INSTORE’s 2026 Big Survey asked more than 500 owners and managers of independent jewellery stores across North America how the year actually went, and two answers stand out because they pull in opposite directions. Lab-grown diamonds have stopped spreading. Gold has not stopped moving. Between them, they describe the counter most independent jewellers worked at this year.
A plateau, not a retreat
The lab-grown numbers describe a plateau, not a retreat. After a decade of explosive growth — 10 percent of jewellers selling lab-grown in 2016, 90 percent by 2022 — adoption has levelled off, with 92 percent of respondents now selling them. What has changed is the commitment behind the stock. Only about one in five sellers now carries lab-grown solely at customer request, down from 27 percent in 2025, and the 8 percent who refuse have held their share since 2021. The category is no longer arriving in stores. It is installed, and the argument has moved from whether to sell it to how.
Price is what sells it
How it sells is mostly a question of price. Asked what drives customers to choose lab-grown over natural, 52 percent of respondents ranked price and affordability as the number one factor, and the most common “other” answer was a version of the same point: a bigger stone for the same money. The effect shows in the trade’s bread and butter. Two-thirds of respondents — 66 percent — said the 0.50 to 1.50 carat natural bridal range is shrinking in their store, as customers trade up to larger lab-grown stones or further up into natural, leaving the middle thinner than it was.
Gold hit hardest
Gold is the survey’s other headline, and it is not close. Asked which raw material’s price changes had the biggest impact on their business, 94 percent named gold. Silver and coloured gemstones barely registered, at 2 percent each. When the dust settled, 53 percent of jewellers said the gold spike had left them richer, against 14 percent who said it had left them poorer and a third who reported no impact — bigger tickets and brisk buying of gold off the street did much of the work for those who gained. Asked where inflation has hit hardest, respondents named product costs first, at 37 percent, and raw material costs next, at 21 percent.
What jewellers expect next
The two stories meet in what jewellers expect next. Asked to predict the next breakout trend, the two leading answers were lab-grown and alternatives to pricey gold — silver, gold-filled, plated and low-karat pieces, and two-tone designs that pair silver with gold. Some of that is enthusiasm and some of it is arithmetic: when the metal in a piece costs what gold now costs, the design work goes into using less of it, or using something else.
Read from the bench, the survey’s real subject is not either material on its own. It is a trade that has finished one transition and is pricing its way through another. Lab-grown is now a settled part of the stock, sold on price, thinning the natural middle. Gold is the unsettled part, repricing every quote, repair and custom job that crosses the counter — and the jewellers who answered say it left more of them ahead than behind.
— Tom