Volatile Gold and Silver Prices Shake Global Jewelry
Industry
Some jewelers are
turning to wood, steel and even platinum. Others are leaning into the volatility
with bigger and bolder designs.
1. Prices of precious
metals such as Gold and Silver have shown extreme volatility, creating
uncertainty across the global jewelry industry.
2. Gold prices surged from
around $2,850 per ounce a year ago to a peak of about $5,586 in January, before falling and stabilizing
near $5,100.
3. Silver prices also
fluctuated sharply, rising about 60% in January and reaching a peak of
$122 per ounce before retreating.
4. The rapid price swings
are linked to global economic uncertainty, geopolitical tensions and currency
volatility.
5. Jewelry brands are struggling
with frequent price revisions, with some adjusting product prices
multiple times within months.
6. Many manufacturers are
shifting toward alternative materials such as steel, wood and
platinum, with Platinum becoming relatively attractive at about $2,200 per ounce.
7. The volatility has
created a “K-shaped market”, where luxury buyers continue spending
while mid-range consumers cut back.
8. The diamond market is
also splitting between high-end natural diamonds and cheaper lab-grown diamonds, reflecting changing
consumer preferences.
9. Wholesale prices for
lab-grown diamonds have reportedly fallen sharply over recent years, increasing pressure
on that segment of the market.
10. Industry experts
believe the volatility could drive innovation in materials and design, as jewelers adapt to rising costs and changing consumer
demand.
Anyone
who has glanced at the jagged graph of gold prices over the past two months might
mistake it for the electrocardiogram of a patient in extreme distress.
For
those in the fine jewelry industry, however, gold’s recent
volatility — the metal traded around $2,850 a year ago, peaked at $5,586 per ounce
in late January, fell below $5,000 in early February and now sits around $5,100
— has been more than unsettling; it has created a level of confusion few have ever
experienced.
“Nobody
knows what’s happening from one month to the next,” Darren Hildrow,
founder and director of NouvelleBox, a virtual and physical
jewelry marketplace, said on a video call last month from
his home in London. “People would usually increase the price of their jewelry once every couple of years. I’ve had multiple brands
saying, ‘How do I price my jewelry? Because I’ve had to
change my pricing three times in the past six months.’”
The
speed and magnitude of price fluctuations in the gold market have seized headlines,
but the yellow metal isn’t the only jewelry material experiencing
“record-setting daily volatility,” Jim Wyckoff, the senior market analyst for Kitco Metals, where he reports on precious metals and mining,
said in a phone interview in late February.
Silver
prices increased by 60 percent in January, following a year of sustained gains.
The white metal’s price peaked at $122 an ounce, then fell in early February and
is at $87 today. The price of both silver and gold shot up again later in the month.
Diamond prices are also in flux, as the natural and lab-grown sectors try to find
their equilibrium.
“We’ve
seen sharp moves before, most recently in 2008-09, 2011 and during Covid,” Charlie Betts, co-founder and managing director of Single
Mine Origin, a company in Birmingham, England, that sells traceable gold, wrote
in an email. “But the combination of speed and the broader sense of uncertainty
around currencies, rates and geopolitics makes this time feel slightly different.
“This
isn’t just a jewelry story,” he added. “It’s a macro story
playing out through jewelry.”
A Bifurcated Market
Amid
such market upheaval — amplified by ongoing challenges in the United States, including
on-again-, off-again tariffs and the bankruptcy in January of Saks Global, the parent
company to Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman — many jewelers accustomed to working in gold and silver are reassessing
their collections.
Some
are embracing alternative materials, including wood, steel and — in an example of
the market’s topsy-turvy nature — platinum, long considered the most premium of
fine jewelry metals and now, at roughly $2,200 an ounce,
a relative bargain. (Just ask Pandora, the world’s largest jewelry
brand by volume, which announced last month that in order to mitigate the effects
of silver’s considerable run-up, it would make more of its charm bracelets using
platinum.)
“Platinum
is certainly benefiting from the gold hike,” Tim Schlick,
the chief executive of Platinum Guild International, a jewelry
trade organization, said on a video call last month from his home office on the
Spanish island of Majorca. “Many manufacturers and retailers are taking the opportunity
and, if you will, upgrading the consumer from white gold to platinum because of
the price.”
Others,
like the Los Angeles jeweler Lizzie Mandler, are leaning into bigger and bolder gold designs, where
the value is self-evident.
“I
respect how much money people are spending and I want to give them a product that’s
worthy of the spend,” Ms. Mandler said by phone recently.
“It definitely feels like the price of gold makes what we do more serious and makes
me not want to produce things I’m not really passionate about.”
Abe
Sherman, chief executive of Buyers Intelligence Group, a jewelry
consulting firm in Napa, Calif., said the sharp rise in prices has not only caused
retailers a great deal of stress, especially as they grapple with the costs of replenishing
their inventories, but is also intensifying what has been referred to as the “K-shaped”
economy — meaning a bifurcated market in which the wealthy continue to spend while
those with less means scramble to make ends meet.
“Brands
and retailers who cater to a higher-end clientele are doing quite well,” Mr. Sherman
wrote in an email. “The attention that gold is receiving has actually created a
desire, leading to bolder styles in jewelry.
“There
is a clear trend toward higher price points,” he wrote.
Natural vs. Lab
The
diamond market reflects that reality, at least when it comes to natural stones,
said Martin Katz, a fine jeweler in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Mr. Katz said that over the past six months, his bridal business has boomed thanks
to an influx of female clients who have told him they are relieved their fiancés
chose to buy them engagement rings set with natural diamonds, as opposed to larger
but less expensive lab-grown stones.
“I
think a lot of times their girlfriends were getting lab-growns
at 6 to 8 carats and were flaunting them,” Mr. Katz said by phone last month. “These
20- and 30-something women find it a bit repulsive.”
Paul
Zimnisky, a diamond industry analyst based in the New
York metropolitan area, has also noticed the market split. “If you look at high-end
diamonds, the people buying natural diamonds are buying large, high quality, fancy
natural diamonds that are hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Mr. Zimnisky said on a recent phone call.
In
the wholesale arena, the narrative is more complicated. When it comes to polished
natural diamonds, 2-, 3- and 4-carat elongated cushions and ovals “are trading at
multiyear highs,” Mr. Zimnisky said.
“Prices
of those goods are up 15 to 20 percent over the last year,” he said. “Then you have
medium-size diamonds that maybe polish into 1 carat — that’s the category getting
hit hard. Because consumers that have a $5,000 budget could buy a medium quality
1-carat natural diamond or a top quality 4-carat lab diamond.”
Stuart
Robertson, president of Gemworld International, the publisher
of a gemstone pricing guide in Glenview, Ill., went a step further, warning that
the lab-grown diamonds sector is due for a reckoning once consumers realize that
the wholesale market has collapsed.
“We’ve
monitored the pricing trends since 2017,” and wholesale lab-diamond prices have
fallen 99 percent, Mr. Robertson said in early February at the annual gem shows
in Tucson, Ariz. “We don’t have any other product in this industry that we’ve continued
to sell to consumers when we knew that the price would only go down.”
In
2019, a top-quality lab diamond of nearly 2 carats cost as much as $5,400 at wholesale.
“The vast majority of lab-grown diamonds selling now at wholesale are less than
$200 a carat,” Mr. Robertson said. “And I’m talking one-carat, two-carat, three-carat
stones. It is a problem.”
That
may be true, but try telling that to the 61 percent of couples in the United States
who in 2025 chose a lab diamond as the center stone of
their engagement ring, according to the latest Real Weddings Study published last
month by The Knot.
“Driven
by economic pragmatism and evolving values, this shift has led to larger average
carat sizes (1.9-carat) and lower average costs ($4,600), reshaping expectations
around luxury and meaning,” the report said.
Innovation Ahead
Gwen
Myers, founder of Eden Presley, a fine jewelry brand in
New York that has long produced collections in 14-karat gold, said that the reality
of a volatile jewelry marketplace has meant reshaping
her own ideas about what her clients can, and should be able to, afford.
“My
girl has a job, she’s buying jewelry for herself — I don’t
want it to be $15,000,” Ms. Myers said on a call last month. “I want it to be attainable.”
For
Ms. Myers’s newest capsule collection, In the Black, which she is debuting at a
wholesale jewelry fair in Las Vegas at the end of May,
she has opted to use a matte black steel paired with 14-karat gold for her pieces,
which will retail between $2,000 and $5,000, she said.
“I
want to put things out that look and feel quality but not have them be so expensive,”
she said. “My manufacturer learned how to work with the steel and there’s not really
anybody in the states doing it.”
Mr.
Hildrow of NouvelleBox said
he expected to see a lot more of that kind of adaptation.
“You’ll
see more interesting, innovative things that are going to happen in the next couple
of years as a result of the pressure,” he said. “But the funny thing about jewelry is that it will never go away. It’s the one thing that
connects humanity, and people always want to buy it, whether there’s an economic
slump or not.”
Shruti
Chhajer Ranka, creative head
of Shruti Sushma, an Indian fine jewelry brand with boutiques
in Ahmedabad and Bangalore, struck a similar note.
“Jewelry occupies a unique position — it is both emotional and
tangible,” Ms. Ranka wrote in an email. “When markets
fluctuate, that combination can feel reassuring.”