Shahla Karimi Jewelry's Diamond Divas earns Webby nod after year-long investment

Shahla Karimi Jewelry made a rare kind of bet: it spent an entire year’s marketing budget on Diamond Divas, a social-first comedy series built to make diamond jewelry feel intimate, funny and relevant to younger buyers. The gamble paid off in the form of a Webby nomination, turning a brand experiment into a piece of internet culture with more than forty one-minute episodes running across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Substack.

Diamond Divas is not a glossy product reel disguised as storytelling. Shahla Karimi Jewelry describes it as an ongoing comedic reality series about modern love and women in the workplace, conceived, funded and produced in-house. The cast mixes actors and improv comics playing customers, which lets the brand mine real showroom friction without leaning on the conflict-heavy rhythms that usually drive reality TV. In that sense, the series gives fine jewelry something the category often lacks: a personality strong enough to travel on its own.

Karimi has said, “We used our entire annual marketing budget to make Diamond Divas-it became our baby, and my top priority,” a line that captures both the scale of the risk and the conviction behind it. The brand also calls the project the first-ever vertical reality series, a format designed for the way younger audiences actually consume culture now, in short bursts, on their phones, where a diamond can enter the frame as part of a joke, a date-night dilemma or a workplace standoff rather than a static object in a case.

The timing matters. The 30th Annual Webby Awards nominees were announced on March 31, 2026, and People’s Voice voting ran through April 16. The ceremony is scheduled for May 11, 2026, in New York City, placing Diamond Divas inside one of the internet’s most recognizable honors just as brands across luxury and fashion are reconsidering whether polished advertising still carries the same weight as entertainment.

Shahla Karimi Jewelry has long framed itself as “the new non-traditional fine jewelry,” built around storytelling, memory, modern love and ethical sourcing. Karimi’s own background, from Vogue and CFDA apparel projects to Director of Merchandising for President Obama’s re-election campaign, helps explain the instinct for narrative over brochure copy. Even the name Diamond Divas has provenance: JCK traced it to Karimi’s workshop on 47th Street in New York’s Diamond District, where custom requests could make the production process feel like its own serial drama. The lesson for jewelry is hard to miss. In a market crowded with beautiful objects, the sharper investment may be the story that makes someone want to wear them.