When smaller diamonds were mined in the Soviet Union, De Beers made arrangements to do the marketing for the Soviets. The average Soviet diamonds were no more than 1/2 carat in their uncut stage.
…De Beers ordered N. W. Ayer to reverse one of its themes: women were no longer to be led to equate the status and emotional commitment to an engagement with the sheer size of the diamond. A “strategy for small diamond sales” was outlined, stressing the “importance of quality, color and cut” over size…
DeBeers devised the “eternity ring,” made up of as many as twenty-five tiny Soviet diamonds, which could be sold to an entirely new market of older married women. The advertising campaign was based on the theme of recaptured love…
The article then recounts various factual instances surrounding the re-selling of diamonds, specifically, to show the difficulty in re-selling personally-owned diamond jewelry and the claim that the value of diamonds appreciates with time. It discusses the experiment of a magazine editor who bought two gem quality diamonds weighing 1/2 carat each for a total of �400.00 and kept them in the vault for nine years.
During this same period, Great Britain experienced inflation that ran as high as 25 percent a year. For the diamonds to have kept pace with inflation, they would have had to increase in value at least 300 percent, making them worth some �400 pounds by 1978. But when the magazine’s editor, Dave Watts,tried to sell the diamonds in 1978, he found that neither jewelry stores nor wholesale dealers in London’s Hatton Garden district would pay anywhere near that price for the diamonds. Most of the stores refused to pay any cash for them; the highest bid Watts received was �500, which amounted to a profit of only �100 in over eight years, or less than 3 percent at a compound rate of interest. If the bid were calculated in 1970 pounds, it would amount to only �167.
The article then tells various stories about women who attempted to encash their diamond jewelry, one of which is about a wealthy woman with a US$100,000.00 diamond ring from Tiffany’s.
She had read about the “diamond boom” in news magazines and hoped that she might make a profit on the diamond. Instead, the sales executive explained, with what she said seemed to be a touch of embarrassment, that Tiffany had “a strict policy against repurchasing diamonds.” He assured her, however, that the diamond was extremely valuable, and suggested another Fifth Avenue jewelry store. The woman went from one leading jeweler to another, attempting to sell her diamond. One store offered to swap it for another jewel, and two other jewelers offered to accept the diamond “on consignment” and pay her a percentage of what they sold it for, but none of the half-dozen jewelers she visited offered her cash for her $100,000 diamond. She finally gave up and kept the diamond.
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