Indian diamond growers have made competing in the marketplace difficult for other synthetic diamond producers, says Ryan Shearman (pictured), who cofounded Aether Diamonds in 2018 and headed the brand.
Last week, lab-grown e-tailer Grown Brilliance announced it had purchased Aether Diamonds (corporate parent: Impossible Diamond) and another e-tailer, Clean Origin (corporate parent: Great Heights) for undisclosed sums.
Aether has a genuinely differentiated product—its diamonds are produced with carbon from the air. Shearman says there has been demand for more diamonds than Aether could make—the problem, he says, is that it manufactures in the United States, as opposed to low-labor-cost India.
“The margin crunch that producers felt versus retail was real,” Shearman tells JCK. “We were selling a product with a premium price. A U.S.-based lab really can’t compete with India, and frankly the material has to go to India for cutting anyway.”
Shearman says Aether is in good hands with Grown Brilliance, given that Grown Brilliance is vertically integrated. Grown Brilliance CEO Tejas Shah says the company is not owned by any growers, but has 260 of its own diamond-making machines as well as multiple diamond vendors.
Although some in the industry question how much environmental issues sway consumers, Shearman believes his novel method is a big selling point.
“When it comes to greenwashing, it’s hard to get one over for consumers,” he says. “Solar became this great equalizer, and a lot of the Indian companies are using that now. But the final frontier is of course the carbon.”
Manufacturing diamonds usually involves methane, which is generally sourced from oil drilling or fracking. Since it uses carbon from the sky to create methane, Aether has billed itself as “carbon negative.”
Aether will continue to produce diamonds for Grown Brilliance and other companies that want them. But Shearman is looking for additional applications of his carbon-capture technology through his new company, Loa Carbon.
“The way margins have slid in lab-grown diamonds, this is a much better way to commercialize our tech,” Shearman says.
On LinkedIn, Shearman wrote that Loa Carbon will specialize in “commercial-scale conversion of renewable energy and captured CO2 into e-fuels and solid carbon materials. We’re starting with synthetic natural gas, high-purity methane gas products, and high-quality graphene nano-platelets.”
(Photo courtesy of Aether Diamonds)
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