On the latest episode of the Rapaport Diamond Podcast, jeweler Eddie LeVian shares his family business’s sweet tooth for chocolate diamonds and how it’s trying to redirect customers toward higher-value stones.
Long Island-based brand Le Vian successfully developed and trademarked the niche diamond product as a way of extracting more value from the brown goods that Rio Tinto’s Argyle mine in Australia produced.
“We are at the stage where we have 5 million Americans and many more around the world who collect chocolate diamonds,” CEO LeVian said in conversation with Rapaport’s Joshua Freedman. “Now we’re graduating those who can into higher[-value] pieces, like the yellow diamonds, the green diamonds, the blue diamonds, the pink diamonds, and so on and so forth. Those cannot be produced in those same scales, so the ability to make pieces and help people graduate is a challenging thing, but I think we’ve done a great job of it.”
LeVian also spoke about how the chocolate-diamond brand came about, the painstaking process of registering the trademark, and how the company transacts with retailers. He also expressed his views on whether synthetic diamonds should be called “lab-grown.”
Plus: The connection between lab-grown diamonds and artificial intelligence (AI) that not everyone has considered.
Listen to the full episode here:
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