There is a week in December when Pretoria goes quiet. The jacarandas have long since dropped their purple onto the pavements, the afternoon storms arrive over the Magaliesberg on schedule, and half the city is somewhere on the N1, bound for the coast. It is a good week for taking stock, and this year there is more to take stock of than most. For anyone working in luxury jewellery in South Africa, 2026 asked hard questions. We would rather answer them plainly than pretend they were never asked.
A Difficult Year, Plainly Stated
Costs rose, and kept rising. Inflation settled into every invoice, and the oil price found its way into the rest. A pearl does not begin its life in Gauteng. An Akoya comes from the bays of Japan, a South Sea pearl from the waters off northern Australia and Indonesia, a Tahitian from the lagoons of French Polynesia. Every one of them travels, and this year travel cost more than it has in a long time.
We were not alone in feeling it. Houses far larger than ours, from Paris to Sandton, spent the year revising their plans. The luxury trade as a whole has had a harder twelve months than anyone predicted, and the market answered in the way markets usually do: with substitutes. Coated glass beads. Shell-powder spheres sold as pearls. Plated chains that will be green at the clasp by March. They photograph well on a phone screen.
A substitute is not a cheaper pearl. It is a different object.
They do not wear well, and they do not last. We have written before about how to tell the difference, and we will keep writing about it, because a client who knows what nacre looks like in daylight is a client who is never disappointed.
What We Changed, and What We Did Not
A year like this one changes a business, and it has changed ours. We have had to rethink the way we operate. Some of that you may have noticed; most of it happened out of sight, behind the scenes, which is where that kind of work belongs.
What we did not change is the work itself. An Akoya pearl spends a year or more in the oyster, laying down nacre in layers too fine to see. A South Sea pearl takes two years, often longer. There is no shortcut through that process, and we have no interest in finding one. The lustre you see on a Lullu piece is time made visible, and time is the one thing a cheaper alternative cannot fake. (For more on where each pearl comes from, see our note on freshwater and saltwater pearls.)
So the decision was made early in the year, and it has not been revisited since. We will not lower the quality of our work to meet a harder market. Not the pearls we select, not the finishing, not the care that goes into a parcel before it leaves us.
The market moved. The standard did not.
That makes Lullu a quieter proposition than some. It is not for everyone, and it has never tried to be. It is for the woman who would rather own one strand she wears every day than a drawer of things she has stopped reaching for.
To the Clients Who Chose Quality
Which brings us to you. To every client who chose a real pearl over fast fashion this year: thank you. You were not persuaded by a sale, because we do not hold them. You were not hurried by a countdown, because we do not run them. You chose the slower thing, the thing that will still be worn when 2026 is a story you tell, and we noticed.
Some of you have been with us for years. Some of you found us only this year. Either way, you are the reason the standard holds, and the reason it will go on holding. A pearl bought this December should still be worn on an ordinary Tuesday in twenty years. That is the only promise we have ever wanted to make.
A New Website, and a Concierge Line
If you have visited lullu.co.za in the past few weeks, you will have seen that it looks different. We have launched a new website, and it is only the first part of what we have planned. Over the months ahead we will add more, each piece designed to make choosing, gifting and caring for your pearls simpler, from the first visit to the day the parcel arrives.
Among them is a concierge line: a direct way to speak to us about a piece, a length, or a gift before you decide. It is the kind of courtesy a good jeweller has always offered across a counter, and we intend to offer it to clients in Cape Town, Durban and everywhere between. Until it opens, the old invitation still holds. Write to us, and we will answer.
A Blessed Festive Season
To those of you choosing gifts this month, we wish you an unhurried December, with time to choose well. Whatever you give, and whoever you give it to, may it be something made to last.
From all of us at Lullu, a happy Christmas, and may you be blessed this festive season, surrounded by the people you love.
