Diamond is April’s Birthstone – and diamonds are still hard to trace — Sharon Z Jewelry

This submit initially appeared as a publication to my checklist on April 12, 2022.

To get more strategies about functioning a jewellery business enterprise, ethical jewellery information and jewelry-creating capabilities, click listed here to indicator up for the list.

Which is why I’ll be paying April speaking all about them to folks on my e-newsletter record. The good, the undesirable, the why.

Let us keep 1 truth at the prime of this article:

This system for sourcing diamonds that we are at this time doing the job in is unfair.

From time to time in order to resolve a trouble, it allows to accept that the issue exists in the initial spot.

When you are operating in a program that is totally weighted against each unbiased designers and their buyers, it helps make it that substantially more challenging to make the hard ethical decisions.

Soon after all, when a name redacted huge jewelry company can make a assert about utilizing only certified Kimberley System diamonds, for people of us who consider to be clear about the serious choices, it can make us seem bad.

I know many of us keep ourselves accountable for running moral businesses, and for applying moral sourcing, but we you should not have the exact access to sources that corporations do. We also don’t have a system that truly traces diamonds from the mines to our inventory.

As a lot as we might want to be confident of the ethics of our diamonds resources, genuinely the most that we can say is “to the best of our expertise”.

And it can be tough to use this degree of honesty. We fear that prospects will operate off, or not feel us, or not listen to and comprehend us.

Understanding that the system is not truthful does not absolve us of our collective accountability, though. We can even now check with issues of our suppliers*, we can still talk to the challenging inquiries of ourselves so that we can make little but considerable adjustments.

Picture for a moment what would it do for all of the market if even a portion of us started off shifting our provide chains to use much more Fairmined metals? What would it do for the industry if even a portion of us started sourcing extra mine-to-current market gemstones? What would a fairer procedure seem like for all of us? What would it look like if extra of us began asking concerns and staying far more clear?

I think it may well search like a greater, fairer field.

XO

Sharon Z

Citations:

*https://www.christinatmiller.com/lr-video clip-archive scroll down this web site to the communicate about Supplier Discussions in Observe to get an plan of what asking issues can produce.