This Cardi B-approved Lab-grown Diamond Brand Wants You to Wear Jewels to Wash Potatoes
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PARIS — Any jewelry brand would be happy to put megawatt creations on the likes of Cardi B, Jennifer Lopez and Adele for the stage and red carpet.
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Not lab-grown diamond brand Shiphra.
“We want you [to] wear 5 carats on your fingers and clean potatoes — or take your kids to kindergarten,” quipped David Mardashev, global operating director of the six-year-old jeweler.
What the brand aims to do is no less than reformulate the relationship between women and their accessories.
Starting around $1,500 for designs with around a carat’s worth of diamonds and up to $500,000 for high jewelry creations involving sets of larger stones, Shiphra creations are meant to be “a companion in their life, not a source of worry,” added Mardashev.
And the dwindling price of lab-grown stones is also an asset when being creative. “With lab-grown diamonds, you can make any fantastic or unusual shape you want because the price of the material isn’t so high,” said Mardashev.
Take lab-grown gems like rubies, emeralds and sapphires. While other jewelry brands have been dabbling in them, they’re a Shiphra standby of the past couple of years.
“The secret sauce is finding and building relationships with the right suppliers,” said Mardashev. “And sauce is the right term because when you talk about diamonds of color, it’s a process that requires additional chemical knowledge as there are additional [elements] at play for color to form.”
Shiphra started in Geneva in 2018 as a passion project for founder Victoria Danilova, an international economics graduate who’d inherited a taste for jewelry from her mother and grandmother.
Mother-of-four Danilova had started to design pieces for herself and it quickly snowballed into a private clientele who came through her through word of mouth for custom designs.
And jewelry-loving entertainment stars soon came calling.
Singer Adele sported chandelier earrings with 30 cushion-cut and 48 pear-cut diamonds for a total of 40 carats for her Weekends with Adele performances at Las Vegas’ Caesars Palace.
Cardi B also sported Shiphra for a New Year’s Eve bash at Miami club E11even, where she wore 36-carats’ worth of lab-created stones, including a ring featuring a fancy blue emerald-cut diamond.
But the one who has reached for Shiphra the most is Jennifer Lopez. She wore the earrings featuring a row of three cushion-cut stones between 1 and 2 carats by the brand to the March premiere of “Air,” directed by now-estranged husband Ben Affleck.
For a “Jimmy Kimmel Live” appearance, her choice was the Pink Orchid ring, which featured a 7-carat pink round-cut diamond surrounded by another 3 carats of white diamonds, and she later wore a 57-carat necklace called Metamorphoses, featuring 66 oval-shaped stones.
It’s the buzz around exceptional pieces like this one or another JLo-approved look, the 30-carat Alexandra choker that had Danilova calling on Mardashev, an old friend and veteran in the luxury in jewelry industry, to navigate the brand’s next step of growth.
An expert in international luxury marketing who spent 16 years as head of regional training and client experience at Chanel for the Russian market before becoming a business consultant in 2018, Tel-Aviv-based Mardashev started advising the brand in 2023 and became global managing director in January 2024.
“When we started, we were a classical [jewelry] business with one particularity — the use of lab-grown stones,” he said. “But what we want to become is the first lab-grown diamond high jeweler.”
The brand is the owner of one of the largest-ever polished lab-grown diamond ever made, an emerald-cut 50.25 carat type IIa stone in a G color and VS2 quality produced by India-based specialist Ethereal Green Diamond.
The 150-carat rough it came from had been grown and polished over a period of eight months and was lauded by the International Gemological Institute as a “paradigm-shifting breakthrough” when it was announced before being displayed at JCK in 2023.
“Given our very good relationships with diamond-growing laboratories across the world, we had committed to buying the stone if a [rough resulting in a] 50-carat diamond with perfect characteristics was produced,” said Mardashev.
Now known as the Shiphra diamond, it will take pride of place in a unique high jewelry design that’s still in the works.
In the meantime, the brand’s poised to launch a fine jewelry line, titled “10” and inspired by the life-or-death decision of the midwife who saved Biblical prophet Moses as an infant and the brand’s namesake.
Imbued with symbolism in many cultures around the globe, the number is also a nod to the binary number system — made of ones and zeroes — which is the basis for today’s computers and everything digital.
Extending its price range is also a sign of the brand’s growing confidence and healthy business despite the luxury downturn, although Mardashev declined to share the privately-held company’s turnover or sales figures.
Shiphra has an ambitious plan to carve its space in high jewelry by leveraging the possibilities in terms of size and innovative stone cuts offered by lab-grown materials.
Next up on the brand’s roadmap to becoming a reference high jeweler rooted in the lab-grown space are plans for a Paris flagship in the next 12 to 18 months, ideally within the so-called “jewelry triangle” zone outlined by Place Vend?me, Rue de la Paix and Rue de Castiglione.
“It seems logical for us to plan the evolution of the brand there as France has historically been the place of high jewelry,” continued Mardashev. “I believe you can build this kind of strong brand in three to five years.”
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