GemThoughts

The JCK Show marks its 20th year in Las Vegas, and things sure have changed!  Las Vegas became the important battleground for jewelry trade shows, and then economic forces beyond anyone's control disarmed the battle.  Yes, there are still changes (JCK moving to the Mandalay, for example) but the reality has not changed.  There are fewer manufacturers extant that can exhibit--and others that have simply dropped out--and there are ever fewer retailers that can come and buy.  We should set aside the question of whether this is good or bad; whether in some ways we are better off not having the overheated market of the boom years.  But on the supplier side, we know that we have long suffered from too much capacity, a condition that will probably continue for quite a while.  The low barriers of entry into the business assures that.  And on the retail side, we have undergone many years of consolidation and stratification that has forced retailers to adapt or...

A number of years ago, maybe ten or more, I was regularly asked by De Beers to do focused studies on the US diamond market.  In those days, De Beers was still working to keep the monopoly boat afloat and trends in the US market was important.  The US market was, after all, better than half the world market, especially after Japan faded away.  In the course of one study, I pointed out to them that they were consistently minimizing the recycling of diamonds, especially better ones, in the US.  After many successful years of selling billions of dollars into the US market, and substantially expanding the consumer base, it made sense that a percentage of that was going back upstream as people sold jewelry out of estates or need.  I took a pure guess and said that it could be 5% of publicly held stocks. Just today, I read a column by Chaim Even-Zohar in which he describes the US consumer as the next "diamond mine", precisely the term I used in a presentation at th...