Hi Slraep,
Not quite what I was saying.
Mikimoto are lovely pearls - overpriced, certainly. Do they have the monopoloy on being high quality modern cultured pearls - no. What Jeremy has done is shown us that his Freshadamas are all the things you say - better value, better orient & lustre etc. etc. Do Freshadamas have a monopoly on being the only very high quality freshwater pearl on the market? No again. Because it is something that theoretically any pearl dealer could do - go to China, establish relationships over years and years, hand pick from tens of thousands of pearls, put together stunning strands. The actual barriers to doing that are huge - time, effort, piles and piles of money - but they are not a unique product. Jeremy very successfully combines doing all that with a slick website that we all love and drool over, the very best customer service (memories of Spherical Flower and her lovely strand), high business ethics, and high end packaging etc. He absolutely deserves the reputation that freshadamas have, but it still doesn't mean that theoretically an identical product is not available elsewhere. They are not grown anywhere unique, nor are they from unique mollusks.
What I am saying is that you and I would still buy Sea of Cortez pearls in a paper bag - they are truly unique. Freshadamas - when we actually understood what they were - we would buy in a paper bag. But to buy Komoko pearls in a paper bag, or Cook Island pearls in a paper bag - well, the average consumer would want to know a bit more... If mystique is part of that, well that's just good marketing. It's not fabrication - it is ADDING APPEAL for the consumer. Like it or not, pearl farming is a commercial enterprise - the product has to make it in the market place, and the producer needs to work at how his product will be perceived by the consumer, and create as favourable an image as possible of that product - basic marketing. And that entails dissociating their product from others where quality is lower or questionable -just like Mikimoto doesn't (to my knowledge) use akoya in its marketing. I don't think that there are many amongst us who could honestly say that the way products are marketed (pearls or other) doesn't affect their purchase decisions.
I think that one thing that we do here at pearl-guide is to identify and support ethical and high quality pearl based businesses - Carolyn Ehret springs to mind - PP and some of the other online vendors also - various companies that supply findings etc - to help others find their way around the pearl world. If the CI growers are working to make their product high-end and specialised in some way, then I am totally all for them marketing their product as such. Of course it is a two edged sword. If they dissociate themselves from the Tahitian umbrella, become known specifically as Cook Island pearls, and then let their consumers down with either poor product flooding the market, or bad or unethical business practices, then their industry will very quickly suffer the consequences.