Online jewelry brand The Clear Cut is committed to never selling lab-grown diamonds. That’s why it’s giving them away for free.
As part of an initiative it began testing last spring, The Clear Cut has begun offering a two-carat round lab-grown diamond for free with the purchase of any mined diamond ring. It’s an evolution of a service the brand already provided, offering customers a free cubic zirconia replica of their ring to wear while traveling so their real diamond ring can remain safe from theft or loss. Thanks to the falling price of lab-grown diamonds, The Clear Cut can now offer real diamonds as a free travel replacement for all of its rings, according to the company.
The initiative speaks to the current disruption in diamonds, where lab-grown versions’ affordability and abundance of supply are causing sellers of both mined and lab-grown diamonds to rethink their businesses.
Speaking to Glossy from the JCK Jewelry Show in Las Vegas, which ends on Monday, The Clear Cut founder Olivia Landau said she’s been able to get lab-grown diamonds from her suppliers for as little as $100 per carat. That makes adding a free lab-grown diamond onto an order of a $15,000 mined diamond ring a negligible cost. The Clear Cut, which does $1 million in revenue per month, doesn’t put much of a marketing push behind the initiative, which opened up to all customers after the test period at the end of 2023. The Clear Cut has sold hundreds of diamonds with the free lab-grown travel diamond since adding the option.
While many jewelry companies like Pandora are incorporating lab-grown into their collections, Landau said they can also be useful for brands committed to sticking with mined diamonds.
“Both products will coexist, and neither will go away,” Landau said. “Lab-grown can be a great replacement for cubic zirconia or moissanite — things that are meant to replicate diamonds — and they can be great fashion pieces. Then you can keep natural diamonds for the things you pass down.”
Diamond prices have been falling across both lab-grown and mined versions. Lab-grown diamonds cost 28% less now than they did a year ago, and mined diamonds have fallen by 7%. Landau said the drop in costs across both categories has been a good thing for the industry, given the record high prices of mined diamonds in 2021.
For brands like The Clear Cut, focusing solely on mined diamonds is a way to stand out in an industry that’s increasingly turning toward lab-grown. But it’s not the only company doing so. De Beers announced on May 31, six years after it first began selling lab-grown diamonds through its Lightbox brand, that it would recommit to only selling mined diamonds.
But mined diamond companies have been affected by the rise of lab-grown options. Kyle Simon, co-founder and COO of The Clear Cut, said that thanks to the popularity of lab-grown diamonds, mined diamond companies have picked up on the importance of sustainability-related storytelling.
“Storytelling around the origin of a natural diamond is going to be a really big thing,” Simon said.
Read More: In a disrupted diamond industry, The Clear Cut offers lab-grown stones for free