“Polished exports from India fell 41% year on year in February,” Rapaport wrote, while “shipments from Belgium dropped 38%, and Israel’s plummeted by 73%.” Meanwhile, “inventory rose among diamond manufacturers and dealers, with new supply becoming available while demand stayed frozen. We estimate that midstream inventory increased 20% from the beginning of the year to mid-March.”
If buyers are looking for an alternative asset to place their cash, in other words, diamonds, at least for the moment, are not an obvious safe haven.
“I don’t think people were buying for the sake of investment,” Becket says. “We had a recent sale in Hong Kong, online, that was pretty much exclusively diamonds, and it did incredibly well.” It’s true, she continues, that “there has been a softening” in the auction market for jewelry as the value of loose stones has declined. But demand has stayed strong, Becket says, for lots with a compelling provenance, a prestigious maker, or a uniquely compelling aesthetic element to the object.
“The Tutti Frutti bracelet is a case in point,” she explains. “The stones in a Tutti Frutti bracelet are pretty modest in intrinsic value,” because Cartier purposefully chose flawed colored stones to contrast with the brilliant diamonds and settings. “So the Tutti Frutti jewelry we value more as works of art.”
A Million Dollars, Sight Unseen
Now the question is whether or not buyers are willing to spend almost a million dollars on a bracelet they’ve never seen in person. Traditionally, Becket says, people are most willing to buy things with which they’re familiar: a Cartier “Love” bracelet or pieces made by famous jewelers such as Graff or Bulgari.
In the past few sales, though, Becket has seen a “broadening” of what’s done well at auction. “A multicolored pair of ear-clips, something we wouldn’t think would do that well online, suddenly has a number of bids,” she says. So the Tutti Frutti bracelet may well be the ultimate test of buyers’ willingness to take leaps of faith at online auctions.
“If these kind of pieces continue to do well, it will mean the pandemic has forced us to arrive at the place we were heading anyway,” she says, “where people have become more and more comfortable buying things online, sight unseen.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.