The Net And Big Sellers Change The Diamond Business
Michael Smyth, who works for a pharmaceutical company
, was peering not long ago at three large diamonds perched on the tops of metal rods, Silver Shiny Metallic Sexy Lingerie balanced above pure white paper in a shop in the Manhattan diamond district. Like countless young men in the generations before his, Mr. Smyth was looking for an engagement ring.But Mr. Smyth is different from earlier suitors, who often trembled at the approach of a salesman. Before he started out, he had carefully researched diamond sizes, cuts and quality on the Internet. He knew the wholesale prices, and he was ready to bargain.
Plenty of his friends actually bought their rings on the Web, he said, ''but since I'm here in New York, I figured I'd take a look.''
''If I were in Iowa, I'd probably buy it online.''
From mine to merchant to customer, the diamond business is changing while it expands like never before -- and the Internet is only part of it. Consumers, both men and women, are demanding better stones, often for lower prices, in a wider variety of locations.
Mom-and-pop stores are being squeezed by giant chains like Wal-Mart Stores, now the world's largest jeweler, and Costco, which increasingly sells diamonds over two carats. Department stores, too, are upgrading their jewelry counters. (Jewelry did much better than clothing in many of them over the holidays.)
And sales of diamonds, for all the predictions from critics that the industry has long been riding for a fall, are continuing to thrive. In 2003, the last year Silver Shiny Metallic Sexy Ripple Lingerie for which data are available, $20.5 billion in diamonds and diamond jewelry was sold in the United States, according to the Jewelers of America, up nearly 10 percent from $18.7 billion two years before.
Eighty-three percent of the brides in the United States say that they want a diamond engagement ring -- and their grooms, in turn, spent $4.3 billion last year on them. And diamonds have spread well beyond engagement rings.
Right-hand rings are promoted to women looking to flaunt their independence. Pop stars like Sean Combs wear watches with 1,200 cut stones on their faces that cost tens of thousands of dollars.
While the number of stones sold is increasing, complex changes are taking place. Wholesalers in the diamond district, on 47th Street between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas, which was once the epicenter of diamond wholesaling in the United States, are laying off dozens of stone-cutters, commissioning the work in India and China, and using the former factory space as showrooms for jewelry they never sold before.
Everyone is trying to cut out the middlemen distributors, who are now regarded as extraneous. Most of the Internet sites do not even buy the diamonds; they act as a clearinghouse for dealers.
The prices, meanwhile, have gone to two extremes. At the low end, the discount chains and many online diamond sites are offering prices that -- even the Main Street Silver Shiny Metallic Sexy Ripple Lingerie jewelers admit -- are at least 20 percent lower than in their own shops. At the other end, to satisfy the cravings of rock stars, Russian millionaires and others with bottomless pockets, prices for the much bigger, much rarer stones have soared as supplies have tightened.
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