Inside Pandora’s Plan to Sell Lab-Created Diamonds to the Masses
Pandora jewellery. Shutterstock.
Pandora could do more for the mainstreaming of lab-created diamonds than any company on the planet.
The Copenhagen-based firm sells the most pieces of jewellery in the world, totalling about $3 billion in sales a year from more than 100 countries. Its breakthrough has been offering affordable luxury to the masses. But diamonds have been too pricey for its middle class customer base — just 50,000 of the roughly 85 million items it sold last year contained the precious stone.
Enter Alexander Lacik, who joined Pandora as CEO in April 2019. A veteran of packaged goods giant Reckitt Benckiser, Lacik is trying to ignite growth. His strategy is a simple one: sell more jewellery to the millions of customers Pandora already has, instead of finding new ones. That’s why lab-grown diamonds are so tantalising because at roughly a third of the cost of mined stones, they are in the price range (starting at about $300 for an item with 0.15 carat) Pandora’s customers expect. That could open the diamond market to them for the first time.
Bloomberg spoke with Lacik about Pandora’s push into diamonds, which recently kicked off with a rollout in the UK and will go global next year.
Since lab-created diamonds are cheaper than mined diamonds, why not market them that way? For a segment that is still new to many consumers and only has a single-digit share of the US diamond market, it seems like an obvious strategy.
