Laurence Graff was born in 1938 in Stepney, in the East End of London, to a Russian-Jewish family. He left school at fifteen, briefly considered a career as a furrier, and was apprenticed to a Hatton Garden jeweller named Schindler. By his own account in interviews given decades later, he was paid one pound per week as an apprentice and supplemented his income by polishing rings on weekends. He set up his first independent workshop in 1960 at the age of twenty-two and registered the company that would become Graff Diamonds in 1962.

The early years and the rise of the house

Graff's first commercial success came from supplying jewellery to retailers in the United Kingdom and, increasingly, in the Middle East. He established relationships with the courts of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and later the Sultan of Brunei. The Middle Eastern client base, expanding rapidly through the oil boom of the 1970s, gave Graff Diamonds the capital and the pricing standard to compete for the world's most important rough diamonds.

The house opened its first New Bond Street store in London in 1962 and expanded to Knightsbridge through the 1970s and 1980s. International expansion accelerated from the late 1990s, with stores opening in New York, Geneva, Monaco, Dubai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and across mainland China.

Important diamonds

Graff has been associated with more important diamonds than any other dealer of his generation, with the possible exception of Harry Winston. He has bought, recut, or sold the Lesotho Promise (603 carats rough, recovered in 2006); the Wittelsbach-Graff (originally 35.56 carats, recut by Graff to 31.06 carats from the historical Wittelsbach Diamond he purchased in 2008 for 16.4 million pounds); the Graff Pink (24.78 carats fancy intense pink, sold at Sotheby's in 2010 for 46.2 million dollars to Graff himself, then sold on); the Constellation (374 carats rough, recovered 2015); the Lesedi La Rona (1,109 carats rough, recovered 2015 by Lucara, purchased by Graff in 2017 for 53 million dollars and yielding the Graff Lesedi La Rona, a 302.37-carat D-flawless emerald cut); and many others.

The Wittelsbach episode produced both record sales and considerable controversy. The original Wittelsbach Diamond was a historic Indian stone of approximately 35 carats with documented provenance to the Spanish royal collection of the seventeenth century and the Bavarian royal family. Graff's decision to recut the stone to remove imperfections and improve symmetry was widely criticised in the museum and academic communities as the destruction of an irreplaceable historical artefact, and Graff defended it as the necessary intervention to bring the stone to its highest potential. The debate continues to inform discussions of when historic-stone recutting is justified.

Vertical integration

Graff's business model is unusual in fine jewellery for its degree of vertical integration. The house owns Safdico, a major rough-diamond purchasing operation, and through Safdico participates directly in the De Beers sights and in tender sales from Lucara, Petra, and other producers. It operates polishing factories in Botswana (the Safdico Botswana facility, opened in 2008 as part of the country's beneficiation strategy) and South Africa, and it controls cutting, design, and retail under a single corporate umbrella. The Diamond Trading Company gave Graff sightholder status, and the relationship with De Beers and now with the post-restructuring rough market has been a continuous feature of the business.

Family succession and current structure

Laurence Graff's son Francois Graff has been chief executive of Graff Diamonds since the early 2000s and has overseen the international expansion of the retail network. Laurence Graff himself stepped back from day-to-day operations in the 2010s but retained a controlling interest and a continuing role as the house's public face and chief diamond buyer.

Honours and philanthropy

Graff was knighted in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to jewellery and to charity. He is the founder of the FACET Foundation, which supports education, health, and conservation projects in Africa, with concentrations in Lesotho, Botswana, and South Africa where the house's polishing operations are located.

Position in the trade

Graff's significance in the trade is twofold. First, he has been the most consistent buyer of important rough diamonds at the top end of the market for forty years, often outbidding the historic American houses (Harry Winston, Tiffany, Cartier) and the European maisons (Bulgari, Boucheron) for stones that would otherwise have set their auction records. Second, the vertically integrated model he built has been studied as one of the most successful in luxury, demonstrating that a single owner can compete on equal terms with the multi-house conglomerates (LVMH, Richemont, Kering) provided the focus is sufficiently narrow and the commitment to top-end material is uncompromising. Graff's career stands as an unusual case in modern luxury of an entrepreneur who built, owned, and continued to direct a business that operates at the very top of its market.