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Diamond marketing is surely one of the PR industry's biggest coups: you take a rareish natural mineral from the ground, cut it, polish it to a sheen and sell it for fantastical amounts because, as a classic De Beers ad put it, "a diamond is forever."
Since its massive ascendence into a multibillion-dollar industry in the mid-20th century, the diamond market has largely resisted the advances of science, which has long been capable of growing the gems in the lab. How did the compact carbon magnates do it? By establishing a marketing mystique about natural diamonds.
An artificial diamond jewelry startup in Broomfield, Colorado now seems to be pulling off a classic entrepreneurial trick, and is making headway by selling chunky bling made with lab-created diamonds to a massive new market: Gen Z.
Jewelry firm Pascal, founded by serial entrepreneur Adam Hua, has raised nearly $10 million in funding since it was founded in 2021, website TechCrunch reports. Some $2.5 million recently arrived from leading technology investor firm Andreessen Horowitz. The small company is even expected to generate revenues of $20 to $30 million this year, and as TechCrunch says, its customers seem to love it: they have a repurchase rate of about 20 percent, a customer retention statistic some companies would kill for.
What seems different about Pascal, Hua explains, is that he's not trying to follow a classic tech startup path and disrupt the existing diamond market. Speaking to TechCrunch Hua instead says his diamonds are marketed based on "culture," and he explained that the goal is to create "a new, affordable diamond category" which will exist alongside classic "luxury" diamonds sold for jewelry like engagement rings--a market Hua thinks will simply "remain."
Logically, diamond is just a fancy form of carbon, like coal or graphite...it consists simply of row upon countless row of carbon atoms arranged in a crystal with shockingly perfect mathematical precision. Natural diamonds get made when carbon is squeezed and heated by fantastically huge forces inside the Earth's crust.
Lab-grown diamonds simply take carbon and heat it and squeeze it using machinery--the same process, but with fewer volcanoes. Some artificial diamond companies market their gems on environmental grounds, pointing to the cost and ecological damage of traditional diamond mining, though critics argue the green credentials of some of these claims aren't supported due to electricity supplies coming from polluting power stations.
Pascal seems to be keeping its sales pitch much simpler: it's all about making diamond jewelry more accessible by creating it with artificial diamonds that cost a twentieth of the price of "real" ones that have similar weight and quality. To give that context, website Diamonds.pro tracks diamond prices, and shows a 1-carat (less than a thousandth of an ounce) natural diamond can cost anywhere between $1,000 and $14,000, depending on quality. Lab-grown diamonds are also still actual diamonds, rather than zirconia or alternatives as used in costume jewelry. Another significant difference from natural diamonds is that artificial gems can be easily colored, making it easier to follow changing fashion trends. Hua even asserted that artificial diamonds are "shinier" than natural ones, and thus are simply better "for TikTok videos."
This is of course a tacit admission that Pascal's market is Gen Z, because as Hua put it, people simply "want to get their money's worth when they buy something for quality and cultural needs."
The words "cultural needs" and "TikTok" in one business plan may make many aging business analysts and psychology professors a little queasy, but the social influencer industry is real. Recent data show that younger U.S. generations are really into artificial diamonds--lab-grown diamond sales in the U.S. jumped 16 percent from 2022 to 2023, and sales of artificial diamonds in U.S. cities rose more than in rural areas.
The big takeaway here is that technology really can overturn billion-dollar businesses, and if you're a canny entrepreneur able to spot a niche market, you can raise funding quickly and turn your ideas into hard revenues. It's just a question of spotting the right "cultural" fit.
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Lab-Grown Diamonds Startup Raises $10 Million to Sell Gems to Gen Z
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24.04.2024
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Diamond marketing is surely one of the PR industry's biggest coups: you take a rareish natural mineral from the ground, cut it, polish it to a sheen and sell it for fantastical amounts because, as a classic De Beers ad put it, "a diamond is forever."
Since its massive ascendence into a multibillion-dollar industry in the mid-20th century, the diamond market has largely resisted the advances of science, which has long been capable of growing the gems in the lab. How did the compact carbon magnates do it? By establishing a marketing mystique about natural diamonds.
An artificial diamond jewelry startup in........
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