De Beers Lightbox Lab-Grown Diamonds Will Be Sold At Bloomingdale's And Reeds Jewelers

For just over a year, the only way to purchase Lightbox fashion jewelry made with lab-grown diamonds was through its website or through an occasional pop-up promotion Beginning this month Lightbox jewels will be available at Bloomingdale's department stores and Reeds Jewelers in a trial run to determine whether there is demand for lab-grown diamonds at $800 per carat in traditional retail environments Independently owned and family run Reeds Jewelers will sell Lightbox diamond jewelry in 30 of its stores, primarily located in shopping malls throughout the Southeast.

The Lightbox collections will be merchandised separately from natural diamonds and branded clearly as laboratory-grown diamonds to customers in store as well as on-line De Beers, which once had a monopoly over the sale of diamonds, shocked the diamond and jewelry industry when it made a surprise announcement in May 2008 that it will manufacture and sell lab-grown diamonds for jewelry The idea, according to Bruce Cleaver, De Beers chief executive, was to tap into a new market while drastically driving down the price of lab-grown diamonds in order to force them into a different jewelry category.

Lightbox diamonds are manufactured at De Beers-owned Element Six labs in London, where it previously produced lab-grown diamonds exclusively for industrial applications. . Source