Next week, the diamond giant De Beers will open its first retail store in America, a 6,000-square-foot space on 55th Street and Fifth Avenue. Some are likely to be surprised by the opening: The company’s famed “A Diamond Is Forever” ads have targeted American consumers for years, but there were no De Beers stores here until now.

In fact, the De Beers Group diamond mining and marketing company – which controls about 60% of the world’s raw diamonds and supplies gems to jewelers such as Tiffany, Cartier, and Harry Winston – had until recently been unable to do business in America because of longstanding antitrust concerns about its domination of diamond production and charges of price-fixing. In 2004, the De Beers Group paid a $10 million fine to settle the price-fixing charges in America. With the legal issues resolved, the company faced a smoother path to tapping America’s lucrative retail market.

The idea of De Beers as a diamond retailer, rather than a supplier, is still relatively new. In 2001, De Beers SA teamed up with the world’s largest luxury group – LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton – to form the joint retailing company De Beers LV. The goal was to capitalize on the De Beers brand name, widely known to consumers due to its marketing efforts, and to compete successfully against the upscale jewelry companies it supplied diamonds to.

To offset antitrust concerns, De Beers LV agreed to buy its diamonds on the open market, as its competitors do: It doesn’t receive preferential treatment or lower diamond prices from the De Beers Group. In the past four years, De Beers LV has opened one retail shop in London and four in-store boutiques in Japan.

The two-story De Beers store on Fifth Avenue, designed by Antonio Citterio, will include a “Bridal Bar” featuring engagement and wedding rings. The store will also offer three jewelry collections designed by De Beers’s artistic director Raphaele Canot, recruited from Cartier. The newest of these, called Radiance, is intended to convey the themes of lightness and sparkle. Diamonds in the collection are tension-set inside whitegold, pendant-like frames, which are strung together to form necklaces or hung from rings as charms. The collection also includes an array of colored diamonds, in hues such as yellow, pink, and orange. Prices for the Radiance collection range from $920 to $9,200.

A second De Beers boutique will open in Beverly Hills in the fall. De Beers LV CEO Guy Leymarie has said that the company plans to open 150 retail stores worldwide in the next 10 years.