格陵蘭的紅寶將問世Greenland Rubies: What We Know At This Point

 寶啾寶石坊要為大家分享一個寶石消息，就是產於格陵蘭的紅寶石及粉紅色剛玉即將問世。 有機會可多多注意有關的寶石情報。

 

September 12, 2017 The rubies and pink sapphires coming out of Greenland are about ready to make their debut.

Greenland Ruby officially announced the start of production at Aappaluttoq in May, making headway on a project that stalled after the former owner of the license to mine the site, True North Gems, ran into financial troubles.

Aappaluttoq is Greenland's first corundum mine, located about 155 miles south of Greenland's capital, Nuuk. The deposit is primary type, meaning that the rubies are extracted from hard rock.

While scale and production numbers are still to be determined, the site could prove to be an important one, offering a consistent supply of gem-quality rubies and pink sapphires.

In effort to keep up with the project, I recently had a chat with Hayley Henning, vice president of sales and marketing at Greenland Ruby, about the company's progress.

Greenland Ruby recently launched a new website, and Henning told me that the company also is working on the branding behind Greenland rubies and pink sapphires.

And now that the stones are coming out of the ground, a number of labs have and continue to get involved, Henning said, to look at both the material and the site.

Perhaps most importantly, though, Greenland Ruby is getting ready to bring some of its first stones to market, specifically as the gem and jewelry world converges in Hong Kong this week.

Read on for more of what Henning had to say.

National Jeweler: Since you started production earlier this year, what have you guys discovered about the stones themselves?

Hayley Henning: What's coming out of the ground here is rubies and pink sapphires. Very often, in the colored gemstone world, it's the origin that is so important and, of course, with these gems, the Greenland story is so special. With so many people, you get a reaction when they find out that Greenland produces gems, let alone that they're rubies. From a product point of view, we know that the colors are excellent, deep, beautiful, saturated reds and then of course running the full gamut all the way down to the line of icy pinks, which of course would be the pink sapphires.

NJ: Will you be selling the gems as rough?

HH: Yes, we will be selling the rough. Greenland Ruby is, after all, a mining operation. We will be promoting the material in way that is meant to be create desire and interest, not only from the consumer point of view but from designers and jewelry manufacturers as well. We want people to be interested in working with the material and then, of course, we want to generate interest with the consumer so that they think it's cool or fun or unique to have a piece of jewelry with these kinds of gems.

NJ: Now that you're getting ready to launch the product, how will you be positioning it in the market and making it stand out from other rubies?

HH: That's the million-dollar question. It really is all about the origin with these gems. It is ruby after all, and there is intrinsic value with ruby and with sapphire. But when we start talking about the origin, we really are talking about this pure, new, untouched environment. It is, in fact, the people of Greenland who have authorized the exploration of the site, as well as the sales and marketing of the material, because it is their material and we have their permission to go ahead and introduce the world to the Greenland ruby. And we're really going to be talking about that because that is the point of differentiation, in the end.

NJ: Will you be launching marketing campaigns around them?

HH: We will. We're not quite there yet, but we will eventually be doing that. We're still in the process of selecting our preferred partners, and these are going to be people who are interested in telling the story along with us, interested in following that route to market, which everybody is so concerned about at the moment, being able to literally track the material from the moment it comes out of the ground. But, we have to do this anyway for export reasons--the Greenland government requires it--so that's a tracking system we have in place.

Our partners will basically be on the same page as us. We don't want to sell through an auction system and then (have) the material disappear into a factory in India or somewhere in Thailand. We will partner with these people who will be buying the rough and personally seeing it through so that we can follow that story. And we want them to tell the story as well.

At that point, after we have established partners, we will start working on marketing campaigns, depending on who those partners are. We are not at this stage saying, 'This is how we're doing it,' because different manufacturers and different brands will have different ideas with how they want to do that. And we want to be a part of all of those processes.

"People who have seen the Greenland rubies say, 'Oh it's very fractured and it's really not that great.' But they haven't seen anything that's been properly produced, which is what we're going to show now." – Hayley Henning, Greenland Ruby