Two years in, the Grown Diamond Trade Organization (GDTO) has expanded slowly but the group uniting lab-grown diamond growers, manufacturers, and retailers still has the right idea—that lab-grown diamonds are a help and not a hindrance to the jewelry industry, its executive director Marty Hurwitz maintains.

GDTO’s role is to help the lab-grown sector mature into its own business model: accurate disclosure, efficient product documentation, useful technology, and practical solutions that reflect the economics of a modern manufactured product, explains the GDTO head and founding member.

“We didn’t spend any money to build the lab-grown diamond category. It grew naturally. No one has macro marketed this category to any consumer, yet consumers are walking in the door worldwide to buy this product,” he says. “Consumers don’t differentiate lab versus natural. They’re all diamonds to the consumer. The challenge is getting more young, Gen Z consumers into jewelry stores to buy anything.”

JCK talked to Hurwitz about De Beers Group and Anglo American, the efforts of other industry groups like the Natural Diamond Council, and what he wishes the jewelry industry understood about lab-grown diamonds in this moment.

How has the Grown Diamond Trade Organization changed since its founding in 2024?

GDTO is stable and continues to represent a substantial portion of the large finished lab-grown diamond jewelry sellers in the United States. Our membership has not grown dramatically, but it includes many of the companies that matter most in the U.S. market.

International expansion has been slower than we originally anticipated, in part because the lab-grown industry remains fragmented by geography and by position in the supply chain. Our revenue and funding have remained stable. We are not trying to build a large bureaucracy. We have remained focused on providing practical services and infrastructure that members and brands can actually use.

Some parts of our original thesis have proven more important than others. When we launched, we believed consumers would place significant value on independent sustainability ratings and detailed information about how and where lab-grown diamonds were produced.

In practice, that has not happened. Consumers simply do not care about sustainability ratings to the extent we initially envisioned. They care overwhelmingly about design, appearance, quality, and price. Sustainability may reinforce a purchase, but for most consumers it is not the primary reason they buy a lab-grown diamond.

That does not mean transparency is unimportant. It means the industry needs to be honest about what consumers actually value rather than building its strategy around what we wish they valued.

The certification market also changed. After GDTO entered the market with a lower-cost alternative for finished jewelry, IGI substantially reduced its certification pricing. That was good for the industry and ultimately good for consumers, even though it reduced one of GDTO’s original cost advantages.

As a result, we have broadened our model. In addition to GDTO-branded certificates, we now provide proprietary, customized certificates for individual brands using our underlying technology. That allows retailers and manufacturers to control the consumer presentation, incorporate their own branding and standards, and provide useful product information without forcing every company into an identical format.

Our leadership and governance continue to reflect a cross-section of the lab-grown diamond industry, including retailers, manufacturers, growers, and suppliers. That was intentional from the beginning. GDTO was not created solely to represent growers or loose-diamond sellers. It was created to support the entire finished-jewelry ecosystem.

What did you think of Anglo American CEO Duncan Wanblad’s comments that it “misjudged” lab grown as a threat?

I thought the comments were accurate, although very late. For years, much of the natural diamond industry treated lab-grown diamonds as either a temporary pricing anomaly, a product consumers would eventually reject, or a small opening-price category that could be contained through terminology and differentiation. That was a fundamental misreading of consumer behavior.

Lab-grown diamonds were not successful because consumers were confused. They were successful because consumers understood the value proposition. They could purchase a larger, better-looking diamond or a more substantial piece of jewelry for the same amount of money. Retailers also discovered that lab-grown diamonds could produce strong unit sales and attractive margins.

The natural diamond industry expected the market to rebound in the same way it had after prior cyclical downturns. But this was not merely a cyclical downturn. It was a structural change in the product category.

I would make one distinction, however: I do not view lab-grown diamonds as a threat to diamonds. They are a threat to the historical scarcity and pricing model for mined diamonds. Lab-grown diamonds have expanded consumer access to diamond jewelry, increased the size and visual impact of the products consumers can afford, and created new reasons to buy diamonds. From a jewelry retailer’s perspective, lab-grown has been an enormous product innovation.

The natural diamond industry’s mistake was spending too much time trying to define lab-grown diamonds out of the category instead of defining a compelling reason for consumers to pay substantially more for natural diamonds.

What do you think of the plans the Natural Diamond Council has for its next steps? It is talking about a push for World Diamond Day marketing, a TrustMark, and more. 

The Natural Diamond Council is moving in the correct general direction. Devoting most of its investment to consumer-facing marketing rather than trade communication is sensible. So is attempting to measure consumer consideration, purchase intent, sentiment, and recommendation.

The industry needs measurable consumer outcomes, not simply campaigns that receive favorable reviews from people already inside the industry. Its emphasis on cultural relevance, creators, organic storytelling, sports, fashion, and major cultural events is also more appropriate than repeating abstract messages about rarity. Natural diamonds need to function as a luxury brand category. They need emotion, provenance, aspiration, design authority, and cultural meaning.

But there is a more fundamental branding problem the natural diamond industry still needs to solve: A consumer must be able to see, with the naked eye, that a piece of jewelry contains a natural diamond.

Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Rolex, and other successful luxury brands create visible signals. People can recognize the product, the design language, the logo, or some other proprietary element without laboratory equipment. That visibility is a major part of what creates status, identity, and willingness to pay a premium.

Natural diamond jewelry needs the same type of recognizable signal. That branding could be placed on the diamond itself or incorporated visibly into the setting. It might be a recognizable mark on the table, a branded design element on the outside of the shank, a distinctive hallmark, a proprietary color used in a visible portion of the setting, or another design feature consumers can readily identify.

The NDC should also be careful not to make attacking lab-grown diamonds the center of its strategy. Regulatory enforcement against deceptive advertising is legitimate. But describing lab-grown diamonds primarily as factory-made imitations risks sounding defensive and disconnected from the millions of consumers who knowingly purchased and enjoy them.

Do you think diamonds should be marketed as a whole or separately as lab-grown versus natural?

Both, but at different levels. The industry should market diamond jewelry as a whole around beauty, love, celebration, self-purchase, fashion, and emotional significance. Every part of the diamond industry benefits when consumers want more diamond jewelry.

At the product level, however, natural and lab-grown diamonds should be marketed clearly and separately. They are physically and chemically diamonds, but they have different origins, economics, supply characteristics, resale expectations, and consumer propositions. Those differences should be disclosed plainly.

Lab-grown diamonds should be marketed around accessibility, size, design freedom, fashion, innovation, and value. Natural diamonds should be marketed around rarity, provenance, luxury, heritage, and, in the right circumstances, collectability.

But disclosure alone is not branding. A certificate stating that a diamond is natural does not create the same consumer value as a product that is visibly recognizable as natural. To support a significant and lasting price premium, the natural diamond industry needs a visual branding system that can be seen in the diamond or the jewelry itself.

The mistake is believing that differentiation requires denigration. A Mercedes does not need to claim that a Toyota is not a car. It needs to explain and visibly demonstrate why a particular consumer should pay more for the Mercedes. Natural diamond marketing should do the same.

What else do you want the industry to know about GDTO or lab-grown diamonds today?

First, lab-grown diamonds are no longer an experiment or a temporary disruption. They are a permanent and substantial part of the jewelry business.

Second, falling wholesale prices do not mean that the category is failing. Declining production costs are normal in a manufactured technology product. The relevant questions are whether consumers continue to buy the product, whether retailers can merchandise it profitably, and whether manufacturers and retailers can create branded value beyond the underlying commodity. The strongest companies will not depend indefinitely on earning extraordinary margins from a loose stone. They will build value through design, branding, service, financing, customer relationships, and proprietary products.

Third, the industry should stop assuming that consumers are primarily motivated by technical or ideological arguments. Most consumers do not begin with a position in the natural-versus-lab debate. They want a beautiful product at a price they can afford. They want confidence that it is represented accurately and that they are receiving reasonable value.

Lab-grown diamond quality is now generally extremely high and remarkably consistent. We are dealing with a manufactured product whose quality can be tightly controlled. In that environment, it makes less and less sense to spend large amounts of money sending every product through an expensive independent laboratory simply to reconfirm characteristics that are already well understood and routinely produced.

Consumers need accurate disclosure and straightforward product information. They do not necessarily need a costly laboratory report attached to every lab-grown diamond or every finished piece of jewelry.

That is where GDTO’s proprietary certificate platform becomes particularly relevant. We can provide a simple, credible, low-cost documentation solution under the GDTO name or fully customized with the retailer’s or manufacturer’s own branding. The certificate can present the information consumers actually need, support consistent disclosure, integrate with the brand’s customer experience, and avoid unnecessary laboratory expense.

Finally, the future is not likely to be an equal division between two interchangeable products. Lab-grown diamonds are likely to account for the overwhelming majority of diamond jewelry units, while natural diamonds become a smaller, more premium, and increasingly branded luxury category. That is not the end of natural diamonds. It is a different business model.

(Logo courtesy of the Grown Diamond Trade Organization)

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