Rio Tinto continues telling its Story

New York--Rio Tinto has four new designers and a new website for Diamonds with a Story, the marketing program launched three years ago to buoy demand for diamonds by shifting the focus from the four Cs to the stories behind the stones: where they came from, and what impact they had, and are having, on a local level.

The website, DiamondsWithAStory.com, is for retailers, designers and manufacturers and went live earlier this year, around the time of the Las Vegas shows. 

The site contains a tab for Product & Marketing, which includes images of in-store materials that are provided to retailers as well as sales training contact information. DiamondsWithAStory.com also has some consumer research, as well as a link to subscribe to the newsletter for regularly updated research. 

The website is in both English and Chinese.

Diamonds With a Story consists of four collections--Cutting Impact, Color My World, Mixed Medium and Shaped By Origin--all priced at $500 to $5,000 retail. Designers who have previously created pieces for these collections include Kara Ross, Phyllis Bergman, Alexandra Hart and Zoltan David.

At JCK Las Vegas 2015, Rio Tinto brought four new designers into the Diamonds with a Story fold.

Sonoma County, Calif.-based Jennifer Dawes, a metalsmith who launched Dawes Design in 2000, focuses on using responsibly sourced materials to create “green” jewelry, so she created pieces for Cutting Impact, the collection targeted at millennial consumers who desire products that are green.

Matthew Campbell Laurenza is a U.S.-born, Hong Kong-based jewelry designer whose often-colorful designs have netted a lot of red carpet time over the years. Laurenza created a line of jewelry, some of which are designed to fit uniquely-cut gemstones that are interchangeable, for Mixed Medium, which is aimed at consumers looking for something unique. 

Suzanne Kalan, who is known for her white diamonds and colored gemstone “Fireworks” baguette pieces, did pieces for Color My World using brown diamonds from the Argyle mine to make more affordable Fireworks.

And finally there is Sandy Leong, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest and is inspired by nature when she designs jewelry. Leong created for Shaped By Origin, which is for consumers who want to know from where their diamonds originated. 

Each line includes 12 to 18 pieces, a mix of rings, earrings, necklaces and bracelets, in 18-karat gold and set with white and colored (gray and brown) diamonds from