Jewelry Tops Global Luxury

Jewelry was the single best-performing category in global luxury spending in 2025. That is the headline finding for anyone in the gem and jewelry trade, and it lands inside a broader Bain & Company and Altagamma report describing a total luxury market of EUR 1.44 trillion ($1.64 trillion).

The nuance matters. The overall market is enormous and stabilizing; the personal luxury goods segment — the part that contains jewelry, watches, leather goods, apparel, and beauty — actually declined slightly:

So jewelry was the top category in a segment that shrank. It outperformed a soft field — which is a genuine achievement and also a reason not to over-read it.

Watches occupy their own space in the findings: collectors prioritized craftsmanship and rarity over hype, which fuelled momentum in the resale market.

Total luxury spending — including cruises, hospitality, and fine dining — is forecast at EUR 1.44–1.47 trillion ($1.64–1.68 trillion).

Jewelry topping the category table is not an accident, and it is consistent with everything else the trade has seen this year. Four structural reasons stand out.

A handbag is worth what the brand says it is worth. A diamond necklace contains gold and stones with an independent, quotable market value. In a period of macro anxiety, geopolitical conflict, and currency uncertainty, that distinction becomes commercially decisive. Jewelry is the luxury category where the purchase doubles as a store of value — imperfectly, but genuinely.

This is precisely why jewelry outperforms when consumer confidence wobbles. It is the least "disposable" discretionary purchase in the category set.

The recurring theme across every data set this year is the hollowing of the middle. Swiss watch exports fell 4.7% in the CHF 500–3,000 band while rising 14% above CHF 3,000. De Beers reported "stronger pricing for higher-value goods" while commercial goods collapsed. Bain's finding that leather goods and footwear struggled while jewelry led fits the same pattern.

Jewelry skews toward genuine high-value purchase. It is structurally positioned in the half of the market that is working.

Leather goods spent a decade being aggressively price-escalated and volume-expanded. That combination eroded exclusivity and produced consumer fatigue — visible in Bain's finding that the category remains challenged even while recovering. Branded fine jewelry has largely escaped that dynamic, retaining scarcity credibility.

This is not an isolated finding. Watches of Switzerland reported luxury jewelry up 14% versus luxury watches up 10% for its fiscal year — jewelry outgrowing watches inside a watch specialist. Two independent sources, same conclusion. When a consultancy's category ranking is confirmed by a retailer's actual sales ledger, the finding is solid.

Bain's phrasing deserves close attention:

Unpack "over hype." That is a direct description of the deflation of the speculative watch bubble — the period in which certain steel sports models traded at multiples of retail because of scarcity theatre and social-media momentum rather than horological merit.

The shift Bain identifies is from hype-driven to substance-driven collecting. Craftsmanship and rarity are durable value attributes. Hype is not.

Set Bain's qualitative finding beside the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry's June numbers:

The hype cycle inflated exactly the mid-tier steel sports segment that is now contracting. Genuine complication, heritage, and rarity sit above CHF 3,000, and that band is growing. Bain explains the mechanism; the Federation supplies the measurement.

Resale momentum in watches is double-edged for the primary market. It provides liquidity confidence — buyers pay more for new when they trust they can exit — but it also creates a substitute channel competing directly with retail. And Bain's broader finding sharpens this considerably: around half of luxury consumers now check the secondhand market before buying new.

That is a structural change in the purchase funnel, not a trend.

Bain describes performance as "diverging sharply":

This is now the third consecutive data set pointing the same direction. Swiss exports to the US up 13%. Watches of Switzerland US revenue up 18%, crossing to more than half of group revenue and profit. Bain: Americas rising while Europe and the Middle East lag.

The US is carrying global luxury. Which makes US-specific risk the sector's dominant exposure — consumer sentiment, interest rates, and increasingly trade policy. This is not abstract: the same quarter that produced these results also produced Section 301 forced-labor tariffs across 60 partners and a 50% Section 338 action against Canadian jewelry imposed with thirty days' notice. Bain's downside scenario explicitly names "weakness in the Americas" as a trigger — and tariff-driven price inflation on imported jewelry is one mechanism by which that weakness could arrive.

Europe is the historical heartland of luxury — the home of the brands, and normally a major beneficiary of inbound tourist spending. Its underperformance suggests weak tourist flows (particularly Chinese) combined with soft domestic demand. For European-based retailers and manufacturers, this is a real headwind.

The Middle East lagging, with renewed escalation named as the downside trigger and continued stabilization as a base-case assumption, makes the region the single most important variable in Bain's model. This echoes Anglo American's language on diamonds — "the onset of the conflict in the Middle East adding to economic and consumer-confidence risks" — and Watches of Switzerland's reassurance that its "direct exposure to the Middle East and tourist consumers remains limited."

Three companies, three different reporting formats, same identified risk.

Chinese online luxury sales up 25–35% in Q1 is the most encouraging number in the report — and also the most easily over-interpreted.

Meanwhile Swiss watch exports to China recorded a marked fall in June, and Hong Kong's +7% was attributed to base effect. Online channel growth and category recovery are not the same thing. The honest read is that China has stopped deteriorating in some channels; it has not returned as a growth engine.

Combined with: roughly half of luxury consumers check resale before buying new.

These two findings belong together, because they describe the same consumer.

A younger luxury buyer who habitually checks secondhand first behaves in ways the industry is not fully built for:

Jewelry is structurally advantaged by resale-conscious buying because it has intrinsic material value. Gold and stones create a floor. A resale-aware consumer comparing a handbag that loses most of its value against a diamond piece that retains a substantial portion will increasingly choose the latter.

This may be the deepest explanation for jewelry's category win. It is not just that jewelry sells well in uncertain times. It is that the emerging dominant consumer behaviour — check resale first — systematically favours categories with intrinsic value.

The same logic that favours natural stones and precious metals works against lab-grown diamonds, whose resale values have been weak and continue to fall as production scales. A resale-checking consumer will discover this quickly. This is arguably the strongest commercial argument behind the industry's terminology realignment — CIBJO's shift to "synthetic," alongside the BIS, ADPA, and Russian measures. Language that discourages treating manufactured stones as value-retaining assets aligns with what the secondary market is already telling buyers.

Claudia D'Arpizio, Bain senior partner and global leader of its fashion and luxury practice:

This is consultancy language, but there is real content in it. Translated into operational terms:

"Not a return to the old rhythm" — the 2010s model is over. That model was: raise prices annually, expand distribution, rely on Chinese growth, treat scarcity as a marketing device. Every pillar of it has weakened. China is cautious. Price escalation triggered the leather goods backlash. Manufactured scarcity is transparent to a resale-literate consumer.

"Meaning, not just product" — the durable purchase drivers are now provenance, craftsmanship, rarity, and story. Not logo, not hype, not price signalling.

"Stepping forward, not stepping back" — appetite has not fallen. Bain's base case is growth. The criteria have changed, not the desire.

For jewelry specifically, "meaning" has an unusually concrete definition — and it aligns with capabilities the industry already has:

The jewelry industry is, in a sense, structurally better placed to deliver "meaning" than any other luxury category, because its meaning is verifiable by laboratory analysis rather than asserted by marketing.

Assemble everything reported in this period:

The single most useful sentence in this report, for anyone in the gem and jewelry business, is the simplest: jewelry was the top category for global luxury spending in 2025.

The context makes it more impressive rather than less. Personal luxury goods shrank — EUR 364 billion down to EUR 358 billion. Cosmetics were weak. Leather goods and footwear struggled. Jewelry led anyway.

Why it led is the analytically interesting part, and the answer is not mysterious. Jewelry holds intrinsic value in a market where roughly half of consumers now check resale before buying new. It sits at the top of the barbell in a market whose middle is disappearing. It escaped the over-distribution and price-escalation that damaged leather goods. And it is the category best equipped to deliver what D'Arpizio calls "meaning" — because jewelry's meaning is provable. Origin can be determined in a laboratory. Treatment can be disclosed. Rarity is geological, not editorial.

The risks are equally clear, and they are shared across the luxury complex. The US is carrying the sector, which concentrates exposure in the one market currently rewriting its tariff code with thirty days' notice. China is not back, whatever a single quarter of online growth suggests. The Middle East is the named swing variable in Bain's own model. And the base case is a modest +2% to 4% at 70% probability — stabilization, not recovery.

D'Arpizio's framing is the right one to end on. This is "not a return to the old rhythm." The decade of annual price rises, expanding distribution, and Chinese growth doing the work is finished. What replaces it rewards provenance, craftsmanship, rarity, honest disclosure, and value retention.

Which happens to be a description of a well-run jewelry business. The category didn't just win 2025 — it is aligned with the criteria that will decide the next decade.