It sounds a little unlikely but the genesis of the idea for diamondthrills is connected to dogs.

On 24th June I blogged about ‘rentalism’ – the idea that we’ve all acquired too much stuff and that an alternative lifestyle is developing whereby we hire or borrow many of the things that we used to buy and which then cluttered up our lives.

In that post I served up a few examples of rentalism, or Zipcar capitalism in action: Zipcar and Streetcar for pay-as-you-go car rental, ShoulderCandy for designer handbags, Art Rent & Lease for art, and BabyPlays for toys.

Here’s another: Bookswim.com, which rents out books, obviously (which is quite a good idea – it’s environmentally sound in the sense that it’s a novel way of recycling paper, and it’s eminently sensible to rent, rather than buy, textbooks when studying for example).

But there is one other example of rentalism that I wanted to mention because it has a special place in the history of diamondthrills: pet rental.

Yes, really: it’s possible to rent a canine four-legged friend for a few hours or a day or a weekend.  The company that pioneered this is called FlexPetz and it started in some of the major cities in the US before moving to London and Paris.

Now as it turns out, there were some objectors to the idea of pet rental, perhaps not surprisingly, and it seems that FlexPetz have suspended operations whilst they try to sort that out. But it’s not so very different from pet sharing which is an informal not-for-profit way of doing much the same thing, and some animal shelters actually have schemes whereby you can adopt a dog for a day.

Either way, you can enjoy the ‘use’ (i.e. companionship etc) of a dog without all the responsibility and commitment of ownership; perhaps a dog really can be for Christmas and not for life!

So what’s all this got to do with the origin of diamondthrills?

Well, a couple of years ago I was on a holiday in Scotland with my wife and we kept thinking that it would be great to have a dog with us as we tramped around the Scottish hills. But we live in an appartment in central London and we’re both out at work all day so it really wouldn’t be fair to keep a dog at home.

But what if we could borrow a dog, not from friends or family but from a commercial pet rental company?

It wasn’t really a serious thought – we knew that it would be fraught with the sorts of issues that FlexPetz has run into. To demonstrate how unseriously we treated the idea, we even joked about how we could combine it with a kennel business: we get paid to take in pets for people who are going away, and then get paid again to rent the same pets out to others!  Definitely a non-starter of an idea, possibly fuelled by alcohol in a cosy Scottish pub.

But the germ of the idea of rental took root in my imagination, and a few months later I began to think seriously about starting up a business of my own.

So I retrieved the idea of rental and connected it to the product that I’ve spent the last 13+ years studying and working with: diamonds.

Why not hire out diamond jewellery to people for special occasions such as weddings? ‘Enjoy the experience of wearing fabulous diamond jewellery without the cost and commitment (and insurance premiums) of ownership… look fabulous in diamonds for a fraction of the cost…’

Eureka! So that’s how diamondthrills was born as an idea in 2007, and I had even coined the name diamondthrills by Christmas 2007.

An unlikely journey: from the Highlands to hiring, from Jack Russells to jewellery, from whippets to weddings… from dogs to diamonds.