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Florida Diamonds
Carat Factory
A Sarasota company can manufacture diamonds as real as those that come out of the ground. Selling them, however, is a multifaceted problem.
 "The industry didn’t like us. DeBeers was not very favorable. They’d pound me on the head and say nobody’s going to buy this thing. ... But the customers liked us." — Gemesis founder Carter Clarke [Photo courtesy Gemesis] |
Clarke’s diamond machines arrived a year later, but the crystals they produced were small and an ugly brown color. The yields were terrible. Abbaschian and a small team of Russian scientists had to help Gemesis re-engineer the equipment. Meanwhile, Clarke, currently co-chairman of Gemesis and still actively involved in the company’s operations, faced another obstacle: Opposition from the natural diamond industry, which feared the impact of lab-made diamonds with the same physical, optical and chemical properties as earth-grown diamonds. Big quantities of lab-produced diamonds selling for a fraction of the cost of mined diamonds could cripple the $60-billion industry.
When diamond giant De Beers learned that Clarke had gotten his hands on the technology, De Beers representatives tried to persuade the American entrepreneur to abandon the venture, Tom Zoellner reported in his 2006 book, “The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire.” They told Clarke “his enterprise was doomed to fail,” that the public would never accept a lab-grown diamond, Zoellner reported.
DeBeers has a different take. “Years ago a meeting did take place between DeBeers and Carter Clarke at Carter Clarke’s request. There was absolutely no attempt to ‘try and persuade him to abandon his venture,’ ” DeBeers spokesman Lynette Gould says.
And while DeBeers has invested in a company called Element Six, which manufactures synthetic diamonds for industrial applications, DeBeers downplays the potential that “synthetics” have as gems. “Synthetics and diamonds are very different products. Diamonds are unique, ancient, natural treasures — the youngest diamond is 900 million years old,” says Gould, who spoke of DeBeers’ confidence “that synthetics will not have the same emotional and financial value as diamonds because the value of diamonds is inextricably linked to how they were naturally formed billions of years ago.”
