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invented romance

96,881 просмотров • 9 месяцев назад •via X (Twitter)

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single-handedly invented romance
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single-handedly invented romance

Alan อลัน

15,812 просмотров • 1 год назад

This company pulled off the most successful scam of the 20th century, and they're finally collapsing. What they did: - Invented the diamond engagement ring to survive a sales crash - Told men exactly what to spend, then doubled it for no reason - Hoarded most of the world's diamonds inside one office in London - Rigged it so the ring you overpaid for could never be resold - Pleaded guilty to price fixing and got shut out of the US for decades Here's how De Beers decided what love costs, and why it is falling apart right now: Go back to the 1930s. Diamond sales had crashed in the Depression. Most American engagement rings had no diamond at all. So in 1938, De Beers hired an ad agency called N.W. Ayer with an unusual order: Do not sell a brand and instead manufacture demand for an entire category. In 1940, only 10% of first-time American brides got a diamond engagement ring. Then ONE sentence changed the industry forever... In 1947, a copywriter named Frances Gerety scribbled four words on a notepad: A Diamond Is Forever. By 1990, 80% of American brides were getting a diamond. Ad Age later named it the single best slogan of the entire 20th century. Think about what that sentence did: It told you the stone was eternal, so your love should be too. It also killed the resale market, because you keep a diamond forever and never sell it. And with no resale market, nobody could discover what the stones were really worth. Then they put a price on your feelings. The "two months' salary" rule was never a tradition. It was ad copy invented in the 1980s with no basis in anything. In Japan, where De Beers moved in during the 1960s, they pushed three months instead. A 1977 De Beers commercial ends with the words on screen: "How else could two months' salary last forever?" The company told men what to spend and called it romance. But the bigger trick was the supply: For most of the last century, roughly 80% of the world's rough diamonds passed through one office in London. De Beers held the stones back, released them slowly, and kept prices high by pretending the things were rare. But they are not rare at all. And when regulators finally moved, the results were ugly... In 2004, De Beers pleaded guilty to fixing industrial diamond prices and paid a $10 million fine. It later paid $295 million to settle a case over fixing gem prices, with $130 million going straight back to the consumers who overpaid. So how does a 137yo empire this powerful actually die? Somebody built a better diamond. Lab-grown stones are optically identical, carry the same certificates, and cost a fraction of the price. Wholesale lab-grown prices have fallen roughly 90% since 2018. The scarcity was always fake, and now anyone can prove it in an afternoon. Anglo American, which owns 85% of De Beers, has written the business down by $6.8 billion over three years. Its carrying value collapsed to $2.3 billion from over $4 billion. In 2025 alone, De Beers lost $511 million at the EBITDA line, 20x WORSE than the year before. Anglo's own filing blamed customers preferring synthetic diamonds. De Beers even opened its own lab-grown brand, then shut it down in 2025. Now Anglo is racing for the exit. It has taken final bids and wants De Beers gone this year, with Botswana and Angola circling the wreckage. The diamonds in those rings are not rare, they were never rare, and the "tradition" behind it was written by one underpaid copywriter in a single night. The most valuable thing De Beers ever mined was your belief. But it's over for them now, after 137 years, no matter how much the CEO pretends otherwise.

Ricardo

38,613 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад