Lab-grown diamonds have disrupted the jewelry industry and the Park Cities and Preston Hollow are not immune.
Alysa Teichman, who’s no stranger to the jewelry business, having joined the leadership of her family’s longtime store Ylang 23 in 2016, opened Wildlike in The Shops of Highland Park five years ago. Recently, Wildlike added lab-grown diamonds to its jewelry lineup.
“We really do encourage people to express themselves and to swap and take fashion risks with their piercings and what we were realizing is that in this economy, where a lot of customers have become more measured, we noticed that it just became more difficult to experiment with out-of-the-box ideas,” Teichman said.
Teichman described the move as a business decision meant to lower prices and increase accessibility for customers.
“Over the past several years … gold prices have continued climbing and we’ve received customer feedback that our products have gotten more and more expensive,” she explained. “We took that feedback and we decided that, for this category, it just made a whole lot of sense to do lab-grown diamonds.”
She said natural diamonds may make sense for engagement rings or heirloom pieces meant to hold value, but for Wildlike, lab-grown diamonds allows customers to change out their jewelry and layer pieces.
“I think lab-grown diamonds have really disrupted the jewelry industry. I think at the luxury, the highest end of what we see at Ylang, that people really see the value of natural diamonds, but I think overall if you look at the diamond market, you’ll see where lab-grown diamonds have really disrupted the industry is with stones that are between, I think, 1 and 5 carats,” Teichman added.
Since its opening in 2021, Wildlike has also expanded with a New York City location.
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