BetterThanDiamond plans to double production of its Takara lab-grown yellow diamonds in 2008 due to higher demand for the stones.

“We were quite surprised at the upswing in demand for our larger canary yellow diamonds in December,” said BetterThanDiamond.com president Less Wright. “We’ve been cutting and distributing lab grown yellow diamonds since 2002, and this was the first time we completely sold out of larger yellow diamonds, and still had more customers on a waiting list for additional diamonds to become available. As a result, production for our yellow diamonds will be doubled for 2008.”

Wright said the increase in demand resulted from increased customer awareness of the value for money offered by lab-grown diamonds, being up to one-seventh the price of a natural diamond. He added that traffic to the company’s website also rose due to a stronger presence on Google searches for key terms such as ‘yellow diamonds’ and ‘cultured diamonds’.