Our Origin Story
Why we think the world needs another fine jewelry brand.
Written by our founder.
.
I was actually pro mined diamonds at the start, or as I called them then, ‘real diamonds’. Needless to say, things have changed. Welcome to our origin story ⋆˙⟡.
Knowing my work in Brand Strategy, a friend I had met in Hong Kong shared that her brother’s factory in China had been working with a lab grown diamond supplier in India that he really liked, and asked what I thought about the brands in that world and if there was potential. So I started some research and quickly realized my mistake in thinking one type of diamond was ‘real’.
A brief history of diamonds
For me, the switch to being pro lab grown came down to two things — the science, and the history.
The science is relatively simple — they’re exactly the same, so exact that you need special machines to tell lab grown and mined diamonds apart. Whether the lab grown diamonds are grown through HPHT (High Pressure High Temperature) or CVD (Chemical Vapour Deposition), the end product is a 100% Carbon diamond.
At that point in my research though, this wasn’t enough for me. Mined diamonds still had an edge because I thought they were rare.
Through my history research, I quickly learned that mined diamonds are more plentiful than we think, and were never supposed to be as expensive as they are, both things we can thank DeBeers for. As the world’s oldest diamond mine owner, with mining rights first purchased with profits from the founder’s teenage business selling ice to miners, DeBeers first formed in 1888 and dominated the industry for the next century, reaching a height of 90% market share in the 1980s. By forming the Diamond Trading Company and convincing other mines to join their cartel, they artificially controlled the supply and demand of diamonds and set the rules on how they should be used.
In 1940, 10% of American women were proposed to with diamond engagement rings, and with declining diamond sales especially post the Great Depression, DeBeers wanted to turn this around. They hired the ad agency N. W. Ayer to do market research and run marketing campaigns for them, among many things, creating the “A diamond is forever” line. Ten years later, the amount of women with diamond engagement rings had grown by 20% and by 1990 it was 80%. Oh and that famous saying about men spending two months of their income on an engagement ring? That was done by them.
How much power does DeBeers have now? After mines in Russia (where more than ⅓ of the world’s diamonds come from, hence price changes during the Ukraine-Russia war), Canada, and Australia began breaking away from the cartel, DeBeers didn’t have the same supply and demand power, and their market share fell to below 60% in the late 90s. This, plus:
The negative publicity around blood diamonds in 1999
The anti-trust lawsuit (where DeBeers was found guilty of illegally monopolizing the international diamond business and settled to pay $295M to U.S. jewelry makers, wholesalers, retailers, and consumers)
Organizational changes
The growth of lab grown diamonds
have made DeBeers’ international market share of diamonds 29%, as of 2023. These days, their marketing focus is on selling the beauty of the flaws in mined diamonds.
The tipping point
Understanding the science and history behind lab grown diamonds changed the idea of buying mined diamonds for me to be an act of ignorance. Why would anyone pay more than 2x the price of something when they can get the exact same thing for less, especially when that higher price was the product of a century of manipulation?
This is all to say, I think mined diamonds will always have huge value in the world. When it comes to romance, I completely understand how someone would want their love to be represented by billions of years of a stone forming in the earth vs a lab. But when it comes to everyday fine jewelry, buying into that narrative didn’t make sense to me anymore.
Of course, when you spend some time researching diamonds, you start getting interested in purchasing lab grown diamond jewelry for yourself.
Modern diamond jewelry brands
My interest in purchasing diamond jewelry was also in line with a shift in style that friends and I were experiencing. We had gotten to the age where we were mostly happy with the clothes in our wardrobe and were now dabbling in the power of accessorizing, whether through a watch, layered necklaces, ring stacks, or manicures. Like with clothes, there too was the transition of purchasing lots of cheaper pieces to wanting to invest in less but higher quality items.
Those thoughts sat in my mind as I started looking at different fine jewelry brands, and I noticed three main themes:
Feminine/bridal designs - The majority of lab grown diamond brands, like mined diamonds, are bridal-related and if they’re not bridal, they lean feminine (daintier, softer, more curves).
Lack of material transparency - Some brands don’t say how many grams of gold are in each piece or what the quality of the diamonds are. If I’m paying more than $1k for something, I want to know what’s in it.
Choice paralysis - Every brand has 20+ options, sometimes even within each category, with collections based on motifs that are pretty (“nature-inspired collection”), but not designed with everyday wear in mind.
Becoming a diamond jewelry designer
At this point, I just had to make the jump from researcher to buyer to designer.
I began laying out what pieces are considered “must-haves” and timeless, and then refining which ones would actually make sense for everyday wear, consulting friends and thinking about what we found ourselves wanting.
Once the types of pieces were set, I began designing them to be unisex. In the same way that so many of the brands I like are wearable by all, and how I’m equally inspired by Lewis Hamilton and Alexa Chung's style, I wanted these accessories to be the same.
I then worked with the experts at our factory to make sure all these pieces would be comfortable to wear (e.g. no thick ring bands that hit your other fingers, secure but simple clasps), and were made with the highest standards of materials for fine jewelry — 18k gold and DEF/VS2+ diamonds. After a few rounds of samples (and playing with diamonds at the factory) our Everyday Collection was set.
As for the brand name, ‘Senite’ comes from an exploration into words related to ‘everyday’. ‘Sefennnahht’, a contraction of ‘seven’ and ‘nights’, is an Old English term used to describe a week. We liked that our brand name would be a direct nod to pieces you can wear everyday, and that the ‘ite’ part of the word felt related to stones.
With these pieces, we hope you enjoy their brilliance, feel pride in knowing their quality, but most importantly to us, we hope you wear them.
Thank you for being here,
Asai