A Downtown Buffalo Wholesaler, 1952

Before there was a showroom on Transit Road, there was a wholesale jewelry business in downtown Buffalo. Ben Garelick got its start in 1952 as a family-owned wholesaler, and its first customers weren't couples shopping for rings. They were other jewelry stores across Western New York, filling their display cases with pieces shipped out of downtown.

The business has always leaned on teaching. Its own history talks about years spent walking customers through the details of diamonds, gemstones, and gold, first the retailers it supplied and later the people who came through its own doors. Hang on to that, because the habit of explaining things turns out to matter a lot in this story.

The Employee Who Bought the Business

Here's the part we love. The man who ended up owning Ben Garelick didn't inherit it or marry into it. Peter Manka Sr. was a longtime employee who worked his way up through the company, and he eventually bought the business himself. He moved it out of downtown and into a free-standing showroom on Transit Road in Williamsville, at 5001 Transit Road.

Then it became a family business all over again. The store's history says Manka and his children have worked side by side there. When designer Kirk Kara wrote about the store on its blog, it described Manka Sr. as still running things with his family right next to him.

One of those kids took an unusual road to the jewelry counter. According to the store's own bio, Peter Manka Jr. spent years in product licensing for Sesame Workshop and The Jim Henson Company before he joined the family business in the early 2000s. His LinkedIn profile lists him at Ben Garelick since 2003, and both Business Insider and the wedding blog Bespoke-Bride have identified him as co-owner. His name sits on a long shelf of articles on the store's website explaining everything from ring sizing to how one kind of diamond differs from another.

That family feel travels, too. Kirk Kara shared the story of Darren and Leanne, a couple from Cumbria, England. Darren picked out a Kirk Kara ring through Ben Garelick, and the plan was to ship it to the UK. With Manka Jr.'s help, Darren got the ring in hand and proposed during the couple's 10-year anniversary vacation in Florida, an engagement that included a hot air balloon ride. A ring sold out of a store on Transit Road ended up at the center of a proposal for a couple who lived an ocean away.

A Billion Years in the Making

To understand why the diamond business got turned upside down, you have to start way, way down. Natural diamonds form in the Earth's mantle, at least 90 miles below the surface, where temperatures run past 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and the pressure is almost impossible to picture. The EarthDate science program puts that pressure at up to 60,000 times what we feel at the surface. Scientists date most gem-quality diamonds to somewhere between 1 and 3.5 billion years old.

Getting them up here took a volcano. Eruptions blasted up from deep in the mantle and carried diamonds toward the surface inside a rock called kimberlite, possibly moving as fast as 20 miles per hour. The pipes those ancient eruptions left behind are where most of the world's natural diamonds get mined.

So when somebody says a natural diamond is older than the dinosaurs, they're underselling it. Most of these stones were already a billion years old or more before the first dinosaur showed up.

Grown in a Matter of Weeks

Lab-grown diamonds skip the billion-year wait. They're made using one of two methods, high pressure high temperature (HPHT) or chemical vapor deposition (CVD), and they can be produced in a matter of weeks.

Here's what trips people up. A lab-grown diamond isn't a fake. It's the same carbon, with the same physical, chemical, and optical properties as a diamond dug out of the ground. Industry sources agree you can't reliably tell the two apart with the naked eye.

That's why the paperwork matters. Since October 1, 2025, the Gemological Institute of America has been laser-inscribing the words "Laboratory-Grown" on the edge of every lab-grown diamond it assesses, along with a GIA number.

Price is where the two really split. Industry sources commonly put lab-grown diamonds at roughly 75 to 85 percent less than a natural stone of similar size and quality. That gap has kept widening as lab production has scaled up and natural supply hasn't.

When the Counter on Transit Road Flipped

There was a time when every loose center diamond Ben Garelick sold for an engagement ring was mined. That's how co-owner Peter Manka described it on the store's blog. Then demand swung so hard that, as he put it, "95% of our center diamonds for engagement rings are lab grown."

The store didn't just ride the wave. It started designing its own line of engagement rings built entirely around lab-grown diamonds. When Bespoke-Bride covered the launch in December 2022, Manka Jr. said the savings were huge while "quality and style are not compromised at all."

Ben Garelick wasn't alone. The Knot's Real Weddings Study 2026 surveyed more than 10,000 U.S. couples who married in 2025 and found that lab-grown center stones made up 61 percent of all engagement ring purchases, a 239 percent jump since 2020. The same study put the average carat size at 1.9, which is a lot easier to reach when the stone comes out of a lab. Industry analyst Edahn Golan's data lands a little lower, at more than half of engagement rings, but the direction is the same.

When the Rulebook Changed

The shift got big enough that the folks behind the diamond world's grading language changed the rules. GIA's 4Cs, cut, color, clarity, and carat weight, became the common language for judging a diamond's quality.

On October 1, 2025, GIA stopped using that system for lab-grown diamonds. Lab-grown stones it evaluates now get one of two classifications, Premium or Standard. GIA's reasoning was that most lab-grown diamonds land in a very narrow range of color and clarity. Its president and CEO, Pritesh Patel, said GIA would no longer use terms built for natural diamonds to describe "what is a manufactured product."

Natural diamonds still get the full 4Cs treatment. And while smaller, everyday natural stones have lost ground, market watchers say larger, high-quality natural diamonds with real scarcity behind them have held up better, with some segments showing signs of recovery.

Grandma's Gold Gets a Second Life

Here's the twist. Just as lab-grown diamonds got cheaper, the gold that holds them got a lot more expensive.

In April 2026, Business Insider looked at how swinging gold prices were changing the way couples buy rings, and Ben Garelick was part of that report. Manka Jr. told the outlet that 25 to 30 percent of the store's engagement ring shoppers were holding off on buying, and on proposing, hoping gold prices would come back down.

Then came the part that made us smile. More customers are bringing in their own old jewelry or pieces handed down in the family, and having that gold melted down into a new ring or applied as credit toward one. Manka estimated a 10 to 15 percent jump in customers using inherited gold for engagement rings and wedding bands.

Think about what that means. A ring can carry a diamond grown in a few weeks, set in gold that came down through the family. The newest thing in the jewelry case and one of the oldest things in the family, sitting together on one hand.

Grown Either Way

So which one is the real diamond? Both of them. One was grown by the Earth over a billion years and carried up by a volcano. The other was grown by people in a matter of weeks. They're the same material, and Ben Garelick carries both.

Timing plays a part, too. The Knot found that around 40 percent of proposals happen between Thanksgiving and Valentine's Day, which packs a huge share of the year's proposals into less than three months of the calendar.

The way people shop has changed right along with the stones. The same study found that 79 percent of the people receiving a ring were involved in picking it out, and about a quarter of couples went to a store together before the proposal ever happened. Four in ten couples said it was important to them that their stone be lab-grown. And for all the online shopping out there, 64 percent of proposers still bought their ring in person, and on average they visited two stores and looked at 10 rings along the way. More than half said the in-store experience mattered to them.

That's good news for a family store. A couple can walk into a showroom, hold a natural stone and a lab-grown stone side by side, and ask every question they've got before deciding which story they want on their hand.

More than seventy years after it started shipping jewelry out of downtown Buffalo, the store on Transit Road is still doing what its own history says it always has. It explains the difference and lets people pick what means the most to them. Grown in the ground or grown in a lab, the ring still carries the same thing to the same moment. A question, and hopefully a yes.