📶 lab-grown luxury

a16z backs lab-grown diamonds, why audiences are flocking to standup comedy, and a visual on how Wall St works

April 30, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

Say “hey” 👋 | Apply 👥 | Upgrade 📶 | Affiliate 💸 | Sponsor 📣

Presented by

Good morning 👋

“Everybody wants diamonds. Nobody wanna work in a coal mine.”

That’s the gist of this week’s piece on a lab-grown diamond company and the market opportunity for synthetic luxury.

Let us know what you think at the bottom of this email.

P.S. We have a new newsletter subscription tier.

Check it out here if you want to see what all we’re putting behind the paywall.

TL;DR:

NEWS
Synthetic luxury is coming 💎

You know who loves diamonds? Everybody.

You know who can afford diamonds? Not everybody.

Pascal is trying to change that, and smart money is following along.

Why it matters: 

Pascal wants to democratize access to the diamond market.

They do this by offering lab-grown diamonds that mimic the real deal but at a fraction of the cost (with some pieces starting as low as $70). According to the CEO, the company has projections to generate between $20 to $30 million in revenue this year and a shiny customer repurchase rate of 20%.

There are two interesting themes that this is playing on:

  1. Lowered purchasing power means less demand for luxury products. However, if you can reduce the purchase price for a lookalike (ie. Pascal), you can create more demand by expanding the ideal customer profile to include those in lower economic buckets.

  2. People want luxury (even if they can’t afford luxury). This isn’t a new phenomenon. People have always wanted ways to feel rich even if they know they’re not (living in Miami, you see this a lot). Pascal is a way to capitalize on that trait.

What happens next: 

As mentioned earlier, Pascal is projecting $20-$30m in revenue this year, so it’s safe to say that they have PMF. If their success is any indicator, we expect to see more companies built around the idea of synthetic luxury.

Some possible markets include:

  • Lab-grown leather (jackets, bags, and shoes)

  • Synthetic pearls (jewelry and decorative items)

  • Lab-grown wool and cashmere (clothing and textiles)

  • Synthetic silks (high-end fabrics for fashion and home decor)

  • Lab-grown exotic woods (furniture and architectural elements)

  • Synthetic fragrances and oils (perfumes and essential oils)

Together with beehiiv

Why are all your favorite newsletters switching to beehiiv?

It’s because the founding beehiiv team were all early Morning Brew employees who helped scale that newsletter to over 4 million daily subscribers.

Years of trial and error went into building the precise tools, dashboards, and analytics needed to accomplish that. And now every newsletter on beehiiv has access to the same winning formula.

So what exactly does beehiiv offer?

  • World-class growth tools like the referral program and recommendation network

  • Monetization via the beehiiv Ad Network and premium subscriptions (i.e. beehiiv helps you get paid)

  • Seamless content creation with a sleek collaborative editor

  • Best-in-class inbox deliverability of 99%

  • Oh and it’s the most affordable by a mile…

Take your newsletter to the next level — get started for free.

TWEET

REFER
Earn free stuff 🎁

You can get free gifts by telling your friends and family to sign up 👇

You currently have 0 referrals, only 1 away from receiving 77 Tools That Make Up the VC Tech Stack .

JOBS

Find investing roles before the crowd 🔎

Find funds + contact data before they start marketing roles they are hiring for.

Recently closed funds:

Name

Fund Size

Fund Number

Eniac Ventures

$160m

VI

Norwest Venture Partners

$3b

XVII

Decarbonization Partners

$1.4b

I

Maven Ventures

$60m

IV

Springtide Ventures

$65m

II

SOSV

$306m

V

a16z

$7.2b

XI

P.S. 👉 If you’re looking to get a new VC job … 

We’ve found the best way to do that is to find the jobs before they become available. In our opinion, the best way to do that is to a) find who is raising funds and b) find who is the right person to contact at each of those funds.

RECS

High Yield Harry's Newsletter

The official finance and investing newsletter of High Yield Harry. Full of the latest wall street gossip, niche credit content, and plenty of memes.

The VC Insider

Invest like a VC: Access top-tier vetted startup investments with proven 8x returns, delivered to your inbox.

MEME

Thanks for reading this far and giving us a little bit of your attention this week.

Feel free to unsubscribe whenever this stops becoming valuable to you.

RESULTS

Here are the results from our poll question in last week’s piece:

Do you think there is still a future for income share agreements (ISAs)?

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨 Yes - in education (78)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Yes - but in a different field (80)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ No - this is just a fancy word for debt (60)

218 Votes

Reply

or to participate.