The two-day promotion, ‘We Protect A Legacy’, aimed to promote natural diamonds by highlighting the declining value of lab-created diamonds.
CEO Karen Rentmeesters told Rapaport News that the campaign wasn’t about denigrating lab-created diamonds but highlighting the difference between the two categories.
“The association that I have, and that I think many people have with things that are in gumball machines is, it’s not about chewing gum. It’s about cheap goods,” she explained.
“It’s something you definitely wouldn’t hold onto, and you wouldn’t feel bad about losing in a day, and its allure evaporates super quickly. I remember, as a kid, being excited to get something out of the machine, and then it was a huge disappointment. Within minutes, it broke, or I would chuck it away because it was so unimpressive.”
She continued: “I don’t want to seem judgmental of people who buy lab-grown; I just feel consumers need to be informed properly, and price is the first thing that hits you when you do that comparison side by side. We would never put a natural diamond in a gumball machine.”
The gumball machine was placed at Stadsfeestzaal, a popular shopping district in Antwerp, and contained 180 lab-created diamonds, weighing approximately .30 carats each.
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