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“I think it may well have been the most breathtaking diamond I’ve held,” Mark Maurer says of a 4.13 carat I-VS2 cushion from Cut by Tolkowsky he recently sold. “I could talk about the polish, symmetry, the balance between color and white light, but it wouldn’t do it justice. This diamond looked like it was being illuminated by some inner light. Just pure magic.”

We sit amidst a wealth of beautiful diamonds in his VanScoy, Maurer & Bash Diamond Jewelers, at the front of an opulent 2,000-square foot showroom that seems anomalous in this mall center outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Even against a backdrop of brands like David Yurman, John Hardy, Ritani, and Roberto Coin—names that tend to identify a store—it’s the diamonds that pop out. Maurer is a man who just happens to love adamas: The initial bulk of his 35 years in retail were given to his VanScoy Diamond Mine, a Lancaster boutique devoted strictly to diamonds (a 2004 merger with local colleague Bill Bash resulted in this door), and his Avalon Diamond Jewelers in Whitehall. He’s also a great believer in cut. A recently acquired third store, Bixler’s of Easton, is a prominent AGS door.

Maurer is not a believer, however, in the branded diamond. “Everyone’s looking for the David Yurman of diamonds,” he says. “I don’t think there is one. I don’t know if I can say for a certainty that the diamond is a commodity—but it certainly is becoming one, thanks to the Internet.”

Diamond displays here—outside of a few designer cases and six feet recently devoted to Cut by Tolkowsky—are individuated by private label themes, and by the Fischler Diamond Company name. Maurer has been traveling to Antwerp (and sourcing largely from that family) for 28 years, and he’s the first to tell you that most of his private label stones are Fischler product.

So why the Cut by Tolkowsky case? And why a cushion—from a cutter like Jean Paul Tolkowsky, a man synonymous with ideal cuts? Whose factories, in Thailand and now in Botswana, are called H&A Cutting Works, and whose sightholder company, Exelco, is the leading hearts and arrows seller in Japan? “I could say that 4.13 carat cushion,” says Maurer. “But it was really the sale of that diamond that sold me.”

In these days of increasing Internet competition, successful jewelers are becoming skilled storytellers. Many of the stories that are closing the sale over the counter today are brand stories. To see how five successful retailers use the branded diamond story, we bring you five concrete examples with five separate brands. These “tales of the sale” are proof positive that brands are one way out of the commodity trap.

TALE OF THE SALE #1: THE GOOGLE CLOSE

“The customer was a friend of Bill Bash,” Maurer begins, “a financial dealmaker, who in fact had advised Bill on our merger. It’s a sale that had to be done efficiently. The guy is from out of town, the fiancée from still another town, and they were going to be here over a weekend. Bill came to me and said she’d requested asscher, and I suggested we show a cushion or two as well. ‘No, no,’ Bill said. ‘I know the guy. Believe me, if he says asscher, he means asscher.’ So I’m calling all over for four carat asschers, and Rob [Cornfield, of Cut by Tolkowsky’s New York office] was one of the calls. I guess he was on the same page as me, because the first words out of his mouth were: ‘Don’t have any asschers, but I have a pretty impressive cushion.’ When it came in, I went back to Bill and asked him just to mention the cushion, and the Tolkowsky name, to his friend.”