#TBTT- Throw Back Thursday Time!
Put on your berets and ascots lovelies, it’s time to get all #Beat generation and #Counterculture on you with some road trip memoirs and cultured diamonds diaries!
The road to JCK Las Vegas 2019 (31st of May to 4th of June) began early this year when our founder Laura Chavez decided now was the time for Lark & Berry to make it’s debut at the famous expo—North America’s biggest, with over 30,000 exhibitors and an untold number of fine jewellery buyers.
“Ever since Lark & Berry was first called diamond disruptors by the press for our exclusive use of cultured diamonds, the attention has just kept coming,” Laura explained. “It just seemed time to get as many of Lark & Berry’s staff in a big rented van as we could and get ourselves to Las Vegas to continue spreading the word of going cultured!”
Laura and Lark & Berry PR man Cameron started everything off in late May by traveling to sunny Los Angeles to take meetings with potential buyers. LA’s progressive vibes and positive attitude towards start-ups and disrupting brands has made the city like an emerging second Silicon Valley—a great place to find homes in boutiques across the sprawling metropolis for Lark & Berry’s lab grown diamonds.
Then, it was time to meet up with Clark, Lark & Berry strategist, writer and producer of our upcoming podcast! Oops, and almost forgot one key resume credential he has to get us to Las Vegas from LA…
Driver.
Yep, that’s #startuplife for you, created diamonds darlings. We all fill multiple roles at Lark & Berry! Plus, us Brits aren’t CRAZY comfortable with driving on the right side of the road—so Clark to the rescue!
Before we made the 4 hr journey from LA to Vegas for JCK, it was time to rendezvous with Svet, our London shopgirl superstar and marketing strategist Joana. We picked them up from LAX and immediately got on the road—van packed up with our whole JCK’s booth worth of decorations and jewellery, 5 people AND their bags… and grown diamonds fans, we probably need not to remind you, fashionistas DO NOT pack light! So, major shoutout to #Dodge for their Dodge Challenger van, whose seats can fold down COMPLETELY into the floorboard. Now that’s the sort of tech ingenuity Lark & Berry cultured diamonds disruptors love!
The 4 hours journey to Vegas was a positive one, full of fun and laughs, though here’s an interesting gossip tidbit: half of us were battling colds. We won’t say who to protect the innocent, but it was a minor miracle to say the least that we didn’t ALL get sick—and that our poor sick ones muscled through the expo!
Finally, we arrived at JCK, to discover we needed even MORE decorations to really make our booth pop.
We made a last minute run to IKEA and got some great furnishings and also placed a last minute order to Franklin Printing in Las Vegas (big shoutout, thanks guys!) to do two HUGE poster-boards for us—one was a blown up versions of this, our current fave LB pic:
The boys and girls at Franklin also did a several-hundred print of the first edition of our Diamond Disruptor magazine, which we handed out at JCK. It was a huge hit and looked great!
So, we get to JCK, half of us are sick, we’ve checked into our hotels, we’ve got our booth looking amazing—we had just opened up for business on the 31st of May at the expo, still catching our breath and marveling at the sheer amount of amazing jewellery and booths on display at the Sands Centre at the Venetian hotel and casino, when JCK handed out an early round of awards…
…and JCK judges came by to inform us we WON the Editor’s Choice Award in Design for our brilliant Bow necklace!
Not only was Lark & Berry the first cultured diamonds luxury brand exclusively using lab grown stones invited to display at the JCK Design Center, but we won 1st place our very FIRST YEAR of being there!
“To win 1st place for design at such an important event, against such prestigious competition was amazing,” said our founder Laura. “Our design award for the Bow necklace is one we’d like to dedicate to everyone out there buying and supporting cultured diamonds. Our fans know—and more people are getting to know every day—that cultured is the new way forward.”
We’ll take any chance to remind of our amazing and breathtaking Asymmetrical Bow necklace, featuring 11.6 carats of luxury’s finest created diamonds. Yay, us!
OK, if you’ve hung in this long, grown diamonds disruptors, we hope you’re enjoying—let’s start wrapping this up to end with two exciting tidbits!
After JCK ended, 4 days later, with Lark & Berry having won the Design award and garnered a great bit of interest in our lab grown diamonds from buyers the world over, we went BACK to LA… to shoot a commercial!
30 some odd fabulous LA actors were cast to participate in a commercial to promote our new ‘Clean. Cool. Cultured.’ campaign… no spoilers here, you’ll have to wait til we have edited this baby to see what we’re up to, but it was SO MUCH fun and we were SO PLEASED to work in LA on a real, pro commercial!
Our new commercials series PLUS the debut of our new Lark & Berry podcast (more details on that soon!) will be out before you can say cultured diamonds lab grown diamonds created diamonds man made diamonds grown diamonds!
…which might make you look a crazy person in public.
But hey, if we saw you do it, we’d give you a wink and a smile, because we know you’re with us—and we know you’re as excited as us for cultured diamonds, the same as mined diamonds, but more fairly priced and MUCH more environmentally responsible!
As always, follow us on social @larkandberry, check out our new VETO STACKABLE RINGS (so many colours!) and stay tuned for more!
