Inbilico and Nove25 in the footsteps of De Beers and DiCaprio- Corriere.it

Sustainable diamonds and silver. With this formula two Milanese maisons take up the challenge of innovating made in Italy jewellery. They are called Inbilico and Nove25. The first, younger, is a company that has integrated sustainability into its identity and that uses only lab grown diamonds, certified gold, recycled packaging, with jewels all made in the Valencia district. The second has specialized in silver since 2005 and has grown thanks to a revolutionary distribution model, when compared to the standards of classic jewellery, with single-brand stores in Europe and international distribution: everything comes from the goldsmith’s workshop of a thousand square meters under the Madonnina. The collection is instead called Inbilico W/Nove25, it consists of three “single” earrings and looks to a certainly young public, attentive to changing trends and with a marked sensitivity to environmental and socially relevant issues.
The message is clear: the time has come, even for such a traditional sector, to review some of the fundamentals of the game. Meanwhile, collaborating and discussing, as is done more and more often in sectors close to us, for example fashion – begins Roberto Dibenedetto, founder of Nove25 -. We met Inbilico a few months ago, at the Vicenza gold fair. We felt ready for a diamond project, and that of cultured stones was a path we had taken into consideration. The meeting with Fiammetta Cicogna, also an actress and director, and Manuela Picciotto, the creative souls of Inbilico (which belongs to the Otto company), led to a shared work, starting from the design of the jewels to arrive at the final message. The cultivated diamond represents a unicum in terms of technology and sustainability – explains Cicogna – but still suffers from an important resistance. The union with silver makes sense precisely because it can break down this barrier and expand the user base.

The differences

Lab-born diamonds are stones that have the same physical and chemical properties as mined ones, the creation starts from splinters selected on the basis of their purity and from which, with the help of high temperatures, authentic diamonds are born, evaluated and certified with the same parameters. The process reduces the costs – economic and social – of mining, shortening the supply chain, but remains very expensive in the deployment of energy and technology used. This is why the two houses have imagined circular packaging for the capsules, with a view to compensation. At the end of the process, however, the price is lower than that of a natural diamond. In Italy there are no laboratories for the cultivation of diamonds – explains Cicogna again -. We source from Spain, France and Belgium and all these laboratories use only renewables.

The market, the prospects

Undoubtedly better known abroad than in our country, according to some estimates the cultivated diamond market is growing by 15% year on year and by 2023 could reach 10-17 million carats produced. The growing attention of jewelery houses: in Italy Morellato offers them with the livediamond brand, Pandora has its own collection, Swarowski too, while the giant De Beers already controls 75% of world production through Element Six, of which it acquired the majority. The company is also expected to produce the stones for use in quantum computers developed by Amazon Web Services, as synthetic diamonds are used in crystal chips that have semiconductor properties. The American Diamond Foundry is also involved in this area, of which the actor Leonardo DiCaprio is one of the main investorsand which has bet on Spain to set up in Extremadura what will become the largest laboratory in Europe.
Diamond Foundry also collaborates with the UAE brand Etika jewels and sells its diamonds directly to consumers through the Vrai brand, which last September opened a showroom in London, in the renowned Mayfair art and luxury district. While Lvmh entered, through its private equity Luxury Ventures, in the capital of Lusix, an Israeli producer.
The Inbilico W/Nove25 collection will be sold on the physical and online channels of both brands, and in a series of markets that, across borders, range from Europe to Latin America, the Middle East and Asia. We don’t have time horizons on the basis of which to evaluate the goodness of the project: we also want to create culture on the subject, and place ourselves as pioneers of a new era of jewelery – concludes Dibenedetto -. As Nove25 we are also thinking about a second line with cultured diamonds and gold, an area that until now we had only dealt with in personalized jewels.