ethical and sustainable value chains for De Beers, as its new executive director, starting Feb. 7, 2026.

She will take over from John Hall, who has been the RJC’s interim executive director since Melanie Grant stepped down in January.

Shah has worked at De Beers for 17 years. She has served as an RJC board member since 2023 and co-chair of its standards committee since 2018. In those roles, she helped create RJC’s 2024 Code of Practices, its 2024 Chain of Custody, and its first Laboratory Grown Material Standard.

She also leads the nomenclature committee of CIBJO (the World Jewellery Confederation), where she helped formulate the Blue List, an attempt to develop globally recognized sustainability terminology.

Shah will be the second former De Beers executive to lead the RJC, after Andrew Bone.

Her departure from De Beers follows that of Feriel Zerouki, who’d worked with Shah and left the company last month after 20 years.

In addition, Pamela Fierst-Walsh, the former State Department official who worked on conflict diamond issues, has departed De Beers, less than a year after joining the company as vice president of global affairs for North America. According to LinkedIn, Fierst-Walsh is now a senior program manager at Google.

(Photo courtesy of the Responsible Jewellery Council)