How Diamonds became a symbol of love.

The story of - De Beers
A thread

The thread below is a collection of stories and data from various sources mentioned here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NVdLjXMse2i0rUSqLvOhxOEKy18WDIY8vSasXOcXpYA/edit?usp=sharing

The goal here is to share and resurface the stories of brands that have defined our lives in one way or the other. Let's jump in:

1/ It was 1869 when an 83.5-carat diamond was found near the 'Orange River' in South Africa. The discovery started the first diamond rush.

2/ An English entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes started by renting out water pumps to the miners in the area during the Diamond Rush.

3/ As he started making money, he started buying claims and shares in smaller mines around.

4/ In 1888, he founded De Beers Consolidated Miners by merging companies and buying out all the smaller miners in the area - to control the supply of diamonds in the market. As a result, De Beers became the only diamond mining company in the country.

5/ Over time, De Beers started different organizations under different names in many countries to distribute the rough diamonds and control the trade.

6/ In 1902, when Cecil Rhodes died, De Beers was producing 90% of the diamonds distributed and sold in the world.

7/ While Cecil Rhodes founded De Beers, it was Ernest Oppenheimer who put it on a path to world domination.

8/ Ernest Oppenheimer had made a name for himself in South Africa's diamond and gold industry.

9/ In 1917, he started a company called Anglo American Corporation. But his eyes were set on De Beers and their diamond business.

10/ Over the years, via Anglo American, he bought shares of De Beers and became one of the biggest shareholders of the company by 1926. By 1929, he became the Chairman of De Beers.

11/ De Beers was now under the control of Ernest Oppenheimer. But the demand for diamonds had stalled in the 1930s.

12/ In the late 1930s, the US was seen as the next big market for diamonds.

13/ In 1938, Harry Oppenheimer, son of Ernest Oppenheimer traveled to New York to meet with the advertising agency N. W. Ayer.

14/ The goal was to create campaigns to increase the demand for diamonds in the US.

15/ Since diamonds are hard to destroy, they came up with the idea of presenting diamonds as a symbol of love and romance and spreading this idea of diamonds.

16/ They started advertising diamonds as a way of expressing one's love for another and successfully gave diamonds a new identity via print, radio, and the movies. The diamond sales in the US increased by 55% in 3 years.

17/ De Beers was already controlling the wholesale supply, and now they had started controlling the demand too.

18/ In 1947, they devised a plan to strengthen this idea of a diamond as a symbol of love. That year, a copywriter at N. W. Ayer, Frances Gerety, came up with the slogan - "A diamond is forever".

19/ By the end of 1945, only about 10% of engagement rings had a diamond. The campaign and the slogan had such an impact on the minds of people that by the end of the 20th century, 80% of the engagement rings contained a diamond.

20/ The interesting thing about the campaign is that since diamonds had now become a symbol of love, romance, and "forever", the majority of consumers would not resale it - in a way, De Beers further controlling the supply and demand of the diamonds in the market.

21/ De Beers instilled their idea about diamonds via some really iconic ad campaigns such as this one. (h/t @ankitkr0)

22/ From the 1960s onwards, De Beers started exploring other countries and new markets to expand their business.

23/ Even in a tough market at the time like Japan, in the 60s and the 70s, De Beers managed to create a Billion Dollar market within a decade.

24/ By 1966, only about 6% of the brides in Japan had received a diamond engagement ring. That number increased to 77% by 1990.

25/ Thanks to N. W. Ayer's brilliant campaign, the wholesale De Beers diamond sales in the US had gone from $23M in 1939 to $2.1B in 1979 - about a 100x increase in 40 years.

26/ In 1999, De Beers' slogan "A diamond is forever" topped Ad Age's list of 'Top Slogans of the 20th Century'.

27/ Over the next few decades, De Beers controlled diamond mining, sales, marketing, prices, and how people viewed diamonds as - across many different markets.

28/ But as more countries and Governments with huge diamond stocks refused to cooperate with De Beers' monopoly, they started looking at creating and promoting their brands of diamonds to consumers directly.

29/ In the 2000s, De Beers launched the brands: De Beers Diamond Jewellers and Forevermark to sell the diamond jewellery to consumers directly.

30/ In 2012, Anglo American plc, the company started by Ernest Oppenheimer earlier, completed the acquisition of De Beers.

31/ De Beers relaunched their iconic slogan - "A diamond is forever" in 2015 for its brand 'Forevermark'.

32/ Today, there are more players in the market that are handling the production and distribution of diamonds.

33/ Over the last 80 years or so, De Beers built their entire empire on that one identity and one idea that a diamond is a symbol of love.

Not sure about the Diamonds or De Beers, but the idea of diamonds as a symbol of love is forever.

End of thread. Stay tuned for another thread soon.