Lab-Grown Diamonds and Silicon Valley’s Cult of Disruption
Are synthetic growers trying to appeal to investors or consumers?
Rob Bates | June 17, 2016
"This week two very good articles were published on lab-grown diamonds, which included two delete-your-account comments from Martin Roscheisen, the CEO of synthetic manufacturer Diamond Foundry. In the first, in Racked, he declared that the mining industry “enslaves people.” (He should tell that to his backer Vast Ventures, which supports an asteroid mining compamy.) In the second, in Atlas Obscura, when asked about the unemployment that synthetics might spark in Africa, Roscheisen smiled and compared that to releasing drug dealers.
Now, to be fair, he was just firing back at Martin Rapaport’s often-heated criticisms. Still, his comments come across as cold rationalizations in the face of the very real prospect of massive job losses. (We should note that Diamond Foundry has discussed mounting factories in Africa. Is it committed to paying its employees there several times more than the major mining companies? Does it do that currently with its Indian cutters?)
In any case, in its scant eight months of operation, Diamond Foundry has turned itself into a lightning rod for a trade that is already half-panicked over its product. It hails from Silicon Valley rather than 47th Street, and you can tell that from its public pronouncements, particularly the fetishizing of disruption. As The Los Angeles Times put it: “The promise of a disruptive business model can be worth billions of dollars in putative investment valuation.”
But while that buzzword is catnip to investors and the consumer media, it plays poorly in the jewelry trade, which feels it has been disrupted more than enough, thank you. Retailers are already worried that synthetic diamonds will devalue their inventory. They will be even more reluctant to patronize a company that denigrates it as well.
Yet lab-grown diamond manufacturers will need the trade’s support if they ever hope to be a real business rather than an investment vehicle. (They could exclusively sell lab-grown diamonds direct to consumers online. But that’s been tried.) I’m not even sure that “disruption” is a winning story for consumers. ... "
The rest of the story and many sublinks are here:
http://www.jckonline.com/blogs/cutting- ... -306540353
