Pandora Posts Strong Results, Slows Lab-Grown Rollout

By Rob Bates | February 06, 2025

Pandora posted yet another strong set of results in 2024, with organic sales rising 13% over the prior year—though the company acknowledged that its highly touted lab-grown diamond line hasn’t lived up to expectations.

The U.S. was Pandora’s star market in 2024, with sales leaping 13% and comps up 9%. Those increases were due in part to the expansion of Pandora’s retail network in the U.S., where “there’s a lot of white space,” CEO Alexander Lacik said on this week’s earnings call.

“All in all, [Pandora had] a good performance in a quite challenging market,” Lacik said. “We are building this company not just for the near term but, importantly, for many years to come ahead of us.…. Our market share, in aggregate, is still very strong, in a very fragmented industry. We think jewelry, as a category, is a structurally exciting place to be.”

Sales of Pandora’s “core” pieces, including its signature charms, grew only 2% on a like-for-like basis, while comps rose 22% in at its fashion-oriented “Fuel With More” segment.

Pandora’s lab-grown collection showed an impressive 43% comp increase in 2024. That business now stands at 315 million krone ($42 million).

The Denmark-based company did walk back its forecast that lab-grown sales will reach 1 billion krone ($139 million) by 2026, saying in a statement that “the global rollout will proceed at a slower pace than originally anticipated.”

On the conference call, Lacik said the strategy shift is due to certain markets’ lack of familiarity with the product.

“What we’ve found and learned is that a prerequisite for this business proposition to be interesting is that a certain level of base awareness [must exist] with consumers,” he said. “We launched in Brazil and Mexico last year where we knew there was literally zero awareness [of lab-grown diamonds], and we can also see it’s harder then to establish this business proposition without an immense amount of investment behind it.”

The U.S. and Canada remain the main lab-grown markets, Lacik added.

“Australia is coming on stream slowly, slowly,” he said. “The U.K. is also coming on slowly. For the future, we will stay in those markets.”

Lab-grown diamonds represent 1% of Pandora’s overall revenue. The company statement said there has been “a tangible positive halo effect on the brand from adding the [lab-grown] collection to the portfolio.”

(Photo courtesy of Pandora)