There was a degree of skepticism and confusion in the diamond hall of the JCK Las Vegas show after De Beers’ announcement of its latest marketing program.
The miner launched Ombré Desert Diamonds, a style of brownish stones that it’s touting as its first “beacon” product in over a decade.
The term “beacon” refers to a specific jewelry concept the company promotes to drive consumer desire for diamonds as a category. Past examples are the eternity ring and the three-stone ring.
Beacon in the desert
The latest concept is an effort to reignite diamond demand during a period of almost unprecedented challenges for the industry.
De Beers will promote diamonds ranging from colorless to brown, encompassing cream white, champagne, sand, honey, ochre and whiskey. It will invest in media and digital campaigns to support the beacon’s success and make marketing material available to participants. De Beers hopes the goods will be available in stores by mid-September.
(“Ombré” is the style of blending one color into another. They’re called Desert Diamonds because De Beers extracts them from mines in the Kalahari and Namib deserts of Africa.)
Addressing the audience at De Beers’ annual breakfast at JCK on Friday, the company’s general manager for natural diamonds, Lynn Serfaty, urged sightholders to manufacture the right goods in time for the launch and encouraged retailers to earmark dollars and shelf space for the product.
Traceability push
The promotion came alongside the full launch of “Origin, De Beers Group,” a traceability program that the company first introduced in a more embryonic form at the 2024 show.
De Beers also announced that the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) was working on taking a minority equity stake in Tracr as part of efforts to turn the blockchain platform into an industry-owned blockchain platform.
In other news timed for the show, Botswana state-owned trader Okavango Diamond Company (ODC) has started registering its rough on Tracr, significantly increasing the availability of traceable Botswana diamonds, De Beers said.
Low colors
Many sightholders were puzzled as to why, with Desert Diamonds, De Beers was focusing on a range of colors that represented such a small segment of the diamond industry.
De Beers refuted the main explanation that its customers proposed — that the miner was sitting on a large inventory of rough with J color and lower and wanted a way of moving it. These goods, if marketed right, can capture value — as Le Vian achieved with its chocolate diamonds from the Argyle mine.
“Like our other beacons, Ombré Desert Diamonds is designed to expand the scope of natural-diamond jewelry beyond traditional purchases,” De Beers CEO Al Cook said in a statement to Rapaport News on Sunday.
The “collective effort to reignite desire for natural diamonds” shows the diamonds’ “uniqueness and rarity through greater differentiation, across a spectrum of golden colors of the African desert,” Cook added.
Different from synthetics
There’s another element on which Cook touched during another breakfast at JCK — this time at the Rapaport Group event on Sunday morning.
“[The Ombré diamonds] look different from synthetics every time you see them,” Cook said in conversation with Rapaport Chairman Martin Rapaport. “But they’re about more than…beautiful colored diamonds in beautiful jewelry. They’re about the beauty of where the diamonds come from.”
Lab-grown diamonds have become heavily focused on high colors because of technological improvements and because the price gap with natural encourages consumers to pick clean goods.
This campaign enables retailers to sell something that, as Cook said, is distinctive in appearance from most synthetics on the market.
The reception from the diamond trade was muted. This is not the first time De Beers has announced a major marketing campaign, and few who spoke to Rapaport News were expecting this to be the one that worked.
It might, however, offer some hope for the companies holding stocks of low-color natural diamonds ahead of the holiday season.
Image: Brown- and golden-hued diamonds. (Shutterstock)
