Modern Jewelry Trends

Popular jewelry brand David Yuman signed a global licensing deal with Clarins Group USA to produce a David Yurman fragrance. It’s not much of a stretch: Tiffany, Bulgari, and Cartier all have fragrances. Bulgari even has a hotel. This is where the investment in consumer advertising finally pays off: Clarins, a marketing powerhouse with sales of $1.2 billion in 2005, will advertise the perfume, capitalizing on the consumer recognition created by David Yurman’s consumer advertising, and creating even more consumer recognition for the name David Yurman. The company already has expanded into watches and retail, with nine stores (two more planned for this year) and an online shop.

In the market for a big diamond? I mean a really big diamond? Up for bid now in Antwerp: the 603-carat Lesotho Promise, the largest rough diamond found since the 777 carat Millennium Star in 1993. Of course both of those are puny compared to the 3,106 carats of the Cullinan, the long-time record holder found in 1905 in South Africa. The Letseng mine, which produced the gem on August 22, is jointly owned by the Gem Diamond Mining Company of Africa and the Lesotho government. According to its owners the rough is D-color. Clarity? Far from flawless, judging from the BBC’s photos of the elongated, roughly golf-ball-sized rough. The winning bid will be announced next week. “A figure of around $10 million is something that we are expecting it to achieve as the minimum, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Clifford Elphick, chief executive of the Gem Diamond Company, told iAfrica. “It does have a couple of glitches, which are really cracks in it, and so unfortunately, it won’t polish into a single stone …. it will polish into a number of stones, probably an 80 carat being the biggest.”

This Christmas, diamonds will speak louder than words. The theme of the Diamond Trading Company holiday campaign is “This Christmas, Say Everything without Saying a Word.”

The new theme will be most elegantly communicated in a new television commercial without dialog, called Sleeping Beauty , which will begin running in mid-November. This ad will have two versions: one with a journey pendant, the other with a three-stone ring.

In an unusually unified strategy, the men-targeted Seize the Day print and outdoor campaign will also reflect the theme. In the now-familiar black with white type format, quote marks have been added around the pieces of diamond jewelry depicted, which include Journey necklaces, three stone necklaces and rings, diamond stud earrings, diamond solitaire necklaces, and diamond right hand rings. Advertisements with lines like “Be a Man of Few Words,” “Speak Love Fluently,” and “Show Her You Mean Everything You Never Say” will appear in 18 men’s magazines as well as online, on the Reuters and Nasdaq boards in Times Square, and throughout Grand Central Station in New York. Marketing materials, including a free downloadable ad slick featuring the line “This Christmas, Say Everything without saying a Word,” are available at www.dps.org. The Diamond Promotion Service is encouraging the trade to use the new theme line in their holiday marketing and merchandising campaigns. Customizable television ads for journey diamond jewelry and three-stone jewelry can also be created online at www.spotrunner.com/dps.

If you are an independent jeweler, sometimes it can seem as if the web is stacked against you, with thousands of sites advocating buying jewelry online and few talking about the advantages of buying jewelry the old-fashioned way, in person. To help balance the information available, Modern Jeweler has created some custom online content to promote the advantages of buying from your local independent jeweler. There are two versions of this article which we are making freely available to jewelers and others to publish online. The first, Ten Reasons to Buy From Your Local Independent Jeweler, is designed for sites like this one. You can use this article on blogs, community sites, anywhere you like. The second version, let’s call it Ten Reasons to Buy From Us, is written in the first person. This article is designed to be personalized with your store’s name, charities, brands, and services and posted on your own company web site. We put it in a pop-up window so you can easily “view source” and copy the html to post it on your own site. We’ve also created a custom version for IJO jewelers. We hope freely distributing these reasons to shop locally will spread them widely across the web and help remind consumers everywhere of the advantages of choosing an independent jeweler that you can know and trust. Do you have even more reasons? Submit them in the comments and we’ll add them to future versions.