At the start of the pandemic, many of us wondered how the jewelry industry would survive. Still, we had no idea how much it would thrive. While plenty of people thought 2021 would be a good year for jewelry, many were surprised when it turned out to be not a great year, but a really great one. For a business that, in the best of times, typically enjoys high single-digit gains, it was shocking to see so many jewelers posting double-digit increases in 2021. Mastercard SpendingPulse reported that holiday jewelry sales in 2021 jumped 32% over the previous year, nearly four times the recorded jump in overall retail sales (8.5%). In fact, jewelry saw the largest gains in any category the company measured. Even better, in many cases, these gains didn’t just top the pandemic year of 2020; they were an improvement over pre-pandemic 2019. Why was the COVID-19 crisis, which was so horrible