Made to Go Mainstream

(diamonds.net) - When it comes to synthetics, the diamond industry has — to borrow a term from management consultant Geoffrey Moore — crossed the chasm. Crossing the Chasm is the 1991 book in which Moore discusses how to sell innovative high-tech products to mainstream customers. The titular chasm refers to the enormous gap between the “early adopters” and “early majority” stages of a new product’s acceptance in the market. It is the phase when a product is highly disruptive and requires behavioral changes, and it’s a point that most hyped-up technologies struggle to pass. While the lab-grown market underwent a drawn-out phase of innovation — starting when General Electric announced the first proven synthetic diamond in the early 1950s, and then its first gem-quality stone nearly 20 years later — the sector only started to make inroads in the mainstream market during the past decade. It is now arguably in the early-majority phase as more jewelry retailers, wholesalers, and diamond manufacturers enter the space. But it hasn’t been a smooth ride toward acceptance. Many in the wider jewelry industry — the “laggards,” as the graph would call them — continue to view lab-grown as a pariah. Still, attitudes have changed toward the product, which the trade considered its biggest threat not so long ago.