ETHICAL JEWELRY: Style and sensibility

March 2009


ETHICAL JEWELRY: Style and sensibility

In the world of fine jewelry, doing good and looking good don’t have to be mutually exclusive

Climate change is almost what the bomb was when I was a kid in the ’50s,” Simon Doonan, creative director of Barneys New York, says when he walks onto the stage for the final presentation of the 10th annual New York Fashion Conference. This year’s theme? “Green: Sustainability, Significance and Style.” Launching into a hilarious anecdote about his youth in Great Britain, Doonan brings three days of panel discussions about weighty issues of ecological and social import to a spirited, if irreverent, close. The gathering has covered everything from the scourge of “dirty gold” to the future of green fashion, and while the messages have been meaningful, the energy in the room has, as with any extended event, gradually been sapped from the room. Doonan does his best to enliven the audience. In recalling his initial resistance to decorating Barneys’ windows with an earth-friendly green theme for the 2007 holiday season, he cuts right to the chase: “Let’s face it — it can be a bit earnest at times,” Doonan says, referring to the by-now obligatory need for companies to tout their green credentials. “We added some style, humor and a bit of glamour in there,” he continues, describing his own cheeky approach to the theme: windows populated by elves clad in recycled Metro cards and a “Rudolph the Recycling Reindeer” display made entirely of recycled aluminum cans. “You don’t have to be earnest and super-crunchy. That’s the vibe I got from people on the street. They were grateful that we’d married those two concepts.” By poking fun at the clichés of the green movement while simultaneously honoring it, Doonan makes a strong case for luxury goods that are at once stylish and socially responsible.

The high-end jewelry industry has had a similar awakening. Over the past three to five years, the selection of high-ticket jewelry described as either green, sustainable, ethical, fair trade, fair made, charitable, cause-based or “conscient luxury” has increased exponentially. The degree of green chatter in the jewelry business, famous for its conservatism and insularity, is today so great that it’s become abundantly clear even the old-timers have embraced the zeitgeist.

But what does being “green” truly mean in a business that lacks a shared understanding of fair trade, not to mention an officially sanctioned third-party process to certify its products as such? One way to understand the movement is by looking at it as the industry’s collective effort to develop smarter, more efficient and sustainable practices to source and produce its goods. And one case to study, in particular, is that of Tiffany & Co., the iconic American retailer that has, in many respects, set the tone for how the luxury jewelry business addresses its commitment to social and environmental responsibility. “I’m not about to tell you we’ve painted the blue box green, but sustainability is good business,” Michael Kowalski, Tiffany chairman and CEO, says at the outset of the Green conference. “We sell objects that matter, things that last: the very antithesis of excess. We owe it to our customers and to the earth itself.”

The company’s initiation into the realm of corporate responsibility came in 1995, years before the movement came into vogue, when it opposed the development of the New World Gold Mine outside of Yellowstone National Park, a project Kowalski described as “a reputational disaster in waiting.” Then came the conflict diamonds crisis, a period of time in the late 1990s when stones mined in African war zones were sold to finance ongoing conflicts. It was a high-profile publicity nightmare, not exclusive to Tiffany but damaging all the same. “We were unprepared,” Kowalski says. “However, to the industry’s credit, there was quick mobilization. We became strong and vocal advocates for the Kimberley Process, and the result has been an effective control system.” In 2001, Tiffany’s refusal to be implicated in other consumer confidence-threatening issues led it “to move beyond industrywide structure and take control of our own supply chain,” Kowalski says. Not only did the firm create its own diamond unit, Laurelton Diamonds, it also advised vendors that it would be scrutinizing their sourcing methods. By 2004, Tiffany had discontinued the sale of two precious resources: Burmese rubies, banned by the U.S. government because of human rights abuses in that country, and coral, whose conservation environmentalists say is critical to protecting the health of the oceans.

Aided by the four-year-old Council for Responsible Jewellery Practices, a worldwide diamond and gold jewelry supply chain initiative of which Tiffany was a founding member, the company has also tackled the issue of “dirty gold,” a term for gold mined through practices that wreck the environment.

In Tipuani, Bolivia – people are expected to meet the firm’s fundamental values or agree to conform to them. In return, they receive a portion of profits to improve their quality of life and mining practices. Ruff&Cut, a New York-based jeweler that uses diamonds mined in Sierra Leone, takes a similar approach, channeling its profits to local organizations such as the Muddy Lotus Primary School.

According to the nonprofit No Dirty Gold, founded in 2004 by human rights groups Oxfam America and Earthworks, the production of one gold ring generates up to 20 tons of waste, including toxic cyanide and mercury runoff. In the most egregious cases, gold mining also destroys landscapes and displaces communities, impacting mostly indigenous peoples in countries such as Ghana, Indonesia and Peru.

While a company the size of Tiffany is expected — and can afford — to be a model of corporate righteousness (by sourcing the majority of its gold and silver from a single U.S. mine that upholds its considerable standards), scores of smaller jewelers have turned to recycled or reclaimed gold to assure their customers that they, too, have confronted the industry’s inconvenient truths. “When I saw the No Dirty Gold Web site, I was shocked by how much devastation there is in metals mining,” says Toby Pomeroy, a boutique designer based in Oregon. “I thought, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t contribute to this kind of destruction.’”

In 2005, Pomeroy asked Hoover & Strong, the largest metals refiner in the United States, if they would set aside their scrap gold and silver for him to recycle. Since that encounter, interest in the company’s reclaimed metals program has spawned a brand of its own: Harmony Metals and Gems, which consists of 100 percent recycled precious metals paired with conflict-free diamonds and fair trade gemstones. For Pomeroy, it all boils down to a single point: “How can we bring ethics to an industry that has operated without accountability?”

Company benefits Tracy Matthews Design, Ruff&Cut, Todd Reed and Large Oria for Ruff&Cut all use diamonds provided by Ruff&Cut, as part of its effort to promote “socially responsible luxury.” Transparency and beneficiation, or the re-investment of profits in the communities where the diamonds are sourced (such as the one the Sierra Leonean diggers in the photo above call home) is at the core of the company’s philosophy.

The good news is that thanks to the jewelry trade’s newfound environmentalist zeal, that question no longer prompts an uncomfortable silence. Not everyone, however, agrees on the best approach. Take Urth Solution, for example. The Beverly Hills, Calif.-based company’s URTH brand jewels, a chic selection of designer pieces made by the likes of Pippa Small and Stephen Webster, are made from gold mined by artisanal and small-scale miners in Bolivia and Madagascar. In exchange for their gold, Urth pledges to ensure “a fair price while providing much needed resources, skills, education and technology through programs funded by the sale of URTH products.”

“We have an independent minerals and sustainability expert to develop a set of standards with a more attainable entry point based on the values of our company: dignity, peace, development, community, ecology, family, health and justice,” co-founder Meyghan Hill says. “So, for example, we will purchase from a community that mines using mercury if, through our reinvestment program funded by the profits of URTH jewelry, they will participate in a mercury management and reduction course.” Urth’s marketing materials, which describe the business as a “marriage of luxury and altruism,” reflect a sensibility that has only recently become if not quite commonplace then certainly not unique in the trade. Another example of the effort to help consumers effect change with their jewelry purchases comes by way of Ruff&Cut, a two-year-old jewelry company based in New York specializing in rough diamonds sourced from Sierra Leone, the country most ravaged by blood diamonds. “Our goal is to create an invisible cord that ties the land and the people who bear the stones to those who wear them with singular conscience — a spiritual cat’s cradle, if you like, of beauty & rawness, of source & provenance, and of purity & distinction, all draw-stringed together,” states the company’s core philosophy.

To that end, explains founder and CEO Wade Watson, Ruff&Cut sells not only its own brand of jewelry featuring Sierra Leonean diamonds but also pieces designed by Todd Reed, Me&Ro and Tracy Matthews. On the Web site, concerned customers will find explicit remarks about where the materials have been sourced and how much money from their sale will go to nonprofit partners. Watson is operating on the conviction that even, or perhaps especially, in a down market, jewelry that promotes lofty ideals gives consumers an extra incentive to buy. Yet given the dismal realities of the marketplace, he and his fellow activist jewelers are equal parts sanguine and concerned about their prospects. “As a whole, I don’t really think the industry gets it yet,” Watson says. “In the end it will be driven by the consumer and their desire to make the world a better place.”