Our Legacy of Craftsmanship

Our vertical integration model helps us uphold our standards of craftsmanship, safe and healthy working environments, community economic development and supply chain traceability.

We cut and polish diamonds at our own workshops in Botswana, Mauritius, Cambodia, Vietnam and Belgium. We also manufacture approximately 60% of our jewelry at our state-of-the-art facilities in New York, Kentucky and Rhode Island, and polish and perform certain assembly work on jewelry in the Dominican Republic. Because we operate our own facilities to our high standards, we are able to help ensure safe, healthy and welcoming work environments. We hire and train skilled craftspeople and endeavor to pay a living wage to employees at our manufacturing facilities in developing countries to support local people and communities.

In 2002, we established Laurelton Diamonds, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary, to procure rough diamonds and source, cut, polish and supply finished stones. Today, we source 100%* of our rough diamonds directly from known, responsibly managed mines or from responsible suppliers with a limited number of known mines. We source the majority of our rough diamonds from five countries—Botswana, Canada, Namibia, Russia and South Africa; our primary suppliers of rough diamonds are DeBeers, Rio Tinto, Alrosa and Dominion Diamonds. 

In keeping with our commitment to responsible sourcing, we provide provenance information—region or countries of origin—for every newly sourced, individually registered diamond (of .18 carats and larger) that we set. In 2020, Tiffany & Co. will launch the Diamond Craft Journey, becoming the first global luxury jeweler to disclose the country where these stones are crafted. The journey outlines several steps, including cutting and polishing, grading and setting—a pioneering achievement in diamond traceability and transparency.

When it comes to traceability of precious metals, we are able to trace 100%* of our raw gold, platinum and silver directly to a mine or recycler. The mines we sourced our raw precious metals from in 2019 are in the United States: Rio Tinto Kennecott’s Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah (for gold and silver), Sibanye-Stillwater’s two mining operations located in Montana (for platinum) and a mine site in Alaska as a part of Salmon Gold.

Our vertical integration model gives us a strong chain-of-custody over raw materials, direct oversight of our manufacturing and a platform to help improve global standards and conditions, serving as a model for others in incorporating environmental and social integrity in sourcing, processing and crafting our jewelry.

^{*See the Report of Independent Accountants}

We are committed to excellence as a company and hold our suppliers to the same high standards to which we hold our own business. The Tiffany & Co. Supplier Code of Conduct (Code of Conduct) and Social and Environmental Accountability Program have helped us uphold our basic expectations with our direct and indirect goods and packaging suppliers. Our Code of Conduct articulates our expectations related to human rights, fair and safe labor practices, environmental protection and ethical business conduct. Our Code of Conduct also asks suppliers to align with the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and to work consciously to operate within that framework.

In 2019, we launched a revised Supplier Code of Conduct further enhancing the Code’s requirements on human rights, labor conditions and environmental protections, among others. In 2020, we also developed and released our Code Guidance Document to further clarify our expectations for suppliers and provide more detail on all of our requirements in the Code of Conduct. In addition to the Code of Conduct being publicly available on our website, the Guidance Document is now available as well.

Over the past year, we have undertaken enhanced efforts to train our supplier base, as an important element of building capacity and engaging with our suppliers. Following the release of our revised Code of Conduct, we conducted both in-person and online training to suppliers. We prioritized in-person trainings for our suppliers in China, Thailand and India. Forty-three suppliers participated in the 1.5-day training. This training is estimated to impact over 17,000 employees across our suppliers. Topics covered include changes to our Code of Conduct, other topics of relevancy for our supply chain, and tools for capability building such as root cause analysis. To facilitate training to all of the suppliers in our Social and Environmental Accountability Program, we also provided seven online training modules. These modules include changes to our Code of Conduct, health and safety, business ethics and management systems, and are estimated to have the potential to impact approximately 35,000 employees across our suppliers.

Through our Social and Environmental Accountability Program, we work with a key subset of suppliers to review and help them improve their human rights, labor and environmental performance. The program includes suppliers that provide us with our finished goods, components, leather goods, polished diamonds, colored gemstones and packaging materials, as well as service providers that repair and perform new sale alterations on Tiffany & Co. merchandise.

We are also focused on deepening our dialogue with suppliers, increasing our knowledge and understanding of our key suppliers’ businesses and taking steps to further embed our responsible sourcing practices into our daily operations and those of our suppliers.