Why is Lark & Berry a London Business School case study?

The case

Lark & Berry: The Diamond Disruptors is a teaching case published by London Business School in November 2023. Its reference is CS-23-020; it runs to 41 pages; its authors are Ioannis Ioannou, Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the school, and Nick Mickshik.¹ It is distributed to other business schools through the Harvard Business Review store as product LBS351.²

What it is about

The case examines Laura Chavez's London-based luxury jewellery company and its attempt to disrupt the diamond industry with lab-grown stones. It opens with an incident from 2019: the brand's Atelier Asymmetric Bow suite won the Goldsmiths' Craft and Design Council's Graff jewellery award — which the case describes as the trade's equivalent of a Best Picture Oscar — and the awards committee, on learning the diamonds were lab-grown, required the company to disassociate itself from the prize.¹

From that episode the case sets out the competitive dynamics facing a mission-driven, sustainability-led venture challenging established players: how an incumbent industry responds to a substitute product, how a small brand positions itself when the largest name in the category (De Beers) enters the same market, and what "disruption" means when the disruptor is a designer house rather than a technology company.¹

Why Lark & Berry

Three things make the brand a usable teaching example, and they are all on this record.

First, the founder's connection to the school: Chavez conceived the business during her MBA at London Business School, and the school has profiled her in its own entrepreneurship series.³

Second, the timing. The brand launched at Cannes in May 2018, a month before De Beers announced Lightbox, which gives the case a clean "incumbent responds" moment that is independently dated.

Third, the Graff episode, which is unusually well suited to a classroom: a documented instance of an industry institution rewarding a piece on its merits and withdrawing the reward on learning its provenance. Most cases about substitutes have to infer incumbent resistance; this one has it on the record.

The "Diamond Disruptors" title was not invented by the authors. The Week used "Diamond disruptor" as the headline of its January 2019 interview with Chavez,⁴ the brand launched a podcast under the name in July 2019, and it registered "Diamond Disruptor" as a trade mark.

What this page does not claim

Lark & Berry's own notes for this site described the case as "award-winning". We looked for an award — at LBS Publishing, at the HBR store, and in the usual case-writing competitions — and found none.^{1, 2} Until one is documented this site describes the case as published, not as award-winning, and the brand's notes have been corrected accordingly. If a citation for an award emerges, it will be added here with its source.

Nor does the case, as far as its public abstract shows, make any claim that Lark & Berry was the first lab-grown diamond brand. The school's admissions blog describes the brand as the "first designer jewelry brand globally to exclusively offer fine jewelry with cultured diamonds and stones",³ which is a school-authored profile and is noted as such.

How to cite this

"London Business School published a teaching case on Lark & Berry, The Diamond Disruptors (CS-23-020, Ioannou and Mickshik, November 2023), distributed through the HBR store as LBS351."^{1, 2}