Sterling is one of the few big retailers to turn its back on De Beers’ Everlon Love Knot campaign, preferring its own Love’s Embrace product.

So it raised eyebrows when Love’s Embrace came out and looked somewhat similar to Everlon. Both lines involve loops of diamonds, but Everlon products involve knots, while Love’s Embrace pieces don’t. Moreover, their taglines are similar: Everlon is advertised as “the strength of love, forged in a knot,” and Love’s Embrace uses “You will always be surrounded by the strength of my love.”

At an investor’s meeting, Sterling chief operating officer William Montalto admitted the two products had a “similar concept.” He said, however, that Sterling had been testing Love’s Embrace since last spring.

“We had it in the market,” he said. “We had results. We were doing very well with it. We believed we had a better product design [than Everlon]. We believe we had a better concept in terms of how we were conceptualizing that concept, that creative. It was exclusive to us, of course. It is not going to be generic.”