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Are sustainable credentials enough to lure jewellery customers away from natural diamonds?
Research shows that consumers don’t always shop their values — price, convenience and design still come first. Conventional lab-grown diamonds are notoriously cheaper than natural diamonds, but as the market becomes increasingly oversaturated, price and environmental claims won’t suffice if the design isn’t compelling.
Skydiamond — which captures carbon from the atmosphere and manufactures it into man-made diamonds — hopes to tick both boxes. The brand is taking aim at a fashion-forward audience, launching a fine jewellery collection designed by new brand ambassador, model and environmental activist Lily Cole. It’s Skydiamond’s first collaboration with a notable figure like Cole, as part of wider plans to pursue more collaborations and supply stones to third-party brands — all in a bid to engage a new luxury consumer base.
“In the sustainability sector, it’s incredibly important that all brands create exceptional product and design really beautiful things, because if you don’t do that, people don’t choose sustainability,” says Skydiamond CEO Madeleine Macey, who joined from London department store Liberty (where she was CMO and creative director) in September, and has previously worked at Manolo Blahnik, Jimmy Choo and Roland Mouret.
Luxury consumers have been warming up to lab-grown diamonds over the past five years, particularly millennial customers, who are drawn to the lower prices and put off by the labour concerns associated with mined gems. The global lab-grown diamonds market was valued at $24 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 9.6 per cent from 2023 to 2032, reaching $59.2 billion, according to Allied Market Research. However, concerns have been bubbling around the manufacturing process of lab-grown diamonds, which critics say is carbon-intensive, energy-intensive and lacks supply chain transparency.
On the flip side, consumers who prefer a natural mined diamond over a lab-grown diamond are often drawn to the idea that it’s coming from the earth, diamond analysts say.
The new nine-piece ‘Gaia’ collection, named after the Greek personification of the Earth, launched on 14 May and includes earrings, pendant necklaces, rings and a body chain, each featuring 18-karat recycled gold balls that are split to reveal marquise Skydiamonds. Prices range from £900 for a chain ring to £6,000 for the body chain, and the products will be sold via Skydiamond’s website. It’s a diversion from the more basic designs the brand has previously offered — which is the goal.
As part of the repositioning strategy, Skydiamond is also planning to deepen its storytelling around its production process — which makes use of sun, wind, rain and atmospheric carbon — by inviting guests to a showroom space in its Skylab in the Cotswolds, England. This chimes well with consumers’ growing fascination for manufacturing.
“Luxury is emotional. The future of luxury is in products that have cultural value and longevity, that tell a story and invite people to wear their values,” says Macey. “For us, there’s enormous value in investing in the future, so if you’re going to be giving an engagement ring, it’s about giving something that will [protect] the planet’s future.”
Competing in the diamond market
Skydiamond didn’t start as a solution for the diamond industry. In 2013, British environmental entrepreneur Dale Vince was looking into drawing excess carbon dioxide from the air, but needed a way to store the carbon permanently. The solution was man-made diamonds — and the method required five years of research and development to get right. The first jewellery-grade stone officially launched in 2020, while Skydiamond as a jewellery brand launched in 2022 with an Earth Day pop-up in Selfridges.
Skydiamond uses chemical vapour deposition (CVD) machines to create its diamonds, a popular method among lab-grown diamond producers. The carbon source used in CVD is usually either carbon monoxide, graphite or methane gas. Skydiamond creates methane gas by combining carbon dioxide extracted from the air and hydrogen taken from rainwater in a facility in the Cotswolds (0.8 litres is required per carat to create a rough stone). The process is powered by wind and solar energy from Vince’s renewable energy company Ecotricity, which he founded in 1995. Vince acknowledges, however, that man-made diamonds are not a practical large-scale solution to carbon capture storage — a carat of Skydiamond contains just 0.2 grams of captured carbon.
Macey’s first move as CEO was to hire an in-house jewellery designer to elevate Skydiamond’s designs. The more basic creations previously offered included classic pendant necklaces, simple diamond studs and round-cut engagement rings.
“I want to build a luxury brand with Skydiamond that is loved and wanted for the design. The stone itself is best in class, and now we’re going to create jewellery that celebrates that,” she says. Macey also says Skydiamond will continue experimenting with the colour of its stones, while pushing to find innovative and conscious metals for use within their jewellery. The Gaia collaboration follows previous collections with British jeweller Stephen Webster and Gucci retail offering Gucci Vault.
Scaling and repositioning in a nascent market
Repositioning as an aspirational brand won’t be smooth sailing, particularly given the tension between the man-made and natural diamond industries. Last month, the Natural Diamond Council successfully filed a complaint to UK regulator the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) over Skydiamond’s marketing of their stones as “diamonds”, “Skydiamonds”, “real diamonds” and “diamonds made entirely from the sky”, which they say is misleading consumers to believe that they aren’t lab-grown.
“Anytime you see the word ‘diamond’ by itself, that refers to a natural diamond that was created deep within the Earth,” Natural Diamond Council CEO David Kellie tells Vogue Business. “I believe unclear marketing and advertising are a threat to the overall diamond market at large. While natural diamonds and laboratory-grown diamonds are separate markets, there are clear descriptors that consumers should be given, no matter which route they choose to invest in so they can be confident they know what they are buying.”
Skydiamond claimed that, since it is only the CVD step in the 23-step Skydiamond production process that’s shared with conventional lab-grown diamonds, it doesn’t see lab-grown as an accurate descriptor, but some diamond analysts see this as enough of a similarity to categorise them as such.
“With time, when lab-grown diamonds as a product mature, I think there will be less consumer confusion around the product,” says diamond analyst Paul Zimnisky. “In the meantime, it is very important for the trade to explain to consumers how the product differs from a natural diamond to maintain the trust of consumers.”
Skydiamond is planning to appeal the complaint, as the company believes its marketing makes it clear that the diamonds are not natural mined diamonds — in fact, the differentiation of its proprietary technology is the entire premise of the brand. Vince also believes consumers are increasingly aware of man-made diamonds, and is commissioning research to prove this.
“It’s a move by the industry to force clunky language on us, and it mirrors what’s happening in big food where there have been complaints from the animal farming industry against the use of the term ‘milk’ or ‘sausages’ and ‘burgers’ [to refer to plant-based alternatives],” says Vince. In fact, Vince claims the term “natural” is misleading when referring to mined diamonds. “When you say something’s natural, you assume it’s in harmony with the environment, and that’s not true. They need to be called mined so people know where they’re coming from,” he says.
Vince is confident that Skydiamond’s innovative process can compete in the market. “All the time we hear people who say, ‘I never would have bought a diamond before, but I could buy one now,’” he says. “Man-made diamonds are opening up a new sector of the market as well as competing with the existing one.”
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