The Diamond Producers Association (DPA) was an international trade body founded in 2015 to represent the world's leading rough-diamond mining companies and to promote consumer confidence in natural diamonds. Its founding members included De Beers, ALROSA, Rio Tinto, Dominion Diamond, Petra Diamonds, Lucara Diamond, and Gem Diamonds — together responsible for the substantial majority of global rough-diamond production by value. In 2020 the organisation rebranded as the Natural Diamond Council (NDC), a name intended to signal a sharper focus on consumer education and on distinguishing natural, earth-formed diamonds from laboratory-grown alternatives. The body remains one of the most significant collective marketing and standards voices in the diamond industry.

Background and founding

For much of the twentieth century, the task of promoting diamonds to consumers globally fell almost entirely to De Beers through its Central Selling Organisation and its advertising agency N.W. Ayer, which produced the enduring 1947 slogan A Diamond Is Forever. As De Beers's market share contracted following antitrust pressures and the rise of independent producers in the 1990s and 2000s, no single company retained the scale to fund category-level marketing alone. The DPA was conceived to fill that vacuum: a collective vehicle through which competing mining companies could pool resources for generic promotion of natural diamonds without surrendering competitive independence at the retail level.

The association was formally established in Antwerp in 2015 and headquartered in New York, reflecting the primacy of the United States as the world's largest diamond jewellery market. Its governance structure gave each member company a seat at the table, with contributions scaled broadly to production volume.

Mandate and activities

The DPA's stated mandate encompassed three broad areas:

• Consumer marketing. The association launched the Real is Rare, Real is a Diamond campaign in 2016, targeting millennial consumers through digital and social media channels. The campaign sought to reframe natural diamonds not merely as luxury commodities but as emotionally authentic objects whose rarity and geological origin carried inherent meaning.
• Industry standards and sustainability. The DPA supported and amplified existing frameworks — notably the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KP) and the Responsible Jewellery Council (RJC) — while commissioning its own research into the environmental and social footprint of diamond mining. A 2019 report produced in collaboration with Trucost (a division of S&P Global) assessed the carbon intensity and land-use impact of member-company operations, providing the industry with independently benchmarked data for the first time at a collective level.
• Trade and media education. The DPA produced materials for jewellers, journalists, and educators explaining the geological formation of natural diamonds, the characteristics of the supply chain, and the technical differences between natural and laboratory-grown stones.

The laboratory-grown diamond challenge

Perhaps the most consequential strategic pressure the DPA faced was the rapid commercial expansion of laboratory-grown diamonds (LGDs), produced by either high-pressure high-temperature (HPHT) or chemical vapour deposition (CVD) methods. By the mid-2010s, LGDs had moved from industrial and specialist scientific applications into gem-quality jewellery at scale, and their retail prices were falling sharply as production capacity increased.

The DPA took a clear and consistent position: natural and laboratory-grown diamonds are chemically and crystallographically identical, but they are not equivalent products. The association argued that the geological origin of a natural diamond — formed over billions of years under extreme pressure deep within the Earth's mantle — confers a rarity and provenance that laboratory production cannot replicate, and that consumers deserved transparent disclosure so they could make informed choices. This position aligned with the disclosure requirements of major gemmological laboratories, including the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), which since 2007 has issued separate grading reports for laboratory-grown diamonds clearly identifying their origin.

The DPA's messaging on this point became more explicit after 2018, when De Beers surprised the industry by launching its own LGD jewellery brand, Lightbox, at price points deliberately positioned well below those of natural diamonds. The move was widely interpreted as an attempt to commoditise the LGD category and reinforce the premium positioning of natural stones — a strategy broadly consistent with the DPA's collective narrative.

Rebrand to the Natural Diamond Council

In June 2020 the DPA announced its rebrand as the Natural Diamond Council. The name change was accompanied by a revised visual identity and a renewed emphasis on the word natural as the primary differentiator in consumer communications. The NDC retained the same membership base and organisational structure as its predecessor. Its chief executive at the time of the rebrand, David Kellie, described the new name as a clearer signal to consumers, retailers, and media of the body's specific focus.

The NDC has continued to publish sustainability data, support responsible sourcing frameworks, and run consumer-facing digital campaigns. It has also engaged with the question of traceability, recognising that blockchain-based and other provenance-tracking technologies — piloted by companies including De Beers (through its Tracr platform) and Everledger — offer the natural diamond industry a means of substantiating origin claims that laboratory-grown stones cannot match by definition.

Relationship to the Kimberley Process and RJC

The DPA and NDC have consistently positioned themselves as complementary to, rather than duplicative of, the Kimberley Process and the Responsible Jewellery Council. The KP addresses the specific issue of conflict diamonds at the point of rough-diamond export; the RJC provides a broader certification standard covering human rights, labour practices, environmental management, and business ethics across the jewellery supply chain. The DPA/NDC's role has been to operate at the level of consumer perception and category marketing, drawing on the credibility of those upstream frameworks while communicating their substance to end buyers in accessible terms.

Significance for the trade

The DPA's formation marked a structural shift in how the diamond industry organises collective action. For decades, De Beers functioned as a de facto industry government, controlling supply and funding promotion unilaterally. The DPA model — a membership association of competing producers — is closer to the model long used in other commodity categories, such as the Cashmere and Camel Hair Manufacturers Institute or the International Olive Council, where no single producer dominates sufficiently to bear promotional costs alone. Whether the NDC can sustain the funding and strategic coherence required to influence consumer behaviour at scale, particularly as LGD market share grows and natural diamond prices face structural pressure, remains an open question in the trade. What is not in doubt is that the organisation represents the industry's most concerted attempt since the De Beers era to shape the narrative around natural diamonds on a global basis.

Further reading

• GIA — Laboratory-Grown Diamonds: An Update (Gems & Gemology, Fall 2019)
• Responsible Jewellery Council — rjc.org
• Kimberley Process Certification Scheme — kimberleyprocess.com