5 Great Clicks for the Week of March 30

By Rob Bates | March 30, 2026

Here are five great articles to get your week off to a well-informed start:

1. Valentine’s Day jewelry sales jump 14% as higher-end spending drives market growth (Tenoris)

Tenoris’ Valentine’s Day survey of U.S. jewelry retailers shows that the K-shape economy is being felt at jewelry counters.

The industry data provider found that February sales at U.S. retail jewelers grew 10.7%, “driven by higher-spending consumers buying more jewelry.” However, unit sales of lower-priced pieces fell.

“The consumer market is telling us that demand is concentrating at the higher end,” Tenoris says. “For retailers, capturing this demand increasingly means focusing on higher-value pieces.”

And while lab-grown diamond sales remained healthy, the report notes that during “events like Valentine’s Day, the share of lab-grown jewelry tends to decline,” and “natural diamond jewelry performs better during ‘official’ periods of love.” Which, it adds, is something of a head-scratcher, considering lab-grown diamonds still compose around half of all engagement sales.

2. The unexpected retail lesson from Barnes & Noble (Fruchtman Marketing)

Before online shopping hurt anything else, Amazon decimated independent bookstores. Yet small booksellers have staged something of a comeback—and so, surprisingly, has America’s biggest bookseller, Barnes & Noble, which just a few years ago was faced with slumping sales and increasing debt.

Several great pieces have recounted B&N’s reversal of fortune, including here and here. Writing in her marketing agency’s newsletter, Ellen Fruchtman believes the book chain’s comeback holds several lessons for jewelry stores. For one, it shows that jewelers must ensure their staff serve as “trusted advisors,” since “education builds confidence, and confidence closes sales.”

“The biggest advantage independent jewelers have,” she concludes, “is something online retailers struggle to replicate: an unforgettable human experience.

**3. Botswana prepares to take an even bigger gamble on diamonds (The Economist, gift link)**

The Economist takes a skeptical look at Botswana’s desire to increase its current 15% holding in De Beers. Critics of the country’s aspirations warn that Botswana needs to diversify its economy away from diamonds and that it won’t necessarily extract more value from an ailing diamond jewelry value chain.

In any case, the publication doubts that the world’s largest diamond producer—which has been seriously hurt by the industry’s doldrums—will scrape together enough money to significantly increase its stake. It predicts De Beers will most likely be purchased by a consortium consisting of both governments and private funds.

**4. The woman shaking up the diamond industry (The New Yorker)**

With the Diavik diamond mine closing down last week, it’s worth remembering the colorful story of its founding, in the mid-1990s, at the height of Canada’s diamond rush.

According to the above profile, Eira Thomas (later CEO of Lucara Diamond) was prodded to look for diamonds in Canada by her explorer father, Gren.

Thomas “traveled to the region with an exploration team, taking along her northern sled dog, Thor, which was part wolf, to protect the group from bears,” the story said. “The animal was not as helpful as Thomas had hoped: when a grizzly approached, the dog whined for its owner.”

Originally skeptical, Thomas became convinced that one lake in particular had the right chemistry that would lead to a diamond deposit. But it wasn’t until the last day of drilling that her team found a sample with a 2 ct. diamond inside, and her hunch proved correct.

“It’s almost unheard of to find an actual diamond within a core—a tiny sample of the total material in a pipe,” said the story. “As soon as Thomas and the Aber team saw the glittering stone, which was the size of an M&M, they knew they’d struck pay dirt. That night, Thomas slept with the diamond under her pillow.”

5. Factoid of the week

Tether, the offshore issuer of crypto stablecoins, was the second-largest buyer of gold in 2025, according to the Financial Times (click through to read article).

(Photo: Getty Images)