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How will they maintain their jewelry business ? It feels like Sony CD-R drives in the Playstation era.



Do it like here in Japan. They charged you 3x-4x the gold price and said "Oh it's not the gold price, but the craftsmanship".


Maybe they'll just stop caring about it because they have a much better new business.

The same way rolls royce no longer sells luxury cars to stuffy British aristocracy but makes a mint building huge jet engines.


While that is a nice idea...

RR cars has been a BMW subsidiary for 21 years, having been separated out from the aircraft engine manufacturing business in the 1970s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Motor_Cars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Holdings

(unless that's exactly what you meant of course, Rolls Royce Holdings indeed no longer makes the cars... )


On an unrelated note, Rolls Royce is probably more synonymous with Rap artists than British aristocracy these days.


Better to move into a new related business than to Kodak yourself.


I think people will keep buying diamond jewelry with natural because it the product is sold as real/natural diamonds. Prestige is important for the high-end market and most of the price will be markup anyway. (Well diamonds are nearly all markup anyway).

Tiffany's isn't suddenly going to be cheaper.


Or even the other way around: with the economies of scale created by industrial use cases removed, mining diamonds just for jewelry could get more expensive.


Nobody ever bought a CD-R to impress a cute piece of ass to marry them.

DeBeers are just positioning on price, natural more traditional and romantic, etc.

Who wants to know their engagement ring was half price?


> Who wants to know their engagement ring was half price?

I mean...a ton of people. My fiancee and I just purchased her ring together and it was pretty much a silent agreement from both sides that lab grown was the way to go (confirmed out loud of course). The stone we ended up getting was about 1/10 the cost the closest natural we could find, and both of us agreed that there are way better ways to spend that money with everything else in the future.

Many people also love jewelry but would rather not have something worth a brand new car on their hand.


The same way vinyl still sells.




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