CaratUp 8.6% in dollars, down in units: the $1,500 line splits the counter
Tenoris data puts US jewellery sales up 8.6% in the first half on a 19% rise in average purchase price and a fall in units. Sales below $1,500 kept declining. June sales rose 13% year on year.
§1Dollars up, pieces down.
American jewellery had a good first half in dollars and a bad one in pieces. Figures from the analytics firm Tenoris, reported by JCK on 5 August, put jewellery sales up 8.6% across the first six months of 2026 while the average purchase price rose 19% and unit sales fell. June alone was up 13% year on year. Underneath the headline, sales of items below $1,500 continued to decline, which is the same threshold the trade has been watching slip since the spring.
The arithmetic is worth doing explicitly, because the two published numbers imply a third. Value up 8.6% on a ticket up 19% means unit count fell by roughly 9%. An eight percent gain in dollars sitting on a nine percent fall in units is not growth, it is a smaller number of larger transactions being counted as a larger business. That distinction decides whether a retailer adds staff or adds inventory value, and most of the trade's half-year reporting has quietly presented the first figure without the second.
§2The third number nobody printed.
The composition behind it is a spending distribution, not a jewellery trend. The New York Times has the top 10% of American households accounting for nearly half of all consumer spending, and a category priced in discretionary dollars inherits that shape directly. De Beers chief executive Al Cook, speaking at the JCK show, put the industry read plainly: "I think the larger, higher-quality diamonds are really growing in value and in desire." The counterpart to that sentence is a mid-market whose customer has not left but has stopped trading up, and whose transactions now sit below the threshold at which value growth registers.
An eight percent gain in dollars sitting on a nine percent fall in units is not growth
§3One mechanism, four companies.
This paper has filed the same shape from three separate companies in the past fortnight. Brilliant Earth reported second-quarter revenue up 6% on total orders down 2.1%, with average order value up 8% to $2,238. Richemont's quarter to 30 June carried jewellery up 24% inside total sales up 20%, a seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit jewellery growth. Luk Fook took a record profit out of fixed-price design rather than gram weight. Four data sets, one mechanism: the ticket is carrying everything and the unit count is carrying nothing.
The growth is in the ticket, and a ticket can be withdrawn faster than a customer, which is the risk nobody is pricing. A shop that has replaced nine per cent of its units with nineteen per cent of ticket has concentrated its year into fewer decisions by fewer people, and if the top decile trims discretionary spending by even a modest amount the fall lands on a base with no volume beneath it to absorb the shock. The practical instruction is to defend the sub-$1,500 line rather than abandon it, because that is where the next decade's high-ticket customer is currently making their first purchase, and a floor that has stopped stocking it has stopped recruiting.
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