Victoria Gomelsky and Rob Bates talk about the CIBJO centenary conference in Vicenza, Italy and the organization’s decision to adopt the term synthetic when referring to lab-grown diamonds. They also discuss a trend Victoria has been tracking that’s bigger than the latest styles people are wearing: the growing cultural influence of jewelry. Experts from renowned museums and other major cultural institutions shared their thoughts with her on this phenomenon. The hosts comment on another burgeoning trend: luxury travel. Victoria went the travel conference IMM LUX and returned with takeaways for the jewelry industry.

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Title sponsor: De Beers (adiamondisforever.com)

Show Notes
04:30 CIBJO and its new synthetic terminology
12:00 The growing cultural influence of jewelry
22:00 Takeaways for the jewelry industry from the IMM LUX travel conference

Episode Credits
Hosts: Rob Bates and Victoria Gomelsky
Producer and engineer: Natalie Chomet
Editor: Riley McCaskill
Plugs: @jckmagazine; adiamondisforever.com

Episode Transcript
This transcript has been abridged and edited for clarity.

Victoria:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Jewelry District… It feels like a long time since I’ve talked to you.

Rob:
Yeah, it definitely feels like it.

Victoria:
Maybe because summer ended, fall has kicked off, and it feels like a lot’s happening, even if it hasn’t been that long.

Last week I attended a travel conference in Las Vegas. We’ll touch on it toward the end of the show. There were interesting takeaways for retail jewelers because we’re often targeting the same people. In fact, luxury travel is probably the biggest competitor to fine jewelry, at least at the high end of this market.

First and foremost, let’s hear about what happened at the CIBJO conference, which took place in Vicenza.

Rob:
It was a very nice event. It was the 100th anniversary of CIBJO, which is the World Jewellery Confederation, the umbrella world organization for the industry.

As you can imagine, there were people from so many different places. They definitely pulled out all the stops for the centennial. They had fireworks and there was a classical music concert at this famous theater in Vicenza. And it was done at the same time at the Vicenza show.

As far as news, there was a bit of controversy: CIBJO’s decision to recommend that everybody use the word synthetic for lab-grown diamonds. And they said you should not use the word lab-grown. It passed pretty much unanimously.

Obviously, the natural diamond industry is suffering. People who depend on the natural diamond industry are also suffering in producer countries. That’s something I take very seriously, but I don’t necessarily think the answer is to try to put this ugly name on the competing product.

I think what they have to do is to stress the positive attributes of natural diamonds. And I think there’s plenty to talk about. It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s not going to be easy.

The United States Federal Trade Commission has a list of recommended descriptors for lab-grown diamonds. One is lab-grown, the other is lab-created, and the third is [company]-created. All those three have been on the list for about 30 or so years. Synthetic used to be on the list, but in the big revision that the FTC did to the guides in 2018, they took it off the list.

Now, they did not say you can’t use it. There are all these misconceptions. It’s very weird that people think that the FTC in 2018 all of a sudden said “You can’t use synthetic and you have to use lab-grown.” And that they just picked a term that had never been used before, when I’ve been using lab-grown for 15, 20 years. So, it’s obviously a term that’s been around.

It’s very similar to something that the American Gem Trade Association has done. And the Federal Trade Commission has said it’s fine to say lab-grown. So that’s what people are going to use in the United States because it has become the widely used term of choice.

Victoria:
And you said in Vicenza, you were in the minority with respect to how you felt about CIBJO’s decision.

Rob:
Yes. I’m surprised by that. People came up to me and said they agreed with me. And when I spoke to people privately, a lot of people agreed with me. And most people don’t think the Federal Trade Commission is going to suddenly change its mind.

I mean, Washington, D.C., is very strange right now. A lot of people have left the FTC who knew jewelry. There are only like two commissioners and there used to be five. So, they’re supposed to revise the guides in 2028 and it’s possible that might not even happen because they’re so short-staffed.

But I think most people who aren’t in the industry agree. I think the only reason to call them synthetic is because the trade has traditionally called them synthetic. And of course, the trade certainly has changed its terms like blue, white. There have been all sorts of old terms that it doesn’t use anymore. So, I’m a little mixed about the whole idea. I mean, CIBJO has the right to do whatever it wants. And I respect enormously the people involved in this. I just personally don’t think it’s the right thing.

Victoria:
So outside of this enduring conversation about lab-grown versus synthetic, what else? Gareth Penny was there.

Rob:
Yes, Gareth Penny was there, and people were treating him like he was the CEO of De Beers, even though he’s a former CEO of De Beers. He certainly leads one of the consortia to buy the company.

Victoria:
Was Al Cook there too?

Rob:
Al Cook was not there, the current De Beers CEO.

Victoria:
Did that feel politically like an odd thing?

Rob:
No. Some De Beers people travel more than others. So it didn’t seem that odd. I don’t think that De Beers CEOs always go to CIBJO. There was a decent De Beers presence there.

Obviously, everybody wants to get this De Beers sale over with. And I think a lot of people are getting very antsy.

Gareth gave a very nice speech, which was forward-thinking. He was very well received. There was talk about AI.

It was quite a party—definitely one of the better CIBJO conferences that I’ve been to. Have you ever been?

Victoria:
I’ve never been to a CIBJO conference. I don’t know if you got this, but are people generally feeling strong about the state of the business heading into the holiday? Was there any talk of, “This is going to be a tough quarter,” “This going to be a tough year”?

Rob:
Well, the natural diamond business is still a little challenged, but it’s starting to pick up, starting to turn around. It’s been a strong year, as we know, especially when you look at the jewelry results from luxury houses. It’s been strong for jewelry in general. Pretty good numbers in the United States. I think people were in good spirits.

I should also mention this, because the AGTA was there and Bruce Bridges, who we had on our podcast before, was there. They talked a lot about tariffs and people from Antwerp talked about how they got the tariffs knocked down.

The message was that the trade benefits when there’s unity. And we’re starting to see this revival and demand for colored stones. They seem to be doing very well, in particular, the colored stone business.

Overall, the message was that we need to have more trade unity, especially when it comes down to issues like tariffs, when everybody needs to focus and go to Washington.

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Rob:
There was this very compelling piece in The New York Times recently about how jewelry is making a bigger cultural impact. Did you read that piece?

Victoria:
Did I read that piece? I wrote that piece.

Rob:
Oh my God, you did?!

Victoria:
I did, I did.

Rob:
I heard it was very brilliant.

Victoria:
Well, thank you. I’ll take it. It ran on September 2nd. The New York Times editors always write the headlines. The headline of this piece is, “Jewelry Is More Than Just a Pretty Bauble.” And then the subhead is, “Appreciation of the category’s cultural resonance has been growing in recent years.”

It’s a little bit of a different story than I normally tackle because I usually write about very specific business or design trends, things that are anchored in product, in tangible things we’re seeing out in the world of jewelry.

This idea came to me through a woman named Rosena Sammi. She is the founder of The Jewelry Edit, which is a website really invested in emerging voices and diverse talents and really a wonderful e-commerce site for anybody looking to shop for jewelry. She has a merchandising background. She’s also got a legal background and is very connected.

She launched the Jewelry Edit Foundation, which really has an interesting mission. And a lot of it is to, again, bring out emerging voices, also to provide opportunities for young people in the jewelry industry.

And part of what she’s created is a series of masterclasses that began about a year ago. She considered them something like salons. In the literary New York City of the 1920s, you’d have these salons where people from different disciplines would come together and debate and talk. There were writers and artists and poets and all kinds of creatives. Well, she’s approached it from this angle where she’s pulled together people from differing backgrounds—whether it’s fashion, literature, art—and got them talking about jewelry.

When I was in New York in March for the Gem Awards, I happened to catch one of these masterclasses. It was led by these sisters. One was Sloane Crosley. She’s a writer who has written about jewelry. She grew up in a family that always treasured jewelry, passed down jewelry. So jewelry has figured quite a bit into her writing. She’s an essayist and novelist. You’ll find her writing in The New Yorker. She wrote a book that was based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant called “The Necklace,” a famous 19th-century short story.

Rob:
I read that story.

Victoria:
She wrote a novel that used it as a jumping-off point, inspiration. In any case, her sister is Dana Naberezny, who is the chief innovation officer at Tiffany & Co. So when I say that this is a family that was steeped in jewelry, I mean it quite a bit.

So, when I attended this masterclass that Rosena and the Jewelry Edit Foundation had put together, it was these two sisters talking about jewelry in this very relaxed, very organic way on a stage at a private member’s club in midtown. It was cool because it wasn’t the very jewelry-centric experience you might expect if you’re sitting in on a conference of jewelry. It was a much more organic conversation about the way that people might grow up with jewelry as a touchpoint in their families. And what it meant to Dana as she went on and made a career out of it. But Sloane talked about the way she incorporates it into her stories.

Well, this is just one of the masterclasses that the Jewelry Edit Foundation has put together. They run roughly once a month. And one of the upcoming ones will be led by a very impressive artist in Chicago named Theaster Gates that many people are probably familiar with. He is a big brain. And through connections that Rosina has managed to pull together, she is doing a masterclass with him in the fall in New York.

I was able to get a quote from him about what he intends to talk about for this New York Times story. He said he plans to talk about the hierarchy and why crafts—and jewelry, for that matter—sometimes fall lower on that hierarchy than fine art, for example, painting and sculpture.

He’s also a ceramicist. So in addition to being this big art world personality, he works with his hands and has a craftsman sensibility. What my piece really explored was all these interesting thinkers that are not within jewelry, but are coming into the jewelry space talking about jewelry in a way that elevates the whole category.

I think sometimes when you step outside and you’re not in the trade, jewelry feels very superficial to a lot of people. What’s interesting is that these different organizations are talking about jewelry in a much more elevated way.

My story also incorporated quotes from two executives from the 92Y who talked about jewelry being recognized in the cultural sphere and the artistic sphere. I talked to Bella Neyman, founder of New York City Jewelry Week. I spoke to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, which has put together quite a few jewelry exhibitions.

I think when museums talk about jewelry or put on exhibitions devoted to jewelry, a lot of people who aren’t thinking about jewelry suddenly realize, “Oh wait, there must be some weight here.” There’s cultural weight there.

I also interviewed Van Cleef & Arpels, whose L’École in Paris, their jewelry school, has some really incredible programs, including a partnership with the National Library of France, where they have put together a digital dossier that’s a study of literature that alludes to or somehow has jewelry incorporated into it. So you can peruse all these books and find out jewelry really is a through line for a lot of interesting, intellectually rich works of art and literature.

I think the takeaway is that jewelry is becoming more recognized as a pillar of our culture—as it should be, because everybody has jewelry, everybody has a jewelry story, even if they don’t think they do. Maybe their mom gave them an engagement ring or they inherited some pieces and they don’t know what to do with them. Every last person on earth practically has a jewelry story. I’m not saying it has to be prized or valuable, but everybody has one, even if they don’t think about it.

So I think that’s generally a good thing for our business. It elevates the conversation and gives people extra reasons to think about jewelry and to think about buying it.

Rob:
Do you think we’ll start seeing shows devoted to specific designers or shows that are more jewelry-centric in the traditional arbiters of culture like galleries, museums, and cultural institutions?

Victoria:
I do. One of the turning points—and this was mentioned by Jonathan Wahl, the director emeritus at the 92Y—is that in 2014, the Met did an exhibition featuring the works of Joel Arthur Rosenthal, aka JAR, the American jeweler in Paris, whose works tend to fetch millions at auction or get a lot of acclaim. That was a turning point because it was a museum—talk about arbiter of culture, I can’t think of anything bigger than the Met saying, “Look, here’s an exhibition that matters.” And that was a little over a decade ago. I think we will see more.

The Museum of Fine Arts has been at the forefront, I would say, of incorporating jewelry into their displays and exhibitions, but the curator there told me they still weren’t sure how some of the displays would land. And they find that it’s very popular.

They have a corridor where they have mostly put jewelry on display. It links two buildings of theirs. And they weren’t sure if it was going to resonate with their audience. In fact, it is wildly popular. So I do think we’ll see more. Museums care about attendance and popular reaction as much as any other institution. They are businesses as well. So, if things are resonating with their audience, they’re going to want to do more.

Rob:
And you said you went to a luxury conference.

Victoria:
Yes, I’ll share a few takeaways. I went to Vegas to attend a conference called IMM LUX. It stands for International Media Marketplace Luxury North America. It’s put on by an Australian company called Trav Media that unites editors and exhibitors. It was like a summit where I listened to a lot of speakers from the luxury travel space.

On the second day they had almost like a speed dating session where they paired different editors with different travel providers. So I met with people from various tourist boards, hotel groups, cities that were trying to draw tourists, somebody from Tasmania trying to talk up their various resorts. The Kenya tourist board was there, the Waikiki collection, which represents a bunch of hotels in Waikiki, all luxury-focused.

There were a few refrains during this summit that happened on the first day of the conference. And a lot of it was this idea, not of quiet luxury exactly, but that it used to be that luxury was about more. It was about bigger and better and glitzier—very visible luxuries. The hotel rooms were bigger, the buffet was more opulent.

And now there are such sophisticated travelers out there and there’s so much that people are looking for. It’s less about bigger, more excess. It’s about exclusivity. It’s about access. It’s really about anticipating people’s needs, thinking through what they might want and using data that you might collect from them—with their permission, of course—to help anticipate what your clients want. In any case, I have takeaways from that conference on JCKonline.

I thought it was worth noting, because during the pandemic, clearly we didn’t have to worry about travel as a competitive industry to jewelry. And since emerging from the pandemic, I would say that, at the luxury end, travel is the biggest competitor. People have flocked back to travel. The wellness industry has exploded. Sports tourism: We saw this during the World Cup, people spending incredible amounts of money on luxury suites or experiences that they couldn’t replicate.

These are some of the takeaways I single out. If you’re a fine jeweler and you don’t have a sports partnership, you may want to think about that because people are very loyal to their sports teams. It gets people together in the real world, out of their offices, away from their desks, and they’re living and loving life. So, if a jeweler can place themselves in that setting, I don’t think you could go wrong. Sports tourism and sports in general, I think are growing businesses.

Rob:
People look at travel as a competitor to jewelry. When people look at luxury spending, travel’s number one and experiences are far ahead of everything else. But jewelry is on top as far as products, as far as rate of growth at least. It’s doing better right now than handbags and luxury clothing.

Was there any kind of jewelry presence at this conference? Because I know that people look at travel as a competitor to jewelry, but a lot of jewelry is bought on vacations, and when people travel.

Victoria:
Absolutely. No, there wasn’t a jewelry presence, but you’re right. I think a lot of designers will have pop-ups or trunk shows at resorts. Yes, those are big opportunities.

There wasn’t a formal jewelry conversation happening at this conference, but I don’t see why they have to be adversarial, these categories. They they can lift each other.

Rob:
Yeah, people tend to spend more on vacation. You’re unplugged from the regular world and you sometimes splurge. It’s apparently a very big driver of purchases. I assume that industry is largely recovered.

Victoria:
Yes, very much so. They were very bullish, at least at the luxury end. So yes, back to that K-shaped conversation we’ve talked about, that upper part of the K, steaming ahead.

Rob:
It’s also interesting that certain jewelers like Bulgari and one or two others have opened up hotels.

Victoria:
Yes, well, Bulgari’s been in that space for a while now, but yes, exactly. I think that they saw this coming.

Any views expressed in this podcast do not reflect the opinion of JCK, its management, or its advertisers.

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