New Diamond Price List Promises Tech-Driven Transparency

New York—The company behind a new list for diamond prices made its trade show debut at JCK Las Vegas with the promise of providing the industry a list that is technology-based, unbiased, and transparent.

The Diamond Price List went live in June and is operated by Lucy Platforms, a Ramat Gan, Israel-based company tech entrepreneur Tomer Gil Levi founded four years ago.

In interviews conducted with National Jeweler both virtually and in person at the show, Levi told the story behind the launch of the list.

Levi is not, as he explained, a diamond dealer. His background is in tech, a booming industry in Israel, particularly when it comes to startups.

He launched Lucy Platforms with the goal of empowering another big industry in Israel—the diamond industry—with the right digital tools to buy, sell, and trade their diamonds.

He called the company “Lucy” as an homage to the song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” a fitting name for a diamond industry-focused tech company founded by a die-hard Beatles fan. “I thought to myself, this is the name,” he said.

In the company’s first few years, Levi and his employees at Lucy worked with a number of diamond companies.

Then March 2020 hit.

Many players in the diamond industry got mad at Martin Rapaport—again—over a price change.

Hundreds of diamond companies pulled their goods off the site, banding together via Instagram and vowing not to use RapNet anymore. (It should be noted that, as of press time, RapNet had nearly 1.7 million unique diamonds listed, more than it had on March 1, 2020. RapNet Chief Operating Officer Saville Stern said RapNet membership has regained pre-March 2020 levels.)

In the midst of all this, Levi said the World Federation of Diamond Bourses asked him and the team at Lucy to create a new listing website as an alternative to Rap, one that was “more robust and objective.”

Lucy made and launched Get Diamonds for WFDB in two weeks.

For various reasons, the price list element of Get Diamonds didn’t last, though the site still exists as a trading platform.

So Levi went back to work, this time taking the better part of a year to create the Diamond Price List, or DPL, which went live in June with the tagline “Your Diamonds. Your Prices.”

DPL is a tech-forward list that bills itself as being transparent, interactive, objective, and accurate. And it is free to use through at least mid-December.

“That’s what industry asked for,” Levi said. “And that’s what Lucy … brought to the table.”

Specifically, the list employs a blend of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and data science algorithms to parse data received from Get-Diamonds.com as well as representative pricing information from multiple other sources to determine polished diamond prices.

Lucy’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing Miguel Martinez pointed out that the DPL also explains its methodology on the website, allowing the trade to see how it arrives at the prices it publishes.

Initially, the plans are for DPL to publish four price list updates a year, though that could change based on industry feedback, Levi noted. 

The platform announced its first price update in September, with prices rising across the board over the preceding three months.  

According to DPL: 
— The price of round diamonds rose an average of 3 percent, with the largest increase in 1.5-1.99 carat diamonds (up 5 percent), followed by 2-2.99 carat sizes (up 4 percent), and 1-1.49 carat sizes (up 3 percent).

— The price of fancy shapes rose an average of 2 percent, with the largest increase in 0.70-0.89 carat diamonds (up 3.4 percent), followed by 0.30-0.39 carat sizes (up 3.1 percent), and 0.50-0.69 carat sizes (up 2.9 percent). 

— For rounds and fancy shapes across all sizes, the largest price increases were recorded in IJ colors while price increases were more consistent in the various clarities, with prices for +SI1 diamonds rising slightly more than those for SI2-I1 stones.

“The increase in the DPL polished prices arrives against the backdrop of increasing rough diamond prices since the start of 2021, some constraints on mining, manufacturing, polished diamond grading capacity, and most importantly, during a period of strong consumer and trade demand for polished diamonds,” it said. 

The next update to the list is scheduled for late November. 

DPL has created two other tools to be used in conjunction with the price list.

The DPL Diamond Price Calculator is an app that can calculate diamond prices according to a multitude of factors (color, cut, carat weight, shape, etc.) and allows users to compare prices, view price analytics, search GIA reports, and share the results. 

It’s available for download in the App Store and Google Play for all Apple and Android Devices. 

Before the end of the year, DPL plans to add a Data Insights Platform, a tool that will provide real-time industry insights on market trends, pricing and more.