At the Heart of the Diamond Debate

Notes from Las Vegas: Day 1

My first day at the Las Vegas shows centered around three key themes affecting te diamond market: lab-grown diamonds, reigniting diamond desire, and the evolving retail experience.

These topics came up organically through conversations in my networking — and that’s the real beauty and value of being at these trade shows. It's in these moments that the best insights surface. I often find myself wondering if it would be rude to pull out my notepad, or if that would run the risk of losing killing the conversation, because the perspectives are so sharp and often unexpected.

For me, analyzing this industry is so rich, layered, and debatable. It’s just awesome. I love this industry, it’s so nuanced.

But let’s get into those themes a little deeper.

When it comes to lab-grown diamonds, there’s growing concern over their expanding market share and the impact that has on natural diamonds. But there is also a sense that the retail lab-grown space is ripe for disruption. One key issue is pricing inconsistency. If a consumer sees a lab-grown diamond at Walmart priced far below a comparable one at a traditional jeweler, they’re going to ask: Why the difference? And increasingly, many retailers won’t have a convincing answer beyond a disclosure of their margins.

The caveat is that’s been the expectation for some time. So many are asking if and when the disruption will happen – they’re losing a bit of patience.

When it comes to natural diamonds, one theme that stood out in my conversations was the importance of shifting our language from demand to desire. As one colleague put it — and I fully agree with this sentiment — desire reframes the conversation. It brings the focus back to emotion, aspiration, and storytelling, which is essential as category marketing efforts continue to evolve.

This leads to a broader question I’m exploring: Are we branding diamonds, or are we branding diamond jewelry? The distinction matters. It’s not enough to promote the stone itself — we need to build brands around the finished product, the design, the experience that enables greater storytelling.

Display in the Hearts on Fire booth at the JCK Luxury show.

Hearts On Fire is doing interesting work in this sense, and its becoming and interesting case study for me because Hearts on Fire has been evolving itself from being a diamond label to a diamond jewelry brand. As CEO Rebecca Foerster explained, the goal is to enable broader, more engaging storytelling by emphasizing the design, the experience and the emotion that the piece of jewelry evokes with the diamond at its core.

This approach aims to shift the value proposition from just the stone to the complete piece — allowing for a more emotionally resonant narrative and, potentially, a stronger premium at retail. To me that makes sense: As a consumer, I find myself more drawn to design-led narratives rather than to the components of the piece of the product that I’m buying.

And that got me thinking as an industry, maybe we’re lacking in strong diamond jewelry branding, brands competing with each to tell those stories and in so doing building equity for the category as a whole. And that’s not to discount the importance of category market of natural diamond jewelry. You do both.

Because what’s happening at retail is that lab grown and economic uncertainty is pushing jewelers to the bookends – toward the luxury consumer on the one hand and to lower price-point consumers on the other. That’s putting pressure on those retailers serving the middle-income households, who have historically been the meat and potatoes of the retail segment.

The answer for retailers is to create added value through the jewelry buying experience. We had a really informative educational session with my friends at Hill & Co which outlined the top 5 drivers of retail sales in 2025. Those being:

1. Personalization

2. Strategic omnichannel – how are your different points of sale serving each other? 

3. Hyper-efficient sales floors – how are your backend systems serving the sales process?

4. AI-powered clienteling – what can you automate to your benefit and to the benefit of your customer?

5. Experience first retail

And that’s our bottom line – to differentiate by providing an engaging and unique purchasing experience to the consumer, because it’s a crowded market out there, not just among jewelers competing for the jewelry customers’ wallet but for the overall retail budget. We’ve got to stand out.