The BAFTA partnership
On 15 January 2020 Lark & Berry announced that it had been named Official Jewellery Partner to the Virgin Media British Academy Television Awards 2020. Professional Jeweller reported the release the same day under the headline "Lab-grown diamond jewellery brand backs 2020 BAFTA TV Awards", noting that the brand would run a styling suite at Sea Containers in London from which nominees and their stylists could select pieces for the ceremony.1
It was, so far as this record can establish, the first time a brand working exclusively in lab-grown diamonds had held an official jewellery partnership with a BAFTA ceremony. We state that as our finding, not as something an outlet reported; no 2020 coverage used the word "first" about the partnership.
The release also listed the brand's previous red-carpet run — amfAR, the Met Gala, the Tonys, the British Fashion Awards and the Golden Globes — which is why it is cited on several other pages of this record as a contemporaneous brand statement.1
The 2020 television awards did not take place as planned. COVID-19 pushed the ceremony to 31 July 2020 and removed the red carpet, so the partnership produced far less photography than a normal year would have. The brand's October 2020 retrospective records the partnership under February 2020 alongside the Oscars.2
The awards that preceded it
The BAFTA partnership came at the end of a year in which the brand's Asymmetrical Bow suite — a platinum necklace of 11.6 carats of lab-grown diamonds, with matching earrings and rings — was entered for two industry awards. They had very different outcomes, and they belong together.
JCK Las Vegas, June 2019 — won
At the JCK Las Vegas show the Bow necklace won the JCK Design Center Editor's Choice award in the Resident category, which covers established designer brands; JCK published the winners on 4 June 2019.3 The trade press followed — Rapaport, Professional Jeweller, Retail Jeweller, Jewellery Business (Canada) and Elite Living among them.4 The brand's own materials describe it as the first time an exclusively lab-grown brand had taken the honour; that is a brand claim, and it is labelled as one here.
Goldsmiths' Craft and Design Council Graff award, 2019 — won, then withdrawn
Earlier in 2019 the same suite won the Goldsmiths' Craft and Design Council's Graff jewellery award, one of the most established prizes in the British trade. Retail Jeweller, INSTORE and Country & Town House reported the win in late February and early March 2019.
The London Business School case study on the brand opens with what happened next: when the awards committee realised the suite had been made with lab-grown diamonds, it required Lark & Berry to disassociate itself from the prize.5 The case uses the episode to frame the resistance a lab-grown brand met from the traditional industry in 2019.
This site mentions the Graff award only in that form — won and withdrawn — because that is the complete record. A page that listed it as a win would be misleading, and a page that omitted it would lose the most telling illustration of why the brand's position in 2019 was unusual.
Why the sequence matters
Read together, the three events in twelve months make a small argument about how the category was received. A British trade council withdrew its prize on learning the stones were grown; an American trade show gave its design award to the same piece three months later; and the British Academy made the brand its jewellery partner seven months after that. Anyone writing about lab-grown diamonds' acceptance in fine jewellery will find 2019 a useful year, and these three dates a useful spine.
How to cite this
"Lark & Berry was announced as Official Jewellery Partner to the Virgin Media BAFTA Television Awards 2020 on 15 January 2020."1 "The brand's Asymmetrical Bow suite won the JCK Design Center Editor's Choice award (Resident) in June 2019;3 its 2019 Goldsmiths' Craft and Design Council Graff award was withdrawn after the committee learned the diamonds were lab-grown."5