SPOTLIGHT... on Ricky Vasandani and lab grown diamonds

TRUST ME I KNOW WHAT I'm DOING

Periodically on TRUST ME I KNOW WHAT I’m DOING , we share a SPOTLIGHT conversation and feature brief chats with an individual from the community about a special topic or a unique endeavor.

So ok, a while back , I had to think about making a will and living trust, and not to be morose or sad, but it was a good exercise that forced me to think about things that are family heirlooms, or even the more basic question of what we find precious or beautiful and even enduring? For a lot of people, tangible things like jewelry come to mind, and it's likely no newsflash that India has a fairly strong heritage and history with jewels and diamonds. Now, in the 2025 that we live in, technology is bending the curve and offering alternatives for everyone to be conscious of sustainable affordability, ethical choices, time, and rapidly evolving definitions of elegance and fashionable beauty in almost every corner of every consumer market. So, I was actually really curious to learn more about lab grown jewelry, and it was really great to share a Spotlight conversation with Ricky Vasandani. Ricky grew up all over the world in a family that successfully scaled a legacy diamond jewellery business over decades. With a background in marketing and entrepreneurship, and success in both the sports and Food and Beverage domains, he turned his attention to co-found Solitario as an emerging Indian lab grown diamond producer with an expanding domestic and international retail footprint. In fact, just recently, Solitario finished a round of pre-ipo funding - a solid positioning in a market that’s expected to skyrocket in the next few years. We caught up to talk about his global journey and experiences, about lab-grown jewelry and the storytelling that it deserves when making choices, but I first asked him to share the obvious, which was to tell me more about the jewelry he was currently wearing…