Insight & strategy diamonds. Any Lightbox lab-grown diamond of 0.2 carats or above will have a Lightbox logo inside the stone. We wanted to position lab-grown diamonds in a different space to natural diamonds, Mitkov explains. We didnt want them to be competing head-on we wanted them to be complementary categories and to be different categories people could turn to for different reasons and occasions and motivations. Lab-grown was intended to be a much more accessible and affordable product that can be fun and can be acquired any day for any activity. We wanted to preserve the space of special occasions for natural diamonds. The insight team carried out a wide range of research on lab-grown diamonds from modelling the potential share of the market that could go to lab-grown and carrying out qual to capture peoples feelings about the area. Very few people understood what it was, so it was quite interesting to see what they perceived and what they thought would happen with this new product, Future-proofing an iconic product, such as a diamond ring, is an important job says Mitkov. The findings were that lab-grown is seen as a fun product you can enjoy and not worry about an accessory while natural diamonds remained the top choice for life events and special gifts. Diamond provenance and origin traceability is a big issue that has recently resurfaced with the war in Ukraine, with Russia being one of the worlds biggest diamond producers. To help address concerns about the origin of diamonds, De Beers has produced a traceability tool to trace a diamond from its rough state to the jewellery consumers buy. The platform uses blockchain to allow diamond owners to access a record of a diamonds provenance and track its movement through the diamond market. Users of the platform can also choose who can access their information. If you are able to tell that richer story of diamonds, it is much more positive for consumers and makes more sense for retailers as well, Mitkov states. Because consumers are interested, they want to understand whether what they buy is doing good in the world. Because it is a luxury purchase, that is even more so. Not set in stone Information gathered from research projects is shared internally via an insight portal, covering market intelligence and pulling in information from a variety of sources. These include third-party insights and analyses and internal research projects, as well as external fortnightly data on sales presented on interactive dashboards that allow users to interrogate the data. Anyone who wants to know what the situation is in the retail space, and what retailers in the US are selling at the moment, can see how things are evolving, Mitkov explains. There is a lot 34 Impact ISSUE 42 2023_pp32-35 I&S De Beers.indd 34 16/06/2023 17:12