By
Bloomberg
Published
March 16, 2025
Botswana, the world’s largest diamond producer, is betting that selling big gems to rich young Americans will ease its economic woe and it is trying to catch their eye via Instagram and TikTok.
That gamble saw it dip a toe into the world of luxury advertising last week, wining and dining social media influencers at a Michelin star restaurant in New York’s Greenwich Village to pitch affluent 20- and 30-somethings on natural rocks over lab-grown rivals.
“One of our strategies is to really counter synthetics,” Bogolo Kenewendo, Botswana’s 37-year-old mines minister, said in an interview from New York ahead of the March 12 event.
The evening was organized with high-end online jewellery seller The Clear Cut, which is a“voice for Gen Zs and is really helping us to tailor the narrative of natural diamonds in the US to a specific demographic,” she said.
Kenewendo is promoting her country’s gems against an onslaught from cheaper, lab-grown variants, which have crushed prices for cheaper stones at the expense of Botswana, which gets more than a third of its budget and most of its foreign exchange earnings from the gems.
Diamond sales from the Debswana joint venture between De Beers, the biggest diamond mining company, and Botswana fell 46% last year, according to the central bank.
Synthetic stones also profit from the blood-diamond narrative that the proceeds of gem mining, in the case of producers including Sierra Leone and Central African Republic, has financed civil wars.
In response, Botswana counters that it’s a flourishing democracy and revenue from diamonds, discovered in the southern African nation soon after independence in 1966, have been used to benefit the entire nation.
“Diamonds do good. That is our selling point,” Kenewendo said. “Almost everybody in Botswana who has been put through primary school all the way to university has been put through by government and through government revenues that are raised through the sale of diamonds.”
Kenewendo is part of a fresh-faced new cabinet, which includes a 26-year-old youth minister once crowned Miss Botswana, trying to breathe life into the struggling economy of the country of 2.5 million people.
Voter anger over the economy led to the shock October election result that swept President Duma Boko’s Umbrella for Democratic Change to power, unseating the party that had ruled for 58 years.
With synthetic diamonds out-competing natural gems in the market for cut stones under $750, the country is aiming at the buyers of more expensive jewellery, while highlighting that its gems can be traced back to Botswana mines through blockchain technology, she said.
“We believe we have a very unique market above five carats that we can really tap into and position the Botswana marque as a premium diamond above all,” she said.
That’s where the alliance with retailers such as The Clear Cut come in.
“Our clients skew a little bit higher than the average American budget,” said Olivia Landau, the co-founder and chief executive officer of the company, adding that most are in their late 20s or early 30s. “Our average engagement ring is about $25,000 to $30,000, around the two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half carat center stone diamond.”
That demographic was the prime audience for the New York-based fashion influencers who attended the event, including Katee Bartlett, Serena Kerrigan and the 19 other guests that evening.
We want “to present a new narrative that most consumers in the US haven’t heard,” Landau said. For the influencers “it’s a great way for them to get educated and also share the story with their audiences.”
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