Community for Ethical Jewelry’s Town Hall Meeting

Sean Dunn is the President of J.R. Dunn Jewelers, the family-owned fine jewelry and Swiss watch retailer founded in 1969 by his parents, Jim and Ann Marie Dunn, on $10,000 in savings and a simple promise to treat every client like family. Fifty-seven years later, J.R. Dunn remains one of the nation's leading independent jewelers, operating a 14,000-square-foot flagship showroom in Lighthouse Point, Florida, alongside a nationally recognized ecommerce business. As a second-generation owner, Sean leads the company with the same credo his parents built it on: relationships first, product second.

A GIA Graduate Gemologist with a business degree from the University of Florida, Sean's path to gemology began with an early fascination with the natural world — he was originally drawn to marine biology — and that curiosity about where beautiful things come from has shaped his career ever since. It informs both his eye as a gemologist and his conviction that the story behind a stone matters as much as the stone itself.

Sean is widely regarded as a digital pioneer in the industry. In the early 2000s, he built J.R. Dunn into one of the first authorized luxury jewelers to sell designer brands online, growing the ecommerce channel into a multimillion-dollar business at a time when most of the trade considered the internet a threat rather than an opportunity. Trained in emotionally authentic, story-driven marketing under Roy H. Williams, he has long championed a brand voice built on vulnerability and honesty rather than polish. Today he is applying that same early-adopter instinct to artificial intelligence, integrating AI across merchandising, client relationships, and operations.

Sean brings a pragmatist's perspective to responsible sourcing. He believes provenance and traceability matter — not as ideology, but because they build genuine consumer confidence, and because diamonds are one of the few categories where real mechanisms for verification actually exist, from blockchain-tracked stones to artisanal mining partnerships in Sierra Leone that return value directly to source communities. His approach is to focus where the greatest good can genuinely be achieved rather than where the messaging sounds best. His deepest inspiration has come from Botswana, where working with master diamond cutter Ada Thela and her team showed him what true beneficiation looks like: not a certification or a marketing claim, but skilled hands, real livelihoods, and lasting opportunity built in the country where the diamonds are born.

Above all, Sean sees himself as a steward of his family's legacy. His father, Jim Dunn, who passed away in 2021, is remembered by clients and staff alike for countless quiet acts of generosity — stories Sean still collects and treasures. His mother, Ann Marie, remains an active voice in the business she co-founded. Sean's work, in the showroom and across the industry, is guided by the standard they set: that a jeweler's real inventory is trust.