What led CEO Berta de Pablos-Barbier to think it was wise for Pandora to promote new ‘standards’ for the international jewellery industry? Even if the announcement was shielded by the pretence of being a publicity stunt, who gave Pandora the right to rewrite the rules?
Independent industry standards and structured nomenclature are designed to keep companies like Pandora honest. Accepted methods and best practices are created to hold people and companies to account.
They are not intended for commercial benefit or corporate gain; however, that is exactly what Pandora has attempted to do.
The Danish jewellery behemoth has declared that the world-renowned standard for diamond grading – the legendary ‘4Cs’ – is apparently no longer acceptable to Pandora. It has announced its own expanded set of standards, claiming it is in the best interests of consumers.
Not only does this strategy demean the long-held standards of the international jewellery industry, but it also flies in the face of ethical business practices.
One must ask: If Pablos-Barbier is happy to create and promote Pandora’s own international standard for man-made diamonds, what’s next?
Will she determine that international accounting standards are no longer applicable to Pandora and move to change them?
And what if Pandora believes the reporting standards of the NASDAQ Copenhagen stock exchange no longer benefit the company? Will she create her own standard?
If the answer to those questions is ‘no’, then one must ask why Pandora’s management believes that it should be able to change diamond grading standards in the jewellery industry.
The 4Cs are not a marketing blurb to be played with at whim. They were not designed to be altered and used by one company for its own advantage, just as we would not expect any company to alter accounting and financial reporting standards for its own benefit.
Standards matter because they create a common language among suppliers, retailers, and consumers and build trust. Once individual companies begin modifying that language for commercial gain, consistency deteriorates, and consumer confidence declines.
Remarkably, this is only the tip of the iceberg, as the issues extend even further.
This matter is made even worse because Pandora has promoted changes to a set of international standards that arguably no longer even apply to its own products!
Perhaps now, you are starting to understand why ‘arrogance’ is a fitting term to describe Pandora’s latest strategy.
Pandora & Platitudes
Earlier this month (6 May), Pandora announced it would promote its lab-created diamond jewellery products by emphasising their ‘environmentally friendly’ nature, particularly in comparison with natural diamond products.
To that end, Pablos-Barbier announced that Pandora would be “adding carbon footprint to the diamond conversation” and providing consumers with an “extra point of comparison and essential insight into the climate impact of their desired diamond jewellery.”
How does Pandora intend to achieve these lofty goals? Allow the company to explain:
- “For decades, diamonds have been graded by the traditional 4Cs: Cut, Colour, Clarity and Carat. Now Pandora is adding the 5th C, declaring the carbon footprint of every Pandora Lab-Grown Diamond as part of the product information on pandora.net alongside the traditional four grading criteria.”
Pandora’s newly appointed CEO, Berta de Pablos-Barbier, who replaced Alexander Lacik at the head of the company in January, was happy to explain further.
“We believe the future is about making diamonds more accessible while giving customers clarity on what they’re buying. We craft our jewellery with sustainability in mind and by introducing the 5th C, we’re empowering consumers to make informed choices,” she said.
The company claims that it is “adding a 5th C” in response to increasing consumer expectations for sustainability, and even magnanimously suggested it would share its methodology and findings with other “jewellery makers” to inspire greater transparency.
There’s just one problem: Who told Pandora it could change the 4Cs?
Just as Pandora has no right to alter its accounting standards or financial reporting requirements, it should not think it can do so in the jewellery industry.
So, why isn’t Pandora treating the diamond industry’s long-running standards with similar respect?
To act with such disdain can aptly be described as arrogant and conceited.
Compare and Contrast
“I'll be dead before somebody comes into my shops and says: 'Can you show me your sustainable products?' It's just not in people's minds when they're shopping this category.” ALEXANDER LACIK
FORMER PANDORA CEO | 
“We craft our jewellery with sustainability in mind and by introducing the 5th C, we’re empowering consumers to make informed choices.” Berta de Pablos-Barbier
CURRENT PANDORA CEO |
Not a marketing slogan
The Gemological Institute of America (GIA) originated and institutionalised the 4Cs framework. The GIA developed the modern grading methodology in the 1940s and spent decades educating both the trade and consumers.
In practical terms, the GIA created the language of modern diamond retailing. The 4Cs are the global standard in the diamond business. As the GIA itself explains, they transformed the way diamond quality is determined and communicated, forever changing how diamonds are evaluated, bought and sold.
The GIA website explains:
- “The 4Cs are for everyone. This framework is both a way to better understand your diamond, and to ensure accuracy in the evaluation of your diamond’s unique characteristics."
- “It is the best way to ensure clear information, uniform practices, scientific grading and transparent evaluation in the global diamond industry. The 4Cs are one of GIA’s many innovative contributions and one we are incredibly proud of because of how many consumers it continues to help.”
The importance of that history cannot be overstated. While the GIA does not claim dominion over the 4Cs, this doesn't mean that Pandora has the authority to change or hijack them.
And let's be clear: Pandora may not have altered the original wording, definitions, or application of the 4Cs; however, the addition of a so-called ‘fifth C’ is nonetheless a change.
The 4Cs were not created by a marketing department searching for a slogan. They emerged from decades of gemmological research, educational investment, and industry standardisation designed to establish consistency, objectivity, and trust in diamond trading.
More importantly, that framework became globally recognised precisely because it was independent of any single retailer's commercial interests.
While the 4Cs are not perfect, they at least symbolically represent a set of ‘rules’ that everyone can play by.
Pandora & Puffery
It’s possible that Pablos-Barbier will claim that Pandora’s 5Cs announcement is nothing more than marketing “puffery” and also note that it isn’t forcing any other business to use the newly minted ‘5Cs’.
In legal terms, puffery generally refers to promotional language that makes exaggerated or subjective claims rather than objectively measurable statements.
With that said, given the company’s global influence as the world’s largest jewellery brand, questions must be asked about the potential disruption this marketing stunt may cause to the broader trade.
Indeed, there is a world of difference between a company’s attempt at marketing puffery in the form of defensible promotional language, compared to the wanton appropriation and disfigurement of the terminology of a globally recognised industry standard.
They are not the same, and Pandora has done the latter to advance a commercial narrative - namely, to sell more jewellery. The 4Cs are not for Pandora to play with, change, or deviate from.
They are, figuratively speaking, the ‘collective property’ of the jewellery industry.
By invoking the language of the 4Cs, Pandora gains instant cultural legitimacy because consumers already associate this terminology with expertise, scientific grading, and trust.
The company is effectively piggybacking on decades of educational investment by the traditional diamond industry and gemmological institutions.
Pandora’s claim to be adding a ‘fifth C’ amounts to attaching corporate sustainability messaging to one of the jewellery industry’s most established and historically significant frameworks.
Let’s be clear: Pablos-Barbier’s announcement is designed to hijack the 4Cs for Pandora's commercial benefit.
It devalues the 4Cs and, remarkably, actually creates even more confusion among consumers in a market that is still struggling to come to grips with the co-existence of natural and lab-created diamonds.
Interestingly, this is not the first time Pandora has run afoul of the broader industry when playing ‘politics’ on the matter of diamonds. (See Breakout Box below)
Poor timing
The timing of Pandora’s publicity stunt makes the entire exercise even more extraordinary. It comes after the world authority on diamonds - and an independent body - declared that the traditional 4Cs should not be used when assessing the quality of lab-created diamonds.
In October last year, the GIA began issuing revised Laboratory-Grown Diamond Quality Assessments that use descriptive terms to characterise the quality of lab-created diamonds.
These assessments no longer employ the colour and clarity nomenclature developed by the GIA for natural diamonds. This was done for an obvious reason - lab-created diamond production has reached a stage where these stones fall within a very narrow range of ‘premium’ to ‘standard’ quality.
“Since 95 per cent of laboratory-grown diamonds in the market fall within a narrow range of colour and clarity because of advances in manufacturing, it is no longer appropriate to use the nomenclature developed by the GIA to describe the broader spectrum of those qualities in natural diamonds for laboratory-grown diamonds,” the GIA explained.
“The GIA 4Cs scales are based on observations of the range of colour and clarity that naturally occurs in natural diamonds. The scales that describe the broad variation of colour and clarity in natural diamonds do not apply to the very narrow range of colour and clarity of laboratory-grown diamonds.
Background reading: Truth behind lab-created diamonds
“Therefore, it is more appropriate to use descriptive terms rather than grades for such small differences in colour and clarity.
“This change will help differentiate natural diamonds and laboratory-grown diamonds, providing a greater understanding of their differing origins, characteristics, and qualities. This will benefit both retailers and consumers, providing them with the necessary information to make informed decisions.”
Therefore, shortly after the GIA had determined that further separation and distinction were paramount when comparing natural and lab-created diamonds, Pandora decided to further expand on this terminology for its own benefit.
That contradiction and conceit strike at the heart of the issue.
The sixth ‘C’: Confusion!
It gets worse because Pandora’s ‘carbon’ metric is fundamentally different from the original 4Cs. Cut, colour, clarity, and carat are measurable gemmological characteristics. They are independently assessed and directly tied to a diamond’s physical attributes.
Carbon footprint, by contrast, relies on - some would argue debatable - environmental accounting methodologies and company-generated sustainability data rather than standardised grading criteria.
Pandora is conflating objective diamond grading with environmentalist brand positioning.
Even more troubling is the precedent this sets. The 4Cs were developed to establish transparent, objective language for diamond trading and not to provide retailers with a platform for proprietary marketing categories.
In a new take on the old idiom ‘judge, jury, and executioner’, Pandora now appears to be positioning itself as both the manufacturer, retailer, and the self-appointed consumer standards authority!
And what will be the unintended consequences for your local ‘high street jeweller’, not just in Australia but worldwide? Imagine dealing with a hypothetical Pandora customer, perhaps shopping for fine jewellery for the first time.
The jeweller begins to explain the ‘4Cs’ – one of the easiest ways to introduce consumers to the intricacy of diamonds – before they are interrupted.
“The 4Cs? Aren’t there supposed to be 5Cs? Pandora’s products always have 5Cs,” the customer interjects.
Where does that leave our friendly local jeweller? Are they supposed to further complicate the issue by explaining that, well, actually, that’s only a system that Pandora uses? Is the jeweller supposed to explain that it’s only a marketing exercise and that they should trust his business rather than Pandora?
Environmentalism “not the driver of our business”
Let’s be clear: Pandora has every right to provide additional environmental information about its products. Greater transparency around sourcing may become an increasingly important component of jewellery retailing.
Where there’s smoke, there’s fireThis is far from the first time the broader international jewellery industry has taken issue with Pandora’s misleading actions. In 2021, the company launched a new collection, Pandora Brilliance, which featured lab-created diamonds. It was noted at the time that these lab-created diamonds were “expected to be made using 100 per cent renewable energy” by 2022; however, this was not the issue. The problem was Pandora’s misleading statements about pre-existing jewellery collections. At the time, Pandora’s announcement explained that it would no longer use natural diamonds across any of its product lines in future. As one report noted, the company’s own data suggested that just one in every 1,700 products the company sold featured a diamond. In simple terms, Pandora was publicly disavowing a product it barely sold at all – and reaping mainstream media plaudits for doing so. In response, five leading industry associations took to the media to expose the fact that Pandora’s product range had not traditionally used diamonds. Collectively, the Natural Diamond Council, CIBJO, the World Diamond Council, the Responsible Jewellery Council, and the International Diamond Manufacturers Association objected to the messaging in Pandora’s announcement. Together they asserted, “The misleading narrative created by the Pandora announcement implying the natural diamond industry is both less ethical and the impetus behind Pandora’s move to lab-grown diamonds, particularly given the inconsequential amount of diamonds Pandora features in its collections, can have unintended but substantial consequences on communities in developing nations.” » Bollocks: How Pandora manipulated the media
» Diamond Council criticises Pandora’s claims
» Industry calls out ‘very misleading’ comments
» NDC publicly criticises Pandora |
The controversy arises not from the disclosure itself but from the decision to frame it as an extension of the globally recognised 4Cs framework.
It has the feel of a marketing meeting from a comedy sketch - a team of lovable misfits is tasked with connecting sustainability to the 4Cs, and the main character has a ‘lightbulb’ moment standing around the water cooler.
“Carbon starts with a C… can’t we just make that the fifth one?”
It might even be funny if the ramifications were not so serious.
With that said, the issues surrounding Pandora’s ‘fifth C’ are not really about sustainability. This is not a debate about whether consumers should have access to more or less environmental information about diamond production.
Some consumers may decide they care deeply about a diamond’s carbon footprint. Funnily enough, Pandora’s former CEO, Alexander Lacik, didn’t think it was an important factor for most people.
“[Environmental, social, and corporate governance] is a nice feature, and for the people who are interested, we have a good story to tell, but it's not the driver of the business,” he told Fortune in early 2024.
“When we talk about product choice, there are only two things that actually drive behaviour. You may claim that you do other things, but design is absolutely the most important aspect of your purchase decision on a product, and the second criterion is price.”
“I'll be dead before somebody comes into my shops and says: 'Can you show me your sustainable products?' It's just not in people's minds when they're shopping this category.”
That is a legitimate market discussion; however, it’s not the issue. The root problem here is authority, something that Pandora’s has no mandate for.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes
The 4Cs became one of the most recognised frameworks in the jewellery industry because they were developed independently of any single retailer's commercial interests and grounded in objective gemmological evaluation.
Pandora, however, has attempted to insert its own proprietary environmental messaging directly into that language while simultaneously benefiting from the reputation and credibility of the 4Cs, which are already recognised by consumers.
The irony is difficult to ignore. The company claims to empower customers through transparency while effectively positioning itself as both a seller and a standards authority.
It is using the supposed ‘authority’ it has wantonly appropriated from a third-party organisation whose purpose in creating it was to effectively hold people and companies to account.
Who wants to leave the fox in charge of the hen house?
What is far less legitimate is the suggestion that a retailer can simply append its own marketing category to one of the most established grading frameworks in the modern jewellery industry and present it as a natural evolution of the standard itself.
Background reading: Pandora, Natural Diamond Council feud
The 4Cs were created to establish objective language in diamond grading and not to serve as a platform for corporate brand positioning.
Standards derive their authority from independence and widespread application. The moment retailers begin selectively altering industry terminology for their own commercial gain, that authority begins to erode and eventually collapse.
Pandora may view the '5th C' as an effective marketing initiative. The broader international jewellery industry, however, has every reason to view it as something far more consequential. It is the commercial appropriation of a globally recognised grading framework that was never designed to serve any one company’s interests.
Bluntly put, it’s a marketing hijack.
Robert M. Shipley developed the framework to professionalise the jewellery trade. Nearly a century later, Pandora appears to be repurposing it for the opposite reason: to differentiate its products in an increasingly competitive market.
Pablos-Barbier would be wise to reconsider this approach before an increasingly sceptical market begins to view Pandora’s ‘5th C’ not as innovation but as the deliberate commercial disfigurement of an established industry language.
Considering Pablos-Barbier replaced Lacik at the top of Pandora’s hierarchy as recently as January, to say the least, this was a bold introduction to the broader jewellery industry.
More reading
Natural diamond organisations protest Pandora statement
Pandora, Natural Diamond Council feud over ‘misleading’ campaign
Jewellers judge Pandora’s platinum-plated switch
Pandora’s Lacik announces departure, new CEO named
The Next Chapter: Pandora revamps retail strategy in Australia