“Unfortunately, this rhetoric has become familiar from Pandora.” This was the phrase buried in the third paragraph from the Natural Diamond Council letter, and its cutting. This is the continuation of a spat between the NDC and Pandora reaching back five years to 2021.
Last week, we wrote about Pandora’s Fifth C launch and what it means for the diamond industry. The Danish jeweller’s decision to add carbon footprint labelling to its lab-grown diamonds, and to join the traditional four C’s of the Gemological Institute of America’s (GIA) traditional grading of diamonds. The four C’s are – Cut, Colour, Clarity and Carat. Behind Pandora’s sustainability messaging we suggested it was clever marketing, and wanting greater control of their raw materials – lab-grown diamonds, platinum, the silver price and recycled gold.
The NDC took less than five working days to respond. Their open letter to Pandora CEO Berta De Pablos-Barbier, published via LinkedIn this week, called the campaign “another disappointing PR stunt that unfairly attacks the natural diamond industry to promote synthetic diamonds.”
The key word in the letter is ‘another’, it’s cutting, and it landed a blow.
