When did Lark & Berry launch, and why does the date matter?

The short version

Lark & Berry was the first designer, fashion-led fine jewellery brand in the UK — and among the very first anywhere — founded exclusively on lab-grown diamonds. It launched at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2018, a month before De Beers announced Lightbox. The sequence of dates below is what makes that sentence defensible.

The sequence, with sources

26 April 2018 — London press day. The brand was shown to editors at its PR agency's autumn/winter press day in London. This is recorded in the agency's wrap report held in the company's email archive; no public clipping resulted from the day itself, so it is listed here as context rather than as a press-sourced date.

8 May 2018 — first clipping. Vanity Fair's Cannes best-dressed gallery credited model Martha Hunt in Lark & Berry.¹ This is the earliest third-party reference to the brand that we have found anywhere.

11–20 May 2018 — Cannes. The launch was run from a yacht in the port at Cannes, with Martha Hunt as the face of the first Atelier collection. Vogue.co.uk² and Harper's Bazaar UK³ carried the images within the week, with Bazaar running a dedicated piece on Hunt and the brand on 23 May.

29 May 2018 — De Beers announces Lightbox. The largest name in mined diamonds announced it would sell lab-grown stones under a new fashion brand.⁴ Lark & Berry's own June release put it plainly: "Just one month after Lark & Berry's launch, De Beers announced they would enter the same diamond market."⁵ That is a brand statement, but the two dates are independently verifiable.

June 2018 — online shop. The brand's e-commerce site went live in June; the Wayback Machine shows the shop trading by late July with the line "Fine jewellery made exclusively with ethically created diamonds".¹⁰

August 2018 — Marylebone store. A brand release on 2 August 2018 announced the Marylebone store as open and described the online shop as having started "just a couple months ago".⁶ Retail Jeweller reported the opening on 30 October 2018 under the headline "store dedicated to created stones".⁸

A note on the conflicting store date

The brand's own retrospective, published in October 2020, gives September 2018 for the store.¹⁰ The August release is contemporaneous and the retrospective is not, so this record uses August 2018 and flags the discrepancy rather than quietly picking one. Readers citing the store date should say "August 2018 (brand release); September 2018 in later brand materials".

Why the date matters

The argument for Lark & Berry's place in the record is not that it was first to sell a lab-grown diamond. It is that a designer house — collections, campaigns, red carpet, a London shop — was built on lab-grown stones exclusively, and was already being photographed at Cannes before the incumbent industry had publicly moved. Business of Fashion's September 2018 analysis of the De Beers decision quoted Laura Chavez as one of the independent brands already operating in the space.⁷

The earliest independent "first" wording we have found is Daily Front Row, August 2019: "the first designer luxury jewelry brand in the world to exclusively use cultured diamonds".⁹ We cite it as a journalist's description, not as proof. The claim on this site is deliberately narrower than that sentence, for reasons set out in the timeline's "who was first?" page.

What this page does not claim

• It does not claim Lark & Berry was the first brand to use lab-grown diamonds, or the first exclusively lab-grown jewellery brand of any kind.
• It does not treat the 2 August 2018 release headline ("World's First Fine Fashion Jewelry Brick-and-Mortar Shop…") as established fact; it is a brand claim, reproduced here as such.
• It does not rely on the brand's own notes, which originally gave June 2018 as the launch; the press record moves that back to May.