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By Tim Barsoe
COPENHAGEN, May 4 (Reuters) - Pandora, the
jewellery maker best know for its silver charm bracelets, will
stop selling mined diamonds and focus on more affordable,
sustainable, lab-grown gems, it said on Tuesday.
"Diamonds are not only forever, but for everyone," Pandora
Chief Executive Alexander Lacik said as the Danish company
launched a new collection of man-made stones.
Pandora, which made 85 million pieces of jewellery last year
and sold 50,000 diamonds, said it aimed to "transform the market
for diamond jewellery with affordable, sustainably created
products".
The growing acceptance of man-made diamonds by millennials
attracted to cheaper stones guaranteed not to have come from
conflict zones has spurred firms such as De Beers to end its
decades-old policy of shunning synthetic gems in its jewellery.
Prices of lab-grown diamonds have fallen over the past two
years following the U-turn by De Beers in 2018 and are now up to
10 times cheaper than mined diamonds, according to a report by
Bain & Company.
Pandora's new collection of lab-grown diamonds will be
launched initially in the United Kingdom and will be available
in other key markets next year, it said.
Pandora said it expected the diamond market to continue to
grow, with sales of lab-grown diamonds outpacing overall growth.
Pandora's lab-grown gems will be made using a technology in
which a hydrocarbon gas mixture is heated to 800 Celsius (1,472
Fahrenheit), spurring carbon atoms to be deposited on a small
seed diamond, growing into a crystal layer by layer.
Pandora, which has until now sourced mined diamonds from KGK
Diamonds, said it will get its lab-grown stones from suppliers
in Europe and North America. Mined diamonds already in Pandora
stores would still be sold, it said.
Opponents of mined diamonds say their extraction causes
environmental damage and so-called blood diamonds help fund
conflicts. A study commissioned by the natural diamond industry
in 2019 said mined diamonds were less carbon-intensive.
(Reporting by Tim Barsoe; Editing by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen
and David Clarke)
