—Bharat Chandra Seth, Director, Lala Kashi Nath Seth Jewellers, Kanpur
I joined the business in 1986, at my family’s store in Bareilly. Since then I have watched gold jewellery in this country go through a quiet revolution in trust, and I have watched diamond jewellery not go through that same journey. Until it does, I don’t see the category reaching its true potential — certainly not in a market like Kanpur, where I can tell you honestly that diamond sales have been slow for a while now.
The difference between the two categories, when I think about it honestly, comes down to one word: transparency. Ask anyone what a gram of 22-carat gold costs today, and every jeweller in this city will quote you a number. That price is public and it is the same whether you buy from me or from the shop next door. If I don’t buy your gold at that rate, someone else will, at the same rate. Diamonds have none of this. Send the same solitaire to five different retailers for a valuation, and you will get five different numbers, and not numbers that are close to each other. I have seen loyal, decades-old customers walk away from even the most respected pan-India brands because the exchange value offered didn’t match what they believed, reasonably, their diamond should be worth after some years. When that happens with a big, established name, imagine what it does to trust in the category as a whole. Diamond, to my mind, is walking the same road. Rarity and beauty are not enough on their own. Without pricing that a customer can verify and trust, a category stays a hard sell no matter how good the product is. This shows up most sharply at resale, which is really where a category’s trust gets tested. I have personally sat with customers who could not understand why a stone bought for lakhs years ago was now being valued at a steep discount. We have gone to genuinely extraordinary lengths to avoid that outcome — I once sent a team to Mumbai with a single stone because we simply could not find the right buyer locally, just to honour a fair price for a loyal customer. Not every retailer can or will do that, and the customer has no way of knowing, walking into any given store, whether they’re dealing with someone who will or someone who won’t.
Certification has helped here, and I want to give industry credit for that. Labs have genuinely improved customer confidence over the years. But certification tells you what the stone is. It doesn’t tell you what it’s worth, and it doesn’t stop the next shop from valuing an identical certified stone at half of what another shop will pay. Very few people, including many in our own trade, can look at a diamond and independently judge its colour and clarity with confidence. That gap is exactly where inconsistent pricing creeps in, and where customer trust quietly leaks away even after the certificate has done its job.
I don’t think a single national diamond price is realistic, given the genuine variation in cut, colour, clarity and carat. But I do believe the industry can move much closer to gold’s model than it has: clearer, more consistent benchmarking of price at a given quality grade, buyback and exchange policies that a customer can rely on before they buy rather than renegotiate after, and retailers, myself included, holding ourselves to pricing we would be comfortable defending to any customer, from any city, at any time. We have built our name in this market over five generations and more than 160 years on one simple idea: price it the way you’d want it priced if you were the one buying. That principle, scaled up, is exactly what India’s diamond retail sector needs right now. Gold proved it’s possible. It’s time diamond caught up.
As told to Pratyasha K
Retail Jeweller India Magazine
