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sensibility
good don’t have to be mutually exclusive
Muddy Lotus Primary School photo provided by Ruff&Cut
But what does being “green” truly mean in a business that lacks a
shared understanding of fair trade, not to mention an officially sanctioned
third-party process to certify its products as such? One way to
understand the movement is by looking at it as the industry’s collective
effort to develop smarter, more efficient and sustainable practices to
source and produce its goods. And one case to study, in particular, is that
of Tiffany & Co., the iconic American retailer that has, in many respects,
set the tone for how the luxury jewelry business addresses its commitment
to social and environmental responsibility.
“I’m not about to tell you we’ve painted the blue box green, but sustainability
is good business,” Michael Kowalski, Tiffany chairman and CEO,
says at the outset of the Green conference. “We sell objects that matter,
things that last: the very antithesis of excess. We owe it to our customers
and to the earth itself.”
The company’s initiation into the realm of corporate responsibility
came in 1995, years before the movement came into vogue, when it
opposed the development of the New World Gold Mine outside of
Yellowstone National Park, a project Kowalski described as “a reputational
disaster in waiting.”
Then came the conflict diamonds crisis, a period of time in the late
1990s when stones mined in African war zones were sold to finance
ongoing conflicts. It was a high-profile publicity nightmare, not exclusive
to Tiffany but damaging all the same. “We were unprepared,” Kowalski
says. “However, to the industry’s credit, there was quick mobilization. We
became strong and vocal advocates for the Kimberley Process, and the
result has been an effective control system.”
In 2001, Tiffany’s refusal to be implicated in other consumer confidence-threatening
issues led it “to move beyond industrywide structure
and take control of our own supply chain,” Kowalski says.
Not only did the firm create its own diamond unit, Laurelton Diamonds,
it also advised vendors that it would be scrutinizing their sourcing
methods. By 2004, Tiffany had discontinued the sale of two precious
resources: Burmese rubies, banned by the U.S. government because of
human rights abuses in that country, and coral, whose conservation environmentalists
say is critical to protecting the health of the oceans.
Aided by the four-year-old Council for Responsible Jewellery
Practices, a worldwide diamond and gold jewelry supply chain initiative
of which Tiffany was a founding member, the company has also tackled
the issue of “dirty gold,” a term for gold mined through practices that
wreck the environment.
COUTURE International Jeweler l Basel 2009 l 35