At the most recent CIBJO Congress in Vicenza, Italy, a number of jewelry industry leaders came together for a panel discussion on the effects of geopolitics on the industry. While the subject of tariffs took center stage, the panel also touched on Russian sanctions and the war in Iran. The panel’s suggestions for action focused on lobbying efforts to challenge tariffs country by country. Lobbying, particularly through industry associations, remains the best course of action for securing tariff exemptions for countries important to the jewelry supply chain. In the meantime, we still have to sell jewelry while dealing with higher costs and lower consumer confidence. Below you’ll find strategies for maintaining sales and margins as costs rise and consumers lose enthusiasm.

Geopolitical Issues Affecting the Jewelry Industry

Consumer confidence is still falling for all but the highest income brackets, and costs are up across the jewelry industry due to a number of geopolitical factors. The price of precious metals is up as investors seek it out as a safe haven in volatile times, wars in Iran and Ukraine stress the supply chain through higher fuel prices, and tariffs put their own upward pressure on prices.

At the highest end of luxury, consumers are still spending, but their money doesn’t buy as much as it used to. Below the top 10% income bracket, luxury consumers are making fewer overall purchases, but the ones they make tend to be more meaningful.

Emotional Storytelling

Reaching consumers in this economy requires forming an emotional connection. During stressful, uncertain times, consumers want comfort and reassurance. They seek experiences that offer an escape from everyday life and products that strengthen their sense of self. Marketing should tell stories that emphasize love, heritage, and spiritual meaning. Accentuate the spiritual grounding and connection with nature that comes with wearing these rare and precious products of the natural world.

365-Day Marketing

In recessions and other economic downturns, the marketing budget is often the first to be cut. Let your competitors slow their marketing efforts and lose market share, it’s even more important to get yourself in front of customers and to stay there. Traditionally, that would mean launching marketing campaigns based around specific products or promos that run for a limited time. The most effective way to keep your message on customers’ minds today is to take a 365-day approach to marketing. That means year-round digital storytelling across social platforms and your website pushing a clear, consistent message about your brand.

Optimize for AI Search

Before AI, SEO optimization was more or less about writing helpful, authoritative content for people, and metadata, titles, and section headings for bots. This two-tier approach ensures that the bots can parse your content and present it to the people searching for it, and that the people reading the article could connect with the writing on an emotional level. This is still the best approach, but the way you organize content and write metadata for AI search is a little different.

As search shifts from keywords in a search bar to conversations with chatbots, make sure that your content answers the questions that relate to your products and directly addresses consumer misconceptions, such as with lab-grown vs. natural stones or ethical sourcing. On the back end, structured data in the form of an FAQ can help AI bots determine that your website is the one that can best answer a user’s question.

Adapt Products for Consumer Budgets

As we said above, consumers still have luxury budgets to spend, but with costs and precious metals prices surging, that budget isn’t going as far as it used to. Lightweight gold designs, electroforming, alternative alloys, and the creative use of non-precious metals and materials such as wood can all result in compelling designs that connect with buyers on an emotional level without breaking budgets. In addition, look for designs that replace some precious metal weight with gemstones (i.e. pavé).

Another way to keep prices in check while keeping customers happy is through digital customization. In-store CAD and digital ring builders allow clients to adjust metal fineness and try out different designs and gemstone configurations, updating price in real time. As they work through design options, they can land on a design that both meets their needs and works with their budget.

Be There for Your Customers

Marketing in an age where most people are feeling stressed and anxious is about being there for your customers. You have to show them that you can provide real connection and meaning, as well as whatever else it is your customers want, whether that’s a temporary escape or a small sense of comfort. Honesty and empathy—real, human emotion, whatever form that may take—is how you create relationships that are more than transactional. These are the kinds of relationships that can survive whatever the world throws at us next.

Following four years of sharply declining diamond prices, the Russian government mandated in June that man-made diamonds be labeled “synthetic” rather than “lab-grown” or any other moniker. Russia’s Alrosa, which accounts for over a quarter of the world’s diamond extraction, reported a loss of $130 million for the first half of 2026, according to Rapaport. While sanctions against Russia account for some of these losses, the company’s struggles reflect the position of the wider diamond industry in 2026.

The change has lab-grown diamond (LGD) suppliers and retailers in other countries worried that the US, EU, China, or India will follow suit, but other countries are unlikely to follow Russia’s lead. (It is worth noting that Belgium enacted a similar law in 2023 and France recently upheld a 20-year-old law stating that lab-grown diamonds be referred to only as synthetic diamonds.) De Beers, however, has taken it upon themselves to call their lab-grown diamonds “synthetic lab-grown.” It is an effort to highlight the scarcity and aura of “naturalness” of mined diamonds at a time when customer confusion about the two categories of diamond has eaten into profits.

As lab-grown diamonds became cheaper to produce, driving the price down, the diamond industry as a whole expected consumers to see low-cost lab-grown diamonds as a cheap imitation of rarer and expensive mined diamonds. Lab-grown diamond marketing, meanwhile, emphasized the identical chemical composition of lab-grown and mined diamonds, creating confusion and ultimately pulling down the value of mined diamonds.

LGD have certainly done their part to put a dent in diamond prices, but they’re not the only culprit. The story is the same for many sectors: the pandemic changed buying habits, with money saved for vacations and restaurants going instead to purchases of luxury goods and electronics that could be enjoyed at home. Those increased sales were not sustainable, however, and these industries are now in the midst of a market correction.

The truth is, the world economy never fully recovered from the pandemic. The businesses that over-hired between 2020 and 2023 ended up laying off many of those employees, and now the rising cost of living coupled with the uncertainty wrought by global geopolitical instability has luxury consumers all over the world postponing proposals and weddings and putting off major purchases.

This doesn’t mean luxury consumers have stopped buying luxury altogether. As we outlined in this article, they’ve moved to spending wisely on more meaningful purchases. It is possible to sell in lower volume overall while increasing customer lifetime value by identifying your ideal customers and giving them the kind of meaningful jewelry they can’t get from anyone else.

With no relief from a challenging economy and the downward price pressure of LGD in sight, the goal today is to create a new story around diamonds, one that resonates with consumers on a personal level. Tradition and prestige has less of a hold on today’s luxury consumer. What does resonate is authenticity and identity. Incorporating mined diamonds into designer pieces in meaningful, intentional ways might be one way to return the aura to the diamond.

In years past, it was easy to look three or four seasons ahead and forecast the big trends to come. Choices were limited and trends were often imposed from the top down. But as culture fragments and tastes become increasingly individual, forecasting trends ends up being less about spotting the next big thing and more about understanding your customers on a personal level.

Gen Z is growing up, and so are their tastes. They’re now entering the luxury market, and as of 2025, Millennials and Gen Z together accounted for 50% of the market. What these younger consumers want from their luxury purchases is not what their parents want. Rather than aspiration or status, Gen Z is more interested in self-expression, as we argued in this article.

As they bring a different set of values with them, the way we market luxury jewelry has to change. Gen Z grew up online and on social media, and they’ve seen its harmful effects firsthand, from lowering their self-esteem to destroying their attention spans. Social media is losing its hold on Millennial and Gen Z consumers as they turn away from influencer culture and turn inward: Who am I? What do I believe in? Where do I fit into society?

This doesn’t mean they’re closing their Instagram accounts en masse. What’s happening instead is a more thoughtful engagement with social media. Rather than giving themselves over to the algorithm and the endless scroll, Gen Z are becoming more mindful about what and how they consume digital content.

Authentic Fashion

What this means for luxury jewelry is that celebrity endorsements and legacy brands don’t mean what they used to. A brand name might have a long history as a signifier of luxury and exclusivity, but if it doesn’t feel real, and if it doesn’t resonate with their identity, it won’t sell. Brands need to be about more than their brand name or the status they convey. Brands, retailers, and designers alike have to focus on the same questions young people are asking themselves: Who am I and what role do I play in the world?

Authentic Experience

Gen Z consumers want not only products that help them express their individuality; they want that feeling of authenticity to translate to the luxury experience itself. The signifiers of luxury are less important than a personal connection, care, and comfort. Above all, that means crafting a brand story that conveys your brand values and resonates with your core audience. A shift toward authenticity means less general appeal of the sort that the biggest luxury brands enjoy, but it means deeper, lifelong relationships with the people who see your brand as resonating deeply with their own sense of self.

Creating Lifelong Relationships

This all leads to a somewhat paradoxical conclusion: one of the biggest luxury trends of the coming years will be not following trends. This seems limiting on the surface. In reality, it is incredibly freeing: your business is free to focus on what it's best at, following your most honest and authentic vision. Your customers want to see the real care, the real intention, the real people behind the products. When you can tell that story, you’ll win over customers for life.

If you follow pop culture, you’ve probably been seeing the headlines all year: Gen Z and younger Millennials are leaving social media. They’re trading in their smartphones for dumbphones. They’re replacing Spotify with an MP3 player or a Discman. They’re pining for the good old days of their older Millennial and Gen X parents’ adolescence, when the Internet came to you slowly via the phone line, when phones had lines, when you popped a cartridge into the Super Nintendo and a CD into the 5-disc changer after school. After the 80s dominated our imaginations for a solid two decades, it seems like the 90s and early 00s are having their moment.

The way young people today experience 90s nostalgia can be broken into two camps. The first covers a brief moment in the early 90s, from about 1992 to 1995: the flannel shirt and greasy hair grunge era. The other encompasses a longer stretch of time, from about 1995 to 2007. Historians talk about “the long nineteenth century,” spanning the French Revolution in 1789 to the beginning of World War I in 1914. Today, the nostalgic among us are gripped by the long 1990s (1995-2007), a time better known as the Y2K era.

The Land Before Smartphones

The iPhone, first released in 2007, turns 20 in 2027. Gen Z never lived in a world without that little glowing rectangle sucking away their free time and filling every second with something to distract them. That distant land, where boredom wasn’t a monster to constantly evade but an invitation to touch grass, daydream, or even get lost in reading a book, looks like a long lost utopia to today’s stressed and anxious, overstimulated young people.

The Y2K aesthetic, shorthand for a particular visual style prominent during the turn of the century, first surfaced online as a coherent historical moment in the 2010s. Since then, it’s been a niche nostalgic touchpoint for a certain kind of extremely online person pining for the days when the future looked fun.

The Cultural Signifiers of Y2K

The shiny outfits and vaguely futuristic, fluorescent-lit backgrounds of the music video for *NSYNC’s 2000 hit “Bye Bye Bye.” The translucent curves of the Apple iMac. Digital cameras and minidisc players. The 1998 Volkswagen New Beetle. Bug-eyed wraparound sunglasses. That’s the Y2K aesthetic.

Y2K Jewelry

2027 could be the year that Y2K goes mainstream. What does all this mean for luxury jewelry? The Y2K look is glossy, chunky, with the reflective finish of a 1950s fighter jet. It’s round, blobby, and inviting, not sharp-edged and minimalist. Fun, organic, unexpected shapes, polished white gold, pale and pastel gemstones like morganite, sapphire, or aquamarine. Thick rings, thick bracelets, asymmetrical charms and pendants. Jewelry big enough, physically or conceptually, to stand out against your baggy, shiny silver tracksuit.

Y2K is the polar opposite of “quiet luxury.” It’s a look defined by big, colorful statement pieces. In a previous blog, we observed that people are buying fewer pieces of jewelry, but spending more on just a few meaningful pieces. In that kind of environment, this kind of bright and bold look is primed to make a comeback. The Y2K aesthetic is already here in fashion jewelry, and popular trends at the bottom end of the market often influence luxury designs.

Can the Future Still Be Fun?

At the dawn of the millennium, product design and fashion made the future look fun. That’s the draw of Y2K nostalgia: it reminds us of a time when our vision of the future was colorful, fun, fluid, soft, comfortable, inviting, and, most importantly, hopeful. If Y2K does go mainstream in the next year, it’s because it gives us an aesthetic vision we desperately need.