The Number Is Not the Problem

500 million USD a year sounds like an extraordinary amount of money. For the natural diamond industry, it should not be. The real question is not whether an industry generating 70 USD billion in annual retail sales can raise 500 million USD a year for its future. The real question is why has it not ever. 

The amount is not the problem. It is financial architecture and collective responsibility — transforming an industry in which everyone benefits from demand into one in which everyone accepts responsibility for creating it. Solve that, and 500 million USD stops looking like an impossible number. It becomes a design problem.

The precise number can be debated. The scale of investment cannot. With laboratory-grown diamonds reshaping the market, the risk is no longer simply losing market share. Without a new financing system, natural diamonds risk becoming marginal far sooner than many imagine.

A Model Built for a Different Era

For decades, natural diamond marketing has depended on funding, which rises and falls with commercial cycles, and the priorities of those financing it. What the industry has historically invested over ten years, it may now need to mobilize every year.

No institution today was designed to mobilize, collect, and govern that scale of capital from the entire global value chain. An organization built to represent stakeholders will have its priorities shaped by them, and funding becomes cyclical, fragmented, and political.

I know this reality first-hand, having tried to build a global platform for generic diamond marketing with the World Diamond Mark, and encountered the same challenges with the World Diamond Heritage Board. I have lived it.

Managing industry interests and creating global consumer desire are different missions: one requires representation, negotiation, and consensus; the other creativity, independence, speed, and world-class talent. They should not sit within the same institution. The institution that raises and governs 500 million USD should, therefore, not be the one that spends it.

Time is running out. As laboratory-grown diamonds enter an era of global generic marketing, natural diamonds cannot confront tomorrow's competition with yesterday's financing model.

The Independent Institutional Solution

The natural diamond industry urgently needs an independent investment institution whose purpose is not to market natural diamonds, but to raise, govern, and allocate the capital required to finance the category's future. The principle is simple: collect contributions across the value chain, pool them independently, and allocate them to the projects best equipped to strengthen demand.

The industry should stop thinking about marketing as an expense, and start treating the creation of demand as an investment. For now, call it the Diamond Investment Fund (DIF). The DIF would operate transparently, with every investment expected to produce a measurable return in demand, desirability, or retail performance.

Governance should be representative and rotating, drawing from each part of the value chain —producing nations, mining, manufacturing, trading, brands, and retail — so no single company or segment controls it. An independent expert committee would evaluate projects, and recommend allocations, since the best people to create consumer desire may not sit within the industry.

Capital should follow ideas and performance, not institutional status.

The World Diamond Day (WDD) illustrates why an independent investment institution is necessary. WDD  began as an independent initiative with virtually no budget, yet, its first edition mobilised participants across more than 50 countries, and reached more than 30 million people on social media. How many transformative ideas get that chance?

The DIF would not replace existing organizations, but complete the architecture around them —freeing marketing bodies, heritage institutions, and so forth to focus on what they do best. It should invest in ideas because of what they can achieve, not in institutions because of what they are. 

Everyone Who Benefits Must Participate

The responsibility for creating demand must extend across the natural diamond value chain. Producing countries, miners, manufacturers, traders, jewellery companies, brands, and retailers all benefit from a healthy market, as do laboratories, insurers, trade fairs, and the wider service ecosystem built around the category. 

If the industry is to establish a sustainable mechanism for investing in future demand, participation cannot be confined to a small group of stakeholders, while the benefits are shared across the entire chain.

This should be an industry investment mechanism, not another appeal for contributions. Not everyone should contribute equally, or through the same mechanism — producing countries, miners, retailers, and service providers have fundamentally different economics. The objective is fair participation, not equal contribution. But fair participation cannot depend indefinitely on goodwill.

The industry will need mechanisms that make participation more systematic, starting with producing countries and miners.

Those who invest in creating demand should have an advantage over those who simply benefit from it. Participation could become a recognized commercial advantage -- from miners through manufacturers and traders, to brands and retailers, turning free-riding into an incentive to participate.

$ 500 million should be built layer by layer: producing countries and rough sales; manufacturers and traders; brands and retailers; laboratories, infrastructure and the wider service ecosystem. No single layer needs to finance the industry's future — together, they can.

As an illustration, a flat 1% contribution at each of the three main stages — rough sales, wholesale, and retail — could theoretically generate more than $1 billion annually, more than double the target.  

The objective would be to bring these contributions together within a single independent institution responsible for their governance and allocation. The mechanisms may differ across the value chain, but the underlying principle would remain the same: different participants, different forms of contribution, and a shared capacity to invest in future demand.

Is the Industry Ready to Share Control?

The scale of the challenge facing the natural diamond category suggests that incremental measures are unlikely to be sufficient. The industry may need to look beyond individual company initiatives and periodic fundraising campaigns towards a more permanent, collective approach to financing demand.

That would require a founding coalition with the authority and credibility to bring together producing countries, mining companies, manufacturers, brands and retailers, and to establish an independent financial structure for the long-term development of the natural diamond category.

Creating it will require leadership — someone, or a small founding group, with the credibility to bring producers, governments, manufacturers, brands, and retailers together around an institution none would ultimately control.

The industry is entering a period of profound transformation — precisely the moment to build the investment infrastructure its next chapter requires.

Everyone wants more demand, stronger marketing, consumers who desire natural diamonds. But does everyone want a system in which responsibility, funding — and control — are genuinely shared?

Perhaps not yet.

The industry may not want this model. But it desperately needs what this model could make possible.