Women in Jewellery 2026: Purvi Shah

The Architect Behind the Standards

Few people in the jewellery industry can claim to have literally written the rules. Purvi Shah, who took the helm of the Responsible Jewellery Council as executive director on 7 February 2026, is one of them. Over 17 years at De Beers Group as Head of Ethical and Sustainable Value Chains, Shah steered the evolution of the company's Best Practice Principles and Pipeline Integrity programmes, which became recognised benchmarks for provenance assurance and supply chain accountability across the diamond trade. She was not simply a participant in the standards process; as co-chair of the RJC's Standards Committee since 2018, and a board member since 2023, she helped architect the three frameworks that now govern an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars globally.

Her appointment arrives at a meaningful juncture. The RJC celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2025 and has since grown to more than 2,000 member companies across 74 countries, spanning every link from mine to retail. Shah takes over from John Hall, who served as interim executive director after Melanie Grant stepped down in January 2026. She is also only the second former De Beers executive to lead the organisation, following Andrew Bone, which means her institutional knowledge runs deep. "I've worked closely with the RJC for many years," she told Rapaport News. "This new role is a natural fit and progression from the work I do at De Beers, which is focused on evolving our ethics and provenance programs."

Three Standards That Define the Modern Supply Chain

The body of work Shah leaves behind at De Beers, and the standards she helped usher through at the RJC, represent the clearest picture of her priorities. The 2024 Code of Practices (COP) is the RJC's foundational certification standard, addressing business ethics, human rights, labour rights, health and safety, and product integrity across the supply chain. Alongside it, the 2024 Chain of Custody (COC) standard defines how companies handle and trade gold, silver, and platinum group metals in a way that is fully traceable and responsibly sourced. Together, these two standards were the result of years of consultation and revision; Shah chaired the committee that drove that process.

The third standard is the most forward-looking. The Laboratory Grown Material Standard (LGMS), launched in February 2025, is the RJC's first dedicated framework for lab-grown diamonds and coloured gemstones. Built on 28 key provisions, it covers legal compliance, due diligence, labour rights, health and safety, environmental management, disclosure, and grading requirements. Disclosure is particularly precise: the LGMS mandates that lab-grown materials be described using terms such as "laboratory grown," "laboratory created," or "synthetic," with that description displayed as prominently as the word "diamond" or the name of the relevant gemstone. For any brand making provenance claims about lab-grown stones, this is the credentialing infrastructure that makes those claims verifiable. All existing RJC members dealing in lab-grown materials were required to complete an audit to expand their certification scope by 1 May 2026.

Language as Infrastructure: The CIBJO Blue List

One of Shah's lesser-publicised contributions sits at the level of language itself. As chair of the CIBJO nomenclature committee, she guided the creation of the Blue List: a set of globally aligned definitions for ESG and sustainability terminology used across the jewellery and watch industries. This is not cosmetic work. When terms like "responsible sourcing," "traceability," or "ethical supply chain" carry consistent, internationally recognised definitions, brands can use them in marketing with a defensible basis. Without that shared vocabulary, sustainability claims collapse under scrutiny into marketing copy, and the meaningful stories brands want to tell about their materials and makers lose their credibility.

The problem the Blue List addresses is real. Greenwashing is most convincing when terminology is loose, and the jewellery industry has not been immune. Shah's work on nomenclature is a structural fix: it builds the definitional scaffolding on which provenance storytelling can stand.

Her Mandate at the RJC

Shah has been candid about approaching her first months with deliberate patience. "I am in my listening and learning phase," she told JCK in her first media interview in the role, "because while I've worked with the organization a long time, it's really different to step inside of it." Her stated priority for 2026 was direct: "understanding where our membership needs us most, and working towards that."

Strategically, her vision is to reframe the RJC's value proposition. Speaking to WWD, she outlined her intent to position the council as "not just a value enabler, but a driver of value creation, enhancing brand trust, fostering collaboration, and supporting long-term business resilience" for its members. That framing matters. For smaller brands and independent jewellers, RJC certification has sometimes felt like a compliance burden designed for large-scale players. Making the standards genuinely accessible, and ensuring they translate into commercial value rather than just regulatory box-ticking, is the challenge that will define her tenure.

In her official statement, Shah tied the personal to the institutional: "I am honoured to join the RJC at a pivotal moment for our industry as we work together to shape a future rooted in transparency, accountability, and sustainability. Responsible business is essential to consumer trust, commercial resilience, and long-term value creation."

Why Provenance Becomes a Story Worth Telling

For anyone who cares about where a piece of jewellery comes from, the significance of Shah's appointment is this: provenance claims are only as meaningful as the systems that verify them. When a brand tells you that its gold is responsibly sourced, or that its lab-grown diamonds meet ethical standards, those claims point back to frameworks like the COC 2024 and LGMS 2025. The strength of those frameworks determines whether "responsibly sourced" is a story or just a slogan.

Shah spent the better part of two decades helping build that verification infrastructure, first inside one of the world's most scrutinised diamond companies, then as the architect of the standards committees that set the rules for an entire industry. The global market for lab-grown diamonds, estimated at $24 billion in 2022, is projected to reach $59.2 billion by 2032 according to Allied Market Research; that growth will produce an enormous volume of provenance claims, and the credibility of those claims rests on exactly the kind of institutional rigour Shah has spent her career advancing.

Her challenge now is institutional rather than technical: to ensure that the standards her committee built are not only rigorous but genuinely usable by the full spectrum of the industry, from mining conglomerates to single-designer studios. The RJC's own framework acknowledges that certification must be accessible to businesses of all sizes. Getting that balance right, between meaningful accountability and practical accessibility, may be the defining work of her first term.