LVMH’s Numbers Confirm It: Jewellery Has Become Luxury’s Strongest Growth Engine

Posted on by Adam Fine

Richemont’s jewellery run has been the story of the year in luxury coverage for seven straight quarters now. That part isn’t new. What’s new is that LVMH’s H1 2026 results, out Monday, and Kering’s Q1 numbers before them, now say the same thing independently. Three groups that don’t coordinate their messaging are all pointing at the same part of the business. That’s what a category shift actually looks like.

LVMH’s group revenue came in at €38.6 billion for the first half, down from €39.8 billion a year earlier, a 3% reported decline, though organic growth (which strips out currency) was positive 2%. One division was the clear growth driver. Watches & Jewelry generated €5.2 billion, up 9% organically for the half, and the growth accelerated through the year, from 7% in Q1 to roughly 11% in Q2. Fashion & Leather Goods, the division that still generates over 70% of the group’s operating profit, only just returned to organic growth in Q2 after roughly seven quarters of weak, often negative growth.

Sit with that for a second. LVMH’s smallest business delivered its strongest growth, while the one that actually pays the bills was still shrinking in the first quarter, and barely grew in the second.

It isn’t just LVMH, and it isn’t just one brand within LVMH

Richemont reported jewellery Maisons up 24% at constant rates for the three months to 30 June, its seventh straight quarter of double-digit growth. That figure understates the story rather than overstating it: Europe alone grew 11%, and it grew on top of a double-digit comparative from the year before. That’s compounding on top of an already strong year, the harder version of growth to pull off.

Kering’s H1 2026 results landed today, and the pattern holds with sharper numbers than before. Group revenue for the half came to €7.2 billion, up just 1% on a comparable basis, with Fashion & Leather Goods, the Gucci-anchored division that carries the group’s identity, still down 1%. Kering Jewelry, the newly separated segment covering Boucheron, Pomellato, DoDo and Qeelin, generated €521 million, up 20% on a comparable basis for the half, extending an already strong first quarter even as growth eased slightly to 18% in Q2. Boucheron hit record revenue behind the launch of Quatre XS, a new size within its Quatre collection. Pomellato’s own momentum came from what Kering’s release calls “the sustained success of its key collections,” the same pattern again: growth built on what the house already owns, not on reinvention.

One group’s numbers could be execution. Two could be coincidence. Three groups that don’t talk to each other, all showing the same divergence at once, is the market talking.

Inside LVMH, Tiffany and Bvlgari Are Both Doing the Work

Tiffany and Co. HardWear black titanium, platinum, and diamond necklace
Tiffany and Co. HardWear black titanium, platinum, and diamond necklace – CREDIT: Tiffany and Co.

The obvious read is Tiffany. Its turnaround has been loud and well covered. But LVMH’s CFO, Cécile Cabanis, was clear on the H1 call that it isn’t a single-brand story. Sixty percent of Tiffany’s business is now what she called the “transformed” side, built around icon lines, and it’s growing far faster than what remains of the legacy silver business, which is still shrinking. HardWear alone is up around 75% year on year.

Knot is close behind, near 50%. That’s not a brand steadying itself. That’s a brand where the new business has to outrun a shrinking old one just to post the group-wide number LVMH reported.

Bvlgari isn’t riding on Tiffany’s momentum either. Cabanis described Bvlgari and Tiffany as both growing in the mid-teens in Q2, and Bvlgari’s growth was spread evenly across regions rather than concentrated in one market. Its March launch, Eclettica, a high jewellery collection built around 128 new designs, has since gone on to post record revenue for the line. Chaumet, smaller again, grew off the continued expansion of Bee de Chaumet.

None of this is best read as constant reinvention for its own sake. Eclettica extends Bvlgari’s own codes into new pieces rather than departing from them. Bird on a Pearl, one of Tiffany’s high jewellery launches this year, does the same with Jean Schlumberger’s archive for the house. Kering’s Boucheron told the identical story this half with Quatre XS, a new size within an existing collection line. Three groups, three houses, the same move each time: the growth is coming from newness, but newness built on decades-old house language, which is a different thing entirely from newness for its own sake.

Leadership at Bulgari changed hands, and the real story is what stayed the same

Laura Burdese became Bvlgari’s CEO on 1 July, moving up from deputy CEO, a role she’d held since July 2024. This was telegraphed two years in advance, and it’s worth resisting the temptation to read drama into the timing.

The more interesting structural detail is what Jean-Christophe Babin kept. He remains chairman of Bvlgari’s board, CEO of Bulgari Hotels, president of the Bvlgari Foundation, and head of LVMH’s group-wide Watches division. LVMH has, in effect, split the jewellery operating job at Bvlgari from the watch group job that sits above it. For a group whose watches business is still slightly negative even as jewellery accelerates, that’s a structural signal worth more attention than the succession headline itself.

On pricing, Cabanis got ahead of the obvious question

The standard follow-up to any luxury beat this year is whether it’s really volume, or price dressed up as demand. Cabanis addressed it directly on the call, cautioning analysts to “be careful when you look at it on the face value,” since the price increases were confined to specific ranges and specific products rather than applied broadly, with real volume growth underneath.

Worth treating that answer with some care rather than taking it as settled. Richemont, in its own July release, explicitly flagged elevated raw material costs, and jewellery is the most metal-exposed category in luxury: gold and platinum price moves alone can flatter reported revenue growth without any change in unit volumes. Neither LVMH nor Richemont discloses a volume-price split by individual Maison, so Cabanis’s answer, however candid, isn’t independently verifiable from the outside. It’s the CFO’s own account of the one number that could undercut her own narrative, and it deserves to be printed as exactly that.

There’s also a comps point worth making plainly, because it cuts in jewellery’s favour rather than against it. Fashion & Leather Goods’ return to growth this half is a return from a genuinely weak base, roughly seven straight quarters of weak, often negative growth behind it. Jewellery’s growth, at both LVMH and Richemont, is compounding on top of prior periods that were already strong. Growing off a strong base is a harder thing to do than growing off a weak one, and it’s the more impressive number of the two.

What this means for the trade

Set LVMH, Richemont and Kering’s numbers side by side and the picture holds across all three: jewellery divisions built on longstanding icon lines are outperforming the fashion and leather goods businesses that have carried these groups’ identities for decades. The growth engine right now isn’t speed to market. It’s depth in a small number of ideas, held and refreshed over decades, arriving at the moment fashion’s core categories are struggling to find their footing.

For brands without that inventory of owned silhouettes to draw on, that’s the harder read in all this. It’s a much slower asset to build than a good season, and all three groups were quietly building it long before it started showing up in the numbers this clearly.

Sources: LVMH’s H1 2026 results and earnings call, 27 July. Richemont’s Q1 FY27 trading update, 15 July. Kering’s H1 2026 results, 28 July.

Further reading:

The Franchise Effect: Why One Jewellery Idea Wins

The three events that decide what the jewellery trends are in 2026

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The Met Gala, JCK, the auctions: how to read the jewellery market in three events

Posted on by Adam Fine

There are three moments in the jewellery calendar that matter more than everything else combined. Miss them and you’re making decisions in the dark. Read them together and you have something most brands don’t: a joined-up picture of where desire and the market are moving.

The Met Gala: Real-Time Desire

(L-R) FKA Twigs, Stella McCartney, Ed Sheeran, and Cara Delevingne attend “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in May 2024 (Photo by Marleen Moise/Getty Images)

Nothing moves the market faster. A piece on the right person on the red carpet on a Monday night can shift consumer search behaviour by Wednesday and inform buying conversations by the following week. The Met Gala is more than a fashion event with jewellery in it. It’s the industry’s most powerful demand signal, immediate, visible, and measurable in ways that no trade show or auction result can match.

For brands, the intelligence question isn’t just who wore what. It’s what happened next. Which stones spiked in search. Which silhouettes started appearing in competitor ranges. Which houses gained cultural momentum they then spent the following twelve months converting into commercial returns. That sequence, carpet to consumer to commercial, is consistent, trackable, and is often under analysed at the brand level.

As Emily Dungey, Communications Director at Gemfields, puts it: “Key calendar moments provide the perfect opportunity to showcase coloured gems, such as Emerald month in May and Ruby month in July, and we have appeared at Paris Couture, Couture Las Vegas, Design Miami, London Design Festival, and various red-carpet outings to keep coloured gems front of mind.”

What the Feed Said: this week’s biggest jewellery stories

JCK: Where the Industry Decides

Francesca Villa enamel piece
Francesca Villa enamel

Less than four weeks after the Met Gala, thirty thousand jewellery professionals arrive in Las Vegas. Seventeen thousand of them are buyers and retailers, arriving with buying briefs and minds shaped partly by what they have just watched land on that carpet. They’ve travelled specifically to commit. The decisions made on that floor carry a commercial weight that no catalogue, showroom visit, or sales call replicates.

Over four days they validate some directions, quietly ignore others, and produce something no algorithm can manufacture: the shared frame of reference the entire industry operates from for the next twelve months. JCK doesn’t simply reflect where the market is going. It reveals which directions the industry is prepared to back commercially.

There’s a distinction worth understanding here. JCK doesn’t create trends. It commercially validates them. By the time something lands strongly on that floor it has already been percolating in design studios, social feeds, and auction rooms for twelve to eighteen months. If something surprises you at JCK, you’re already behind. The signal was available earlier, just in a different form. The show is where those upstream signals get commercially ratified and where your buyers’ open-to-buy allocations for the season get mentally committed, often before they’ve formally placed a single order.

The competitive intelligence dimension is just as significant. Every meaningful competitor is on that floor showing their hand simultaneously, what they’re leading with, what they’ve dropped, where they’re investing design resource, how they’re pricing. JCK is the one moment in the year where the entire competitive landscape is visible at once. Brands that attend with that lens come away with intelligence that would take months to assemble any other way.

And for brands that weren’t there: if your buyers were, their expectations of your range have shifted whether you know it or not. How quickly you process and respond to what came out of the show has real commercial consequences.

What Vegas revealed about the future of jewellery

The Auction Room: The Long View

Christie’s Geneva in May. Sotheby’s New York in December. Hong Kong in spring and autumn. The saleroom gives the jewellery market its most visible public measure of value. Estimates, guarantees and provenance all shape the result, but the final price still reveals what collectors are prepared to pay when exceptional stones and finished pieces meet the market.

Recent results have told a consistent story. Coloured stones have produced many of the top results across the major auction houses: the Estrela de Fura ruby achieving $34.8 million at Sotheby’s New York in 2023, and the De Beers Cullinan Blue achieving $57.5 million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2022, tying the record price per carat for a blue diamond. Different stones, different markets, same signal: buyers continue to show up for exceptional colour at the very top of the market.

The coloured stone momentum visible in salerooms from 2022 onwards is visible in commercial fine and demi-fine ranges across the market. That’s not coincidence. It’s the market reading its own signals, slowly but legibly, for anyone paying attention.

Why All Three Matter

As Jayant Raniga, CEO of PureJewels by Bhanji Gokaldas, puts it: “JCK helps us identify emerging precious-gem and colour trends, the Met Gala shows how those trends translate culturally, and major auctions reveal which stones, provenance, and craftsmanship the market believes will retain future value.”

Three timescales, three types of decision-making intelligence, one coherent picture.

The Met Gala tells you what consumers want right now. JCK tells you what buyers are validating for the season ahead. The auction market tells you where the category is heading over the next two to three years.

Jade Trau, Founder and Creative Director of Jade Trau, describes the same connection from a designer’s side of the launch. JCK and Couture are where designers actually put new work into the market, and the Met Gala runs on identical mechanics from a different angle, a red carpet moment rather than a trade floor. Neither guarantees anything by itself. As she puts it: “What actually matters, and what separates the designers who last from the ones who don’t, is what you do with that attention once you have it.”

The signal doesn’t just show up at the top of the market. It runs the full length of the supply chain, from the rough stone auctions where designers source their material, to the salerooms where finished pieces set record prices. Ayushi Khandelwal, Creative Director at Arayian Fine Jewellery, describes it: “Every collection begins with the gemstone. At Gemfields auctions, we look for exceptional quality, clarity and colour when sourcing rough, and those stones often inspire our designs. At the JCK Show, we closely observe client reactions to understand evolving demand. Recently, we’ve seen growing appreciation for unheated rubies above 5 carats and exceptional fancy-shaped gemstones. The Met Gala showcases how extraordinary gemstones, exceptional craftsmanship and remarkable design elevate fashion on a global stage, inspiring audiences around the world to appreciate and aspire to high jewellery.”

That’s the same three-moment logic playing out from the design studio’s side of the table. A brand sourcing rough at Gemfields is already reading the same colour signal Sotheby’s and Christie’s are pricing at auction. By the time it reaches JCK, that instinct gets tested against real client reaction. By the time it reaches the Met Gala, it’s either confirmed or it isn’t.

Critically, these signals do not move in a neat sequence. They feed one another. Auction results influence how exceptional stones are valued. Red-carpet appearances turn them into objects of wider desire. JCK reveals whether that desire is being converted into buying decisions, new collections and commercial commitment.

Coloured stones demonstrate the pattern. Exceptional rubies, emeralds and coloured diamonds have dominated major auction results, gathered increasing visibility on the red carpet and moved steadily into commercial fine and demi-fine collections. Each moment reveals a different part of the same market movement.

The value lies not in watching any one of them. Most brands already do that. It lies in connecting what happens in the auction room, on the carpet and across the JCK floor before the direction becomes obvious to everyone else.

At Something About Rocks, we cover all three as connected market intelligence rather than isolated diary events. Because by the time a trend becomes obvious, the commercial advantage has already gone to somebody else.

Further Reading: Richemont’s Jewellery Boom Isn’t Luck: It’s Pricing

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Richemont’s Jewellery Boom Isn’t Luck: It’s Pricing

Posted on by Adam Fine

Group sales rose 20% at constant exchange rates to €6.3 billion for the quarter ended June 30, beating the 11% analysts had forecast. Jewellery led the way, up 24%, driven by the Group’s four jewellery maisons – Buccellati, Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels and Vhernier – delivering a seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. Shares hit a record in Zurich, up as much as 7.4%, and the broader luxury sector rallied with it.

The headline is straightforward. The more interesting question is why jewellery continues to behave so differently from the rest of luxury.

The category story: Jewellery is separating from luxury

Van Cleef & Arpels Alhambra

This wasn’t a case of luxury enjoying a broad rebound and Richemont simply riding the wave. If anything, the opposite is true. Much of the sector is still grappling with softer aspirational demand, a slower Chinese consumer and growing fatigue after years of price increases across handbags and ready-to-wear. Richemont’s Jewellery Maisons continue to move against that backdrop.

Kepler Cheuvreux analyst Jon Cox told Reuters that Richemont remains the market leader in branded jewellery and dress watches, where demand is currently stronger than in other luxury categories. He also argued that buyers are increasingly drawn to products with intrinsic value and that wealth created by the AI investment boom is finding its way into high-end jewellery purchases.

Jefferies, the independent investment bank, described Richemont’s results as “blow-out” and said jewellery is likely to remain a disproportionate winner as luxury earnings season unfolds, with Richemont continuing to gain share within the category. That distinction matters. Two trends appear to be happening simultaneously. 

  1. Jewellery is proving more resilient than leather goods or apparel
  2. Richemont appears to be capturing a disproportionate share of that resilience.

Richemont’s business is unusually weighted toward jewellery.  Most other big luxury groups aren’t built that way. LVMH and Kering, for instance, get much more of their revenue from leather goods, ready-to-wear, and fashion than from jewellery. So when Richemont posts a whopping 24% jewellery-driven growth, that tells you jewellery demand specifically is strong. It doesn’t tell you luxury demand broadly is strong.

The story, then, isn’t that luxury has recovered. It’s that jewellery has become the strongest-performing segment within luxury, and Richemont is setting the pace.

It’s less a China story than a pricing story

The obvious explanation for a result like this would be a macro tailwind—a currency move, stronger tourism or a broader wealth effect. None fully explains what happened. Growth was broad-based across regions, with the Middle East the only notable exception. Even there, Richemont said local demand largely offset weaker tourist spending.

What repeatedly surfaced in analyst commentary instead was pricing. Bernstein’s Luca Solca noted that Richemont successfully serves both ends of the market. A high jewellery piece can sell for $1 million +, while a Cartier ring or bracelet remains accessible at roughly $2,000 to $5,000. Both segments grew during the quarter, and growth was broad-based rather than concentrated in exceptional high jewellery sales. That kind of consistency doesn’t happen by accident. It’s what pricing architecture built for the long term looks like.

Heritage and innovation reinforcing one another

One detail stood out. Cartier’s long-established Love and Panthère collections continued to perform strongly alongside newer launches such as Clash de Cartier Colors. That’s an important strategic signal. Heritage collections aren’t competing with innovation—they’re creating the stability that allows new collections to build over time.

Read more: The Franchise Effect: Why One Jewellery Idea Wins

Retail did the heavy lifting

Owned retail sales rose 24% to €4.5 billion, representing roughly 71% of group revenue. Wholesale and royalty income increased 9%, while online retail grew 18%. Growth was strongest where Richemont controls the customer relationship end to end. Years of investing in directly operated boutiques are now translating into measurable operating leverage.

An insider’s perspective

I spent several years as CMO at Alfred Dunhill, one of Richemont’s Maisons, so I’ve seen this operating model from the inside. What stands out to me isn’t just the 24% growth rate. It’s the consistency. Seven consecutive quarters of double-digit jewelry growth point to something structural rather than cyclical. Inside a Maison, that’s the difference between building long-term brand equity and reacting quarter to quarter.

What’s really happening is a price ladder, not two isolated customer groups. Cartier maintains the same design language, craftsmanship and brand story at every rung, whether someone buys a $4,000 bracelet, a $40,000 necklace or a multimillion-dollar high jewelry commission. Many brands struggle to stretch across that spectrum without diluting one end or the other. Richemont has largely avoided that trap because the brand narrative doesn’t change as you move up or down the ladder.

The retail mix matters for another reason, and it’s a distinction I learned the hard way in a Richemont boardroom. I once used the phrase “owning the customer” and got pulled up on it immediately. It was made abundantly clear that language like that was considered disrespectful to the client relationship, practically a CEM (career-ending move) to say out loud. The correct term, and the one that actually reflects how these Maisons are trained to think, is “owning the customer experience”. 

It’s not about higher margins, and it’s certainly not about possession. It’s about controlling the moment a purchase decision gets made, the story that surrounds it, and the relationship that continues after. That’s difficult to replicate through wholesale distribution, and this quarter illustrates the cumulative value of getting it right.

Why jewellery is winning

Pull the threads together and the picture is clear. Jewellery isn’t riding a luxury rebound. It’s outperforming a sector that is largely still struggling, and Richemont is the clearest evidence of why.

The architecture holds because the story never changes as you move up the ladder, as already noted. What’s harder to copy is the rest of it. Heritage collections fund the credibility that new launches need to land. Growth is concentrated in owned retail, where Richemont controls the relationship rather than renting it out to a wholesale partner. And the demand itself is being driven by wealth generated by the AI investment boom, landing in a category built to receive it, rather than one still working through years of price increases it can’t fully explain.

None of that is luck, and none of it is easily copied. It’s the result of years of deliberate choices about pricing, product and distribution, made well before this quarter. Richemont’s results, taken on their own, point to something bigger than one strong quarter. They point to jewellery as the standout performer in luxury right now, built on fundamentals & strategic rigor that the rest of the sector hasn’t matched.

Like this? Read Paris Couture Week 2026: Why rarity became luxury’s greatest asset

Issue 17 featuring Simon Pegg and Saffron Hocking, out now.

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The Franchise Effect: Why One Jewellery Idea Beats a Thousand Products

Posted on by Adam Fine

There’s an idea that doesn’t get enough attention in jewellery. It explains more about who wins commercially in this industry than almost anything else. It’s called a product franchise, not a brand, not a collection, but a single design that keeps generating revenue year after year.

The word is borrowed from business, where a franchise is a system that replicates value reliably. Applied to a product, it means the same thing: a design idea that keeps producing returns long after the initial launch investment has been made.

Read more: What Vegas revealed about the future of jewellery

A CEO that I once had the pleasure of working for and who shall remain anonymous, always referenced the Nike Air Force 1 as the ultimate example of a product franchise.   Launched in the early 1980’s the Air Force 1 has been in continuous production ever since – and I believe it’s the only shoe in Nike’s history that has never been officially retired.  Estimated annual sales are close to $1 billion, based almost entirely on the strength of the original design.  

What makes it the clearest example across any consumer category is that it hits every point on the franchise tick list simultaneously. The identity is fixed. Cultural adaptions are used to drive demand, think new colourways, Travis Scott collaborations & limited-edition drops.  Each update creates a new reason to buy again without ever altering the base identity of the product and consistently creating relevance to refresh the Air Force 1 franchise.

Jewellery’s Blockbuster Franchises

Van Cleef & Arpels Alhambra

In the jewellery world we have The Love bracelet. The Charm bracelet. The Alhambra. These aren’t just iconic pieces. They’re machines. Revenue systems that compound over time because the product itself creates the conditions for the next purchase. That’s a fundamentally different thing from having a bestseller, and the distinction matters enormously if you’re running a jewellery brand.

The biggest unit-volume franchise in jewellery is Pandora’s charm bracelet.  Nearly three quarters of a $5 billion business is in one product concept! Analyst estimates suggest charm bracelets account for around 70-72% of sales. That’s an extraordinary level of dependency and a key driver behind Pandora’s commercial success. 

The quandary must be regularly discussed within their strategic departments and boardroom, as to how future proof the business:  Diversify too fast and you dilute the franchise that built the business or stay the course, staying concentrated and be over exposed to a core idea that may lose cultural relevance.   

The two most iconic jewellery franchises are Cartier’s Love Bracelet and Van Cleef & Arpels Alhambra. According to Richemont’s FY2026 Annual Results, the Jewellery Maisons division, driven by Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, delivered combined sales of €16.5 billion, up 14% at constant exchange rates. Richemont does not break down sales by individual franchise, but it is estimated that the Love and Alhambra franchises represent a highly significant share of their respective Maisons’ commercial volume.

The Richemont franchise playbook is remarkably consistent and shares an underlying logic: the icon is the constant, never touch the motif, rotate the materials, change the scale, extend the categories, create seasonal variations & build cultural relevance.  The customer who already owns a piece already has a reason to want the next one. The franchise stays fresh without ever becoming something different.

Cartier’s most significant recent update was last year’s introduction of Love Unlimited a modern iteration which features tactile, flexible bands of gold which are simpler to slip on and off the skin. 

The Engagement Ring Franchise

The engagement ring is probably the most powerful product franchise in any consumer industry. It is a single product idea that has generated billions in annual revenue without ever needing a redesign. But De Beers built it in 1947 and didn’t own it. The value flowed to every retailer that ever sold a solitaire. In almost every other industry, the company that creates the franchise captures it. In bridal, the creator gave it away to the entire market.

That makes it a vulnerable foundation to everyone in the bridal category. Headwinds affecting the sector currently include lab-grown diamonds disrupting the value equation, declining marriage rates in key western markets and younger consumers questioning the ritual of marriage itself. 

Why most brands never build one

First, the reason to come back must live inside the product. What that means in practice is that something about the product’s design creates an inherent pull back to the brand, without the brand having to manufacture a reason externally.  The charm bracelet has empty space on it the day you buy it. The Love bracelet needs another person to put it on. The Alhambra comes in a new stone every season without ever changing its shape. The product gives the customer their own reason to return. That’s what makes it different from a transaction. A transaction is complete the moment the customer walks out of the store. A franchise product is never quite complete.

Second, it takes time. A lot more time than most businesses are prepared to give. The Love bracelet wasn’t iconic in its first decade. The Alhambra wasn’t being copied straight away. Culture cements a franchises status; brands don’t get to declare it at launch. That sits badly with quarterly targets, which is exactly why so few brands manage to build one.

Third, the product has to mean something and that meaning has to be transferable. The Love bracelet survives not because it’s beautiful but because it can be given. The charm bracelet survives because it tells a story. Beautiful products sell. Products that mean something keep selling. That’s the difference, and it’s a bigger gap than most product teams realise.

What this means for brand strategy

For jewellery brands without an established franchise, the question is not “what should our hero product be?” It is “what is the mechanism by which our customer returns?”

Map your current bestsellers and ask: does the customer who bought this have a structural reason to buy again? Is there a symbolic occasion that recurs? Is there a design system with empty space in it? Is there a motif that can be extended or seasonally rotated without losing its identity? If the answer to all of those is no, the product may sell — but it takes more to be a blockbuster franchise.

For more read The Week That Clarified Everything: Jewellery Is the Main Event

Jewellers are getting creative when it comes to the price of gold, and the results are exciting new designs

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The Week That Clarified Everything: Jewellery Is the Main Event

Posted on by Adam Fine

Three stories landed this week that, taken together, say something the industry has been dancing around for a couple of years: jewellery is no longer fashion’s accessory. It’s the main event. And the brands that get that first will be in a very different position to those that don’t.

The short version

The market is splitting. Cleanly, quickly, and probably permanently.

At the top, ultra-luxury is doing extremely well – better than anyone expected given the macro backdrop. At the other end, lab-grown has quietly built a diamond market that didn’t exist five years ago. Big stones, low commitment, worn the way you’d wear a great pair of heels rather than something you pass down.

The bit in the middle, the aspirational fine jewellery brands that sold you on “real gold, real diamonds, sensible price”, is the part that’s under pressure. And the uncomfortable truth is that the pressure isn’t temporary. It’s structural.

Three things follow from this.

Jewellery has broken away from fashion. The growth is different, the psychology is different, and brands still treating it as an accessories category are missing what’s happening. This has been widely documented by Bain, McKinsey & sentiment research. Consumers are choosing jewellery over clothing. That’s a real shift, not a blip.

Natural and lab-grown diamonds have stopped competing. They’ve moved into different lanes serving different needs. The brands still trying to hedge between the two without a clear position are the ones with a problem.

The mid-market squeeze won’t fix itself. Rising gold costs, tariff pressure, and lab-grown competition at the accessible end – that combination doesn’t resolve with better margin management. The way out is having a stronger point of view and a stronger brad awareness, not a tighter P&L.

Now the evidence

Richemont

Eleven percent jewellery sales growth! In a year when fashion struggled, the watch market stalled, and tariffs made global supply chains miserable.

Cartier, Van Cleef, Buccellati, Vhernier – €16.5 billion in jewellery revenue, up 16% in the final quarter alone. Total group sales hit €22.4 billion.

The obvious question is why. And the answer is almost embarrassingly simple: these brands know exactly what they are. Nobody walks past a Cartier Love bracelet wondering what it stands for. That kind of clarity – built over decades, never softened for short-term relevance – is what’s compounding right now while less defined brands tread water.

Love Unlimited bracelet
Cartier Love bracelet CREDIT: Cartier

Having worked for Richemont I can tell you first hand that nobody develops and implements a brand platform frameworks so religiously. Johann Rupert is a true genius, and this structural approach gives Richemont’s jewellery brands defined territories that avoids cannibalization and gives consumers a distinct visual and emotional framework to buy into.   Am strongly convinced that this same approach works does not work for fashion brands, but we can save that monologue for another week.

McKinsey said jewellery would be the fastest-growing part of fashion by unit volume, four times the rate of clothing. Richemont is what that actually looks like in practice. The question for everyone else is what their version of it looks like.

What India’s diamond data is really telling us

The most significant number this week didn’t come from a brand. It came from India’s gem export council: lab-grown diamond exports overtook natural diamond exports by volume in both March and April. First time, sustained. The world’s main diamond manufacturing hub is shipping more lab-grown than mined.

The instinct is to frame this as natural versus lab-grown, winners and losers. But that’s the wrong read. They’ve stopped competing. Natural diamonds are moving into genuine luxury territory – the kind of purchase you make the way you’d buy a vintage Rolex or an old-school piece of Bottega. Something with provenance, weight, a specific meaning. Lab-grown is doing something completely different: it’s built a diamond fashion category, where you buy a statement tennis necklace for a Saturday night the way you’d buy a great jacket. Bolder, bigger, no guilt, no inheritance-level price tag.

Signet’s CEO put it simply: “We want both to grow.” Which sounds obvious until you realise most brands are still trying to play both sides without committing to either. That’s the actual risk.

The squeeze in the middle

Gold is expensive. Tariffs are making sourcing harder. And lab-grown fashion is now genuinely competitive on perceived value at the accessible end of the market.

That’s a specific problem for the brands that built their whole story around democratising fine jewellery – good materials, real craftsmanship, prices that made you feel smart. It was a compelling proposition. The trouble is the ground has moved.

Think about what happened to mid-tier department stores when fast fashion got good and luxury got covetable. The middle got hollowed out – not because it was bad, but because the clearer propositions on either side became more magnetic. Something similar is happening here.

The brands that come through it will be the ones with something to say beyond price. An aesthetic, a community, a genuine point of view. Affordable isn’t a brand. It’s a feature. And features, eventually, get copied.

JCK opens Thursday

The industry’s biggest annual trade show lands in Las Vegas on Thursday. This year it arrives at an unusually sharp moment.

Watch which brands show up knowing exactly what they are. And watch which ones are still trying to speak to everyone.

The market has been making its preferences clear for a while. This week just made it harder to look away.

The Chandelier Index: Meet the New Economic Indicator the Jewellery Industry Didn’t Know It Needed

Posted on by Adam Fine

“When the world feels uncertain, people don’t reach for the quiet and the delicate. They reach for the chandelier.”

I’ve spent the last few years watching the jewellery industry closely. The spending patterns, the search data, the red-carpet moments, the retail numbers. And somewhere in all of that, I kept noticing something that didn’t fit the conventional wisdom.

Every time consumer confidence fell, I expected jewellery buyers to go quieter. Smaller pieces. More restrained choices. That’s what the textbooks suggest people do when they’re under pressure.

They weren’t doing that. If anything, there were signals that they were doing the opposite.

That observation is what led us at Something About Rocks to propose a new idea. We’re calling it the Chandelier Index. Here’s what we think it means.

First, some context on why the old indicators keep failing

Most people have heard of the Lipstick Index. Leonard Lauder coined it in 2001, observing that Estée Lauder lipstick sales were rising even as the economy weakened. The idea was simple: when people can’t afford the handbag, they buy the lipstick instead. A small treat to soften hard times.

It’s a nice theory. But it kept breaking down. By 2008 lipstick sales were actually falling during the recession, not rising. COVID killed it entirely. It’s hard to sell lipstick when everyone’s wearing a mask. Most recently, Estée Lauder reported a 10% drop in sales even as economic anxiety intensified. The substitution story simply doesn’t hold any mor

The Hemline Index is older and even shakier. Short skirts in good times, long hemlines in bad. This was attributed loosely to a 1920s economist, though the original research never quite said that. It made sense when there was one fashionable hem length. Fashion fragmented, and the signal went with it.

Both of these are comfort stories. They assume that when times get hard, people seek small consolations.

What we saw in jewellery was something different. Not discretion. Assertion.

What the data actually shows

Here’s the pattern we’ve been tracking. Google Trends search interest for bold, maximalist and statement jewellery has risen consistently since 2021. Right through UK inflation hitting an 11.1% peak in October 2022, right through the US consumer confidence crash, and it’s still rising now. Meanwhile searches for minimalist and delicate jewellery have stayed essentially flat throughout the same period. According to Pinterest’s 2024 trend report, searches for “maximalist jewellery” surged 3,460% in the summer of 2024.

American consumer confidence just hit its lowest recorded level in the University of Michigan’s survey, a series that goes back to 1952. Below the financial crisis. And additionally, below COVID. And the Chandelier Index is at a five-year high.

That is not a comfort pattern. That is people deciding to be seen.

A note on methodology, because transparency matters here: the index we’ve built uses Google Trends normalized search data, relative measures rather than absolute counts. This is a hypothesis, not a peer-reviewed study. The next step is building a proper retail panel that tracks bold-versus-delicate sell-through data quarterly. That doesn’t exist publicly yet. When it does, the index becomes definitive.

The Chandelier Index Adam Fine
The Chandelier Index

What this means if you’re running a jewellery business

The practical implication is uncomfortable for anyone whose planning assumptions are built on the old model.

Weighting your buy toward delicate, accessible pieces during downturns and shifting to statement when confidence recovers is lipstick-index logic. The data doesn’t support it anymore. The assertion impulse doesn’t switch off when confidence falls. If anything, it intensifies.

Why we think naming it matters

The Chandelier Index doesn’t claim to predict recessions. What it claims is simpler: that when people are under pressure, the jewellery they reach for tells you something real about how they feel about themselves. Not whether they’re rich or poor. Whether they want to be seen or not.

The Lipstick Index told us people wanted comfort. The Chandelier Index tells us they want presence. Right now, they want to be seen.

What the Feed Said – this week’s biggest jewellery stories

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This Week in Jewellery: What TikTok, Instagram and Google Are Actually Telling You

Posted on by Adam Fine

Last week was jewellery’s biggest week of the year. The Met Gala landed on May 4th and the feeds haven’t really recovered since. In a good way. Our editorial team at Something About Rocks called it right in their preview, predicting that the “Fashion Is Art” theme would push jewellery front and centre — expecting sculptural one-off pieces over volume, craft over scale, jewellery as wearable art. That’s exactly what happened, and TikTok, Instagram, and Google have been digesting it ever since.

If you’re a jewellery brand trying to make sense of what this week means for your content and strategy, or a jewellery lover, you’re in the right place. Here’s what we’re seeing across the platforms, and the business read behind it.

The Met Gala Lit Up Search — and Stayed There

Hugh Jackman, Cara Delevingne, Charli XCX and Venus Williams arrive for the Met Gala
Hugh Jackman, Cara Delevingne, Charli XCX and Venus Williams arrive for the Met Gala – CREDIT: Getty Images

Monday’s red carpet didn’t just generate a night of social content. It generated a week of it. Our full roundup on Something About Rocks documented a carpet that spanned Jon Batiste’s archival 1951 Cartier platinum brooch, Emily Blunt’s half-a-million-dollar Mikimoto pearl-and-diamond body jewel, and Beyoncé arriving in a full Chopard suite anchored by the extraordinary ‘Queen of Kalahari’ necklace. Over 200 old mine cut diamonds were woven into Isha Ambani’s couture bodice, with a further 250 carats in graduated necklaces around her throat.

But here’s the strategic read behind all of that spectacle. The looks still circulating most actively on TikTok and Instagram this week aren’t necessarily the most expensive ones. They’re the ones that told the clearest story. Jisoo’s vintage 1905 Cartier choker, which she had altered from its original black velvet to pale pink to match her gown became a talking point. Not because of its carat count, but because of the personalisation behind it. That’s the algorithmic lesson worth holding onto this week. Story travels further than spectacle.

On Google This Week: The Numbers Are Telling You Something

The Google data is concrete enough to act on. Silver jewellery is running at approximately 9,900 monthly searches and up 22% in the last quarter — moving in lockstep with SS26’s cooler-toned styling direction that we’ve been covering across our recent fashion week content. Mixed-metal jewellery is growing right alongside it, with Google searches up 22% year-on-year, which is the platform’s way of confirming what the runways have been showing us: rigid metal rules are genuinely over in how consumers think and shop. On the flip side, rose gold is in real decline. It’s down 33% over three months and 45% year-on-year according to Google Trends. If your content or paid search is still leaning heavily into rose gold, that’s a conversation worth having now rather than later.

On the vintage and heritage front, Google’s trajectory is striking. Search interest in old mine cut diamonds is up 236% year-on-year, and interest in antique and distinctive cuts more broadly is accelerating. The Met Gala’s abundance of archival pieces landed in a week where that appetite was already quietly building in search before Monday even arrived. When cultural moment and consumer intent line up like that, it’s worth moving quickly.

On TikTok This Week: Identity Is the Dominant Format

TikTok’s #jewelry tag now carries 14 million posts. The content dominating that space this week isn’t product showcase. It’s autobiography. Jewellery tours, “what I always wear” videos, charm necklace builds. They all share the same underlying format: the wearer explaining what each piece means to them. The charm necklace in particular remains TikTok’s most commercially potent jewellery format right now, with creators loading chains with personal symbols, initials, and objects that represent moments rather than aesthetics. It feels participatory rather than aspirational, which is exactly why it works.

The stacking story is equally consistent. The mood on TikTok this week is maximalist — chunky layers, mixed metals, bold textures, stacking everything. One thread worth flagging: with gold prices where they are right now, chunky gold pieces are being framed by creators not as excess but as aspiration. The high price of the underlying material is making bold gold feel more exclusive, not less desirable. That’s a content angle any brand can pick up and run with directly, and it’s landing well.

On Instagram This Week: The Brooch Is Having Its Best Week in Years

One of the quieter but genuinely exciting signals this week on Instagram has been the brooch. It’s a trend Something About Rocks has been tracking carefully across several seasons. Men’s brooches in particular have been climbing the red carpet steadily, and the Met Gala gave it a fresh and highly visible surge. Jon Batiste’s 1951 Cartier archive piece, A$AP Rocky’s enamelled designs, and Hugh Jackman’s transformable diamond brooch all generated sustained Instagram reach well beyond Monday night.

What’s encouraging is how this is now filtering into the non-celebrity feed too. Styling accounts and micro-influencers have picked up the brooch as a layering device — pinned to blazers, draped on necklines, used as a finishing touch where a statement ring might have sat twelve months ago. Google data puts pendant necklaces at around 6,600 monthly searches as a stable baseline — the brooch isn’t there yet in search volume terms, but it’s clearly gaining real cultural momentum on Instagram right now. That’s the window. Before Google follows Instagram.

The Takeaway

This week’s platform data sends one clear and genuinely encouraging message: jewellery has never been more talkable, and TikTok and Instagram are rewarding the brands that understand why people wear pieces, not just what those pieces look like. Google confirms silver and mixed metals are where consumer appetite is growing. TikTok confirms that story-led content — charms, tours, meaning — is the dominant engagement format right now. And Instagram is telling you the brooch moment is real and still early enough to make your own.

Pick one of those signals. Build content around it this week. The brands winning right now aren’t doing anything complicated — they’re just paying attention to the same data you just read, and moving before everyone does.

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Interested in more? Read about Pandora’s introduction of a fifth C into diamond buying