The Jewelry District, Video Edition: GIA’s Susan Jacques

By Kathy Passero | May 14, 2025

On The Jewelry District’s second video podcast, JCK editor-in-chief Victoria Gomelsky and news director Rob Bates interview Susan Jacques, outgoing president and CEO of GIA. Susan recounts her fascinating journey from growing up in Africa to a life-changing GIA course to an unlikely move to Omaha, where she helmed Borsheims and reported to Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. She even spent a day behind the counter with the billionaire investor. Susan also discusses GIA’s mission, her decision to retire, what the industry must do to avoid a crisis of consumer confidence in diamonds, and the upcoming AGS/GIA Converge conference.

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Episode Credits
Hosts: Rob Bates and Victoria Gomelsky
Producer: Natalie Chomet
Video: Jack Belisle
Engineer: Sean Paulsen
Editor: Carol Hartsell

Show Notes
02:15 From Africa to Omaha
10:51 Warren Buffett, “#1 Sales Associate”
18:03 Positioning GIA for the future
21:45 Points of pride
28:50 A crisis of consumer confidence
36:17 AGS and GIA join forces for Converge

Show Recap
From Africa to Omaha
Victoria and Rob welcome GIA president and CEO Susan Jacques and ask about her background. One of three daughters born to an Australian mother and a British father, Susan grew up in Zimbabwe (then known as Rhodesia), where her parents ran a timber business.

Susan lived in Zimbabwe during a “politically charged” time, as the country transitioned from colonial rule. “It was the most wonderful people and the most beautiful country,” she says. “I’m very proud to say I’m from Zimbabwe.”

Unsure what to do after graduating from high school in the 1970s, Susan attended secretarial school in the capital of Harare. She accepted an offer to work as a junior typist for Zimbabwe’s largest jewelry company. “That was my entrée into this incredible industry that I’ve been so blessed to be a part of,” she says.

It wasn’t long before political unrest led Susan and her family to relocate to England. When she returned to Zimbabwe, her former employer gave her a job in marketing.

Her boss was taking GIA correspondence courses, which intrigued Susan. She begged her parents to send her to the in-residence course, and in June 1980—just after Zimbabwe gained official independence—she and four colleagues headed to Santa Monica, Calif., to study for six months.

The experience “was life-changing,” Susan says. It “altered the trajectory of my career. It infused so much enthusiasm and passion in me for gem materials.”

When the course ended, she worked for a small grading lab in Santa Ana, Calif. At that time there was a booming certification business in colored stones, but that market “tanked” in 1982, leaving Susan with a dwindling income, unable to cover her living expenses. “I had just a bought a new car,” she says. “And my new car had a 22% interest rate.”

She shared her plight with her friend and former GIA classmate Alan Friedman, whose family owned prominent Omaha-based jeweler Borsheims. He asked her to work for him.

“Omaha, Nebraska, was not on my life plan,” Susan says. “I’m a believer that you can set your mind to anything for one year.” She resolved to get some retail experience under her belt, then head back to California. Instead, she stayed for 31 years.

Warren Buffett, “#1 Sales Associate”
Rob asked what drew Buffett and his company Berkshire Hathaway to purchase Borsheims. Susan explains that in 1986, Berkshire Hathaway bought the Nebraska Furniture Mart, a prominent Midwestern retailer that happened to be owned by an in-law of the Friedmans. In Borsheims, Buffett saw the same potential for lasting success that had drawn him to the Nebraska Furniture Mart, Susan says.

He purchased the company in February 1989, “and we were ever so grateful that he did,” she says. One of the biggest changes that resulted was exposure to a global clientele, including politicians and business icons. Shareholder meetings soon drew tens of thousands to Omaha every May. “We had glorious events at Borsheims,” she says.

Warren himself worked the floor during shareholder events. “I made him up a nametag that said ‘Crazy Warren, #1 Sales Associate.’ That was at his request.”

She remembers one man purchasing a $10,000 diamond tennis bracelet just “because he was buying it from Warren.”

In 1991, Alan Friedman’s father, Ike, died, which sent the company reeling. His son-in-law took over but stepped down after a couple of years to deal with a family matter. That was when Susan, then Borsheims’ vice president, got an unexpected invitation.

“Warren called me one day and asked me to come down to the office,” she recalls. “I had met him once or twice in the store. I didn’t know him at all. And he offered me the position as president and CEO. I was 34 years old, I had never gone to college, and I spent the next half hour trying to tell him this was a really big mistake.” His response? “I’m willing to take a bet. I think you can do it.”

Susan would serve as the company’s CEO for 20 years, reporting directly to the legendary billionaire. Before accepting the job, though, she asked Buffett for one piece of advice to help her succeed. He told her: “Do not say or do anything you don’t want to read about on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper…to be read by your family and friends.” It’s an approach she took to heart and has shared with colleagues many times. “It takes us decades to build our reputation, and it takes us minutes to lose it,” Susan says. “That’s been my mantra throughout my career.”

Positioning GIA for the future
Susan joined the board of GIA in 1996, during her tenure at Borsheims, and eventually became board chair. In 2013, she was appointed GIA’s president and CEO.

Last November, GIA’s board held a strategy session. “The most important thing to determine when you’re trying to devise your strategy is who is your [primary] customer,” Susan explains. “What we landed on, and we believe very strongly is, it is the retailer. And the reason is our mission is to ensure consumer confidence in gems and jewelry.”

She believes the most significant person in the gem and jewelry supply chain “is the retail sales associate, standing at the counter.” Those salespeople on the floor are the best “conduit” for GIA’s mission, she says.

Points of pride
Victoria asks what prompted Susan’s decision to retire later this year. Susan responds that she had always planned to step down when the youngest of her three sons graduated high school, which will happen in June. In retirement, she hopes to travel, visit family, volunteer, and devote time to the interests she’s been too busy to pursue.

“[I’m] so grateful though for the extraordinary opportunities I’ve been given and the exceptional people I’ve had the privilege of working with in this remarkable industry,” Susan says.

GIA is conducting a global search for a successor, with help from recruiting firm Korn Ferry and a board search committee. Susan hopes her successor will be named by midyear. She plans to travel with the incoming president to GIA’s labs, schools, and research centers around the world, to “say goodbye to each of our 3,100 colleagues, as well as introduce them to the next CEO.”

She hopes to still attend industry events post-retirement. “I look to not disappear,” she says. “I tell people, ‘I’m just a phone call away.'”

Rob asks how Susan’s perspective on GIA changed when she went from board member to staffer. She says she gained a deeper appreciation for the importance of the research GIA does through its endowment, investing tens of millions of dollars annually into work vital to consumer confidence in gems and jewelry.

“Ours is an industry purely, purely founded on consumer trust,” she says. “We are constantly uncovering things that people are trying to do that would take advantage of consumers.”

She is proud of the fact that GIA provides widespread education and continually modernizes its offerings to remain relevant. “We have almost 60 chapters around the world today,” she says, noting that the organization opened its first Thailand chapter earlier this year.

GIA’s laboratory services and instrument development are crucial as well. “When lab-grown diamonds and natural became such a challenge in the industry, we were able to produce a desktop device that helped people separate those from one another, and it brought assurance, it brought consumer confidence,” she says.

A crisis of consumer confidence
Rob points out that some industry members disagreed with GIA’s decision in 2020 to issue standard grading reports for lab-grown diamonds. Susan responds that GIA started grading lab-grown stones more than 15 years ago, long before they were commercially available.

“Part of the reason originally we decided to do it was because the more we see of a product, the more we can learn about a product,” she says. “Our mission is to protect consumers…. It is not [to protect] natural diamonds, it is not colored stones, it is not pearls, it is not synthetic rubies. It is gems and jewelry. And lab-grown does fall into that category of protecting consumers.”

However, she concedes, the landscape has changed dramatically in the past few years.

“Our wish for lab-grown diamonds and natural diamonds in today’s marketplace is that the sellers of [lab-grown] quit referring to them as being the same [as natural],” she says. “What GIA has stated is that optically, physically, and chemically they are the same. They are a diamond. And that’s where the sameness ends.”

She says many lab-grown diamonds are produced in factories that use coal fuel, which is not necessarily environmentally friendly or sustainable. Moreover, the sheer volume of lab-grown production (60 million carats last year) eclipses the 23 million carats of natural diamonds mined by De Beers last year, sparking a precipitous drop in the wholesale price for lab-grown.

“That is not the same as a natural diamond, [which] is rare and comes in a continuum of color, continuum of clarity,” Susan says. “The band we are only seeing [for lab-grown] is D-E-F in color, and VS or better in clarity.”

She does believes there is space for lab-grown in the industry. “Consumers need to understand that there is not an intrinsic value and there is not rarity to these gemstones, and the fact of the matter is at these prices, certification doesn’t really make sense any longer,” she says.

With many retailers are still selling lab-grown stones for thousands of dollars, consumers will inevitably be blindsided when they discover their diamonds have no value. “I think it’s a consumer confidence crisis that we as an industry can be facing,” she says.

She adds that “at this moment in time, every single lab-grown diamond for us at GIA is identifiable” because those diamonds are created in a different way from natural diamonds.

Is an inexpensive device to distinguish types of diamonds on the horizon? Probably not, according to Susan. “What we are trying to look for is so challenging scientifically,” she says. “A $200, $300 sit-on-your-desk [device]not at this time.”

AGS, GIA join forces for Converge
For the first time, AGS and GIA will collaborate on the Converge event, to be held Sept. 7-10 at the Omni hotel in Carlsbad, Calif. The conference includes a variety of educational courses and professional development opportunities.

“I’m a very big believer that the best days of this industry are still ahead of us,” Susan says, but adds the industry should always remember to uphold “consumer confidence through the actions, integrity, honesty, trustworthiness of the work that each of us do.”

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