I was on a train somewhere in Switzerland when my three-year-old started crying. Nothing dramatic — tired, wanted something, the usual. What struck me wasn't the child. It was the carriage. A row of adults, most of them past fifty, sighing in near unison. Not hostile. Just… inconvenienced. As though a crying child on a train was a strange imposition rather than an ordinary fact of life.
I watched them and thought: a society that sighs at a crying child is telling you something about all of them.
My business lives on engagements, weddings, and births. Not as a sentiment — as a revenue model. When people form families, they buy diamonds. When they don't, they don't. The train carriage in Switzerland was a data point. So is everything that follows.
The numbers that don't make the trade press
Half of European families with children now have just one child. The average first-time European mother is 31 years old. In 1975, she was 26. Below-replacement birth rates in two thirds of countries across the continent. These are not projections — they are census figures from the last decade, now working their way through the economy.
Covid accelerated something that was already happening. Signet Jewelers coined the term "engagement gap" to describe what they saw in their own sales data: a cohort of couples who delayed engagement during the pandemic and never quite caught up. The gap didn't show up in diamond demand immediately. It showed up three years later, which is roughly where we are now.
The trade looked at soft demand and blamed lab-grown. Then it blamed tariffs. Then it blamed consumer confidence. All of those things are real. None of them is the whole story.
China: the customer who left
China recorded 6.1 million marriages in 2024. That sounds like a large number until you compare it to 2013, when China registered 13.5 million marriages — more than twice as many. The 2024 figure was also a fifth lower than the year before.
The diamond trade spent a decade building its China thesis. Young urban consumers, rising incomes, the "A Diamond is Forever" campaign doing the same cultural work in Beijing that it did in New York two generations earlier. It was a reasonable thesis. It was also true, for a while. What changed wasn't the diamond. What changed was the wedding.
When marriages decline at that rate, the downstream effects on the jewelry market are not subtle. Bridal is not a segment of the diamond business. For most of the trade, it is the diamond business. Fewer weddings means fewer engagement rings, fewer wedding bands, fewer anniversary purchases five years later. The drop compounds.
India: the answer that's already there
India is having approximately ten million weddings a year. Not a projection — a current figure, running consistently for years, with no sign of structural decline. The Indian wedding industry is estimated at $130 billion annually. Weddings account for more than half of India's total jewelry market.
India's share of world diamond jewelry demand has moved from 10% in 2019 to 12% today. De Beers, in its most recent consumer research, projects the Indian natural diamond market growing at 12% per year through 2030. The driver is income growth: the segment of Indian households earning $20,000 or more per year is expected to go from 32 million households to 67 million by 2030. As Indian incomes rise, the historical preference for gold gives way, at least partially, to diamonds. This is the same transition that happened in Japan in the 1970s and China in the 2000s. In India it is happening now, at scale, against a backdrop of a marriage market that remains robust.
The trade knows this abstractly. What it hasn't fully done is follow the implication. India is not a secondary market with upside. For natural diamonds specifically, it may already be the most important growth market in the world.
What "follow the weddings" actually means
It means the question isn't just "what are consumers spending?" It's "are consumers forming families?" A market where people are getting married at thirty-one instead of twenty-six is not the same market as one where they marry at twenty-six. The purchase happens later, at a higher price point, with higher expectations and more deliberation. That shifts what you sell and how you sell it.
A market where marriages are declining — not softening, but structurally declining across a generation — is not a market that recovers. It's a market that contracts. Slowly at first, and then all at once.
And a market where ten million weddings happen every year, where the middle class is expanding by tens of millions of households per decade, where the culture has always treated weddings as among the most important events in a family's life — that is a market worth understanding deeply, not treating as an emerging afterthought.
The train carriage in Switzerland sighed at my child. Somewhere in India, there is a family spending three months of income on a wedding that will involve several pieces of jewelry, at least one of which will be a diamond. Both things are true at the same time. The trade gets to decide which one it's building toward.
Follow the weddings. The diamonds will follow.
Sources
European birth rates and family size: Eurostat — Fertility Statistics ·
Average maternal age: Eurostat ·
Signet engagement gap: Signet Jewelers investor communications ·
China marriages 2024: China Ministry of Civil Affairs ·
China marriages 2013 peak: Statista / NBS China ·
India weddings and jewelry market: De Beers Diamond Insight Report ·
India diamond demand share: GJEPC ·
De Beers India growth projection: De Beers Diamond Insight Report