A Panorama episode released this month felt unusually close to home to me.
The piece is a documentary about a fraudulent diamond retailer called Vashi and its eponymous founder Vashi Dominguez who purportedly mastered a high value Ponzi scheme by cooking his books with a margin of error in the region of 100 million quid.
The thing is, I had two dealings with Vashi in 2020 and 2021… I nearly bought a diamond from them, and I interviewed for a job!
Not the job for me
The job prospect came first… I was looking to leave Andertons and putting feelers out and heard about a Head of Ecommerce job with a contemporary jeweller with big ambitions to grow through online sales.
Through a contact, I got a first and second interview for the job and remember (although maybe this is just hindsight talking) that I felt the ask was really vague. What did they want? “Growth”. How much? I asked… Loads.
In fact I took some notes suggesting they gave me some ballpark target numbers for revenue growth which were 10-15x the current actuals they told me they were doing.
Based on what the BBC doc says (that they declared £105m revenue in 2021 when it was only £5m in actuality), I was probably told a false sales figure too, although the number I was given was a lot less than £105m and didn’t seem implausible to me.
I’d like to think I would have raised an eyebrow at a figure north of £100m – that feels like a lot for a young, luxury goods retailer who is claiming their boom is still to come – but even one of the experienced investors in the programme admitted their usual due diligence was foregone, owing to the convincing facade Dominguez had created. The ruse obviously wasn’t that obvious, even to trained eyes.
In the end, I don’t think they would have offered me the job, and I got a strong feeling it wasn’t the right one for me. That’s largely because it asked for aggressive growth using ecommerce channel management and marketing, whereas my strengths were in managing large teams and delivering technology. I think I even felt like I’d probably disappoint them owing to their super steep growth targets, and so happily let the opportunity go.
Once in a lifetime
But with no reason to believe that they were anything other than a legitimate business, Vashi’s name came quickly to my mind when I wanted to buy an engagement ring…
So (effortlessly) donning my best archetypal clueless bachelor face, I confidently walked into multiple jewellers and did thorough, comparitive, in-person research emailed Vashi.
Because, right, I can’t even set out to buy a t-shirt in a shop without experiencing social anxiety sweats and risking 75% chance of giving up and going home empty handed! Buying a diamond ring IS a daunting experience, and it’s made far more comfortable by a nice website, online buyers’ guides, and an email based consultation booking system where an unfashionable millennial can schedule oneself in for a meticulously scripted, retail sales encounter.
So not-many-emails later I walked into the Vashi store in The Royal Exchange (uncomfortable mainly because that place is a hang for people who like expensive things far more than I do) and had an hour’s chat with a lovely lady who showed me diamonds on velvet cushions and talked about “4 Cs” and generally made me feel like this was a good place to buy the most lavish, symbolic gift I’m ever going to buy.
So, like any non-maniac I didn’t just buy a diamond ring there and then. The lady and I said our yah yah‘s and agreed I’d think about it and be in touch again some other time.
The store struck me as dead quiet, but it was a weekday evening and I wouldn’t want it to be teeming. No recollection of un-jeweller like jewellers busybodying in the shop like Panorama reported, and overall no alarm bells raised (other than about the general cost of diamonds).
But as I started to narrow down what I wanted and became more serious about completing a purchase – there was that gut feeling again – something about Vashi was standing out.
It wasn’t their USPs like the custom craftsmanship or the “Love Story” book I’d get as part of buying from them… It was that Vashi omitted one thing that everywhere else I was considering had: the GIA certificate.
This document is an independent report on the specific diamond you are buying, grading and measuring its beauty and particulars. The absence of one raises the question “why” as, for the most part, the cost of diamonds didn’t vary that much across different retailers.
Even at this level of spend though, I found myself really wanting to just go through with buying what I wanted from Vashi. At this stage, the idea of walking into more jewellers and going through their consultation processes to ultimately get what surely was the same core product, seemed like starting again.
But luckily for me I listened to my instinct. I messaged the lady back saying I was uncomfortable with a “self certified” diamond and thanked her for her time. Panorama claim that Vashi mis-sold diamonds, lying about their weight and their quality and scratching their minuscule identifying numbers off to cover their tracks.
Steven Stone found me the right ring in the end. It was a great sales experience and, for a shop on an offshoot of Oxford Street, they were remarkably fairly priced too. Let it be known that I got the size of the ring perfect first time and have absolutely no awkward proposal story to tell… at least not today.