The journey for CaratLane began in 2008, followed by the partial buyout by Titan in 2016 and the final takeover by the latter happening in 2023. How has the brand evolved ever since?
If you see our journey, we started as an online jewellery brand where we wanted to make beautiful diamond jewellery accessible to everybody in the country. This was due to the whole idea that great designs were only available with some particular designer brands which were not easily accessible to everybody and all women in the country. We made this possible by creating very unique designs, which you can wear every day because until then, there was no everyday jewellery brand in the market.
Most of our jewellery shopping as women also happens during big occasions like when we are getting married or when somebody in the family is getting married. But I think the vision at that time was very clear that we wanted to create jewellery that is worn every day and not kept in the lockers. And the second thing was there was a lot of innovation in manufacturing that CaratLane brought to the table because we didn't want to sell like other jewellers i.e. by weight.
If you see, when traditionally jewellery is bought the purpose was - how is this going to look on me? Hence, the woman actually doesn't care about whether she is wearing a two-gram bangle or a one-gram one, but the look should be stylish. So we innovated a lot in manufacturing, like 3D printing technique or laser cutting, which gives you stylish, lightweight jewellery. We launched online and were able to deliver it at price points which were not available earlier.
Then, of course, Titan came into the picture and helped us in a way to understand, though, we had started on our journey of retail expansion. The customer needs to touch and feel the jewellery. And the experience of buying jewellery itself is very entertaining for the customer. She enjoys trying out several pieces and then making the decision, and it's like an affair with somebody else. Like, she goes either with her husband or with her friends or mother-in-law to do this shopping.
We had started our journey online, but obviously, we learned a lot from their retail expertise; in the last four or five years, we've rapidly expanded.
Now we have about 270 plus stores, in more than 100 cities in the country. And from an online brand, we became a truly omnichannel brand. That has been our biggest transition.
And when I say omni, it is not just that we are available in a store, on the app and the website. When I mean omni, it means that we market at a hyper-local level – wherein everything is done at a pin code level. What is the inventory available at a pin code level? Who is my customer at a pin code level, and how do I drive that customer to the store which is closest to their location? So that true omnichannel brand is what we've evolved into. And I think that is one of our USP's.
Other than the great jewellery and the modern, approachable brand that we've created for ourselves, the customer experience of this omni journey is one of our biggest transitions, USP and achievements, in my opinion.
CaratLane has carved a name for itself in the space of forever wearable jewellery. How have you made sure that the marketing strategy of the brand has retained a similar set of values and brand ethos, consistently?
I think that from the beginning, the brand was launched keeping the customer in mind, and making beautiful jewellery accessible to all. And that has stayed constant. The customer has been our North Star then, and the customer is still our North Star. And even whether we are launching a new collection or we are opening a new store, the question is always how many more customers will benefit from this.
A small example is that we did research a year ago. This research told us about the role of the brand or the category playing in the life of the consumer. It tells about the emotional driver for the category of the jobs that need to be done.
While it was the marketing team which did it, all the teams across the company used it as a starting point. So when my merchandising team wants to design a collection, they think about their motivations, aspirations, fears, and what jobs she's seeking to do. She’s seeking an emotional payoff from jewellery. And they will use it in the creation of jewellery.
Even when we are looking at our supply chain, for example, if our customers come to us for gifting, what is it that they want to achieve? They want to show their love for their loved ones through our jewellery, right? Our jewellery is just a means to that end. So our supply chain should be strong, and our 24-hour delivery should be strong. Our packaging should be ace because it is the emotion that we are keeping in mind.
Our vision, earlier, was about making jewellery accessible, but now we say that we are in the business of helping people express their emotions through jewellery. So I think the constant about design being a very important leverage, but customers’ emotions being at the centre have been the values which we have constantly stuck by.
And it doesn't matter whether you are only available online, as a brand. Sometimes people think that an online brand is modern and retail brands are not. But I think that is a very old way of understanding it. We are present where the customer needs us. If she needs a store, we will be there. If she needs a web app, we are there. So making it convenient for her and being present where she can shop conveniently, has always remained constant for us.
The marketing strategy is two-pronged. One is, about what the brand perception and proposition of the brand is. From a brand marketing lens, we are very clear that there are two cohorts of customers. The majority of them are women who are buying jewellery for themselves because they want to feel good, express their style, and want to make a statement and that's why they are buying jewellery for themselves.
And the other cohort is somebody who wants to gift jewellery to someone. Even in that gifting it could be women gifting to important people in their life, and men gifting to their spouses. So, it could be men and women who are gifting.
So from a top-of-the-funnel or desire-building brand advertising, we focus on the woman and helping her express her style individually. ‘Khul ke karo express’ is our brand proposition whether you're doing it for yourself or you're doing it even for somebody else. It is the brand platform that we use to build desire for the brand. But at the same time, delivering on our omnichannel promise is because we are doing our digital marketing and other things at a hyper-local level.
Since the brand came into the market, several brands have been vying for the consumer’s attention in the space of forever wearable jewellery, so competition has only become intense. What kind of a USP have you stuck to, to gain and retain brand loyalty all these years?
When we ask customers about what holds most value and what they love about CaratLane, unanimously, in every survey that we have done, they talk about the designs and the collections that they see - whether it's our modern mangalsutra designs or even the IPs. We tie up with international brands and launch jewellery in association with them like we did Harry Potter, Power Puff Girls, Minions etc. These are very successful collections. The Harry Potter collection is one of our most successful ones. If you take the concept of Harry Potter, we've turned it into very beautiful-looking jewellery.
Our designs are categories like modern mangal sutra. For instance, for the first time we made mangalsutra in a ring format. And very recently we've launched a mangalsutra earring as well.
So, we are pushing the boundaries on what the consumer can use to express her style. So, definitely, the first thing is maintaining those designs - we believe that the design is the chocolate and all the marketing you do around that, is a wrapper. While we continue to focus on how we build a better wrapper, we should never forget what is our soul, which is the design.
So we focus on both these things. Our design is one. And second, I can proudly say that our biggest USP and strength is the omnichannel experience.
What kind of a media mix will you be looking at for CaratLane this year – which mediums will see a focus?
Being a digitally native brand, all our marketing starts online. In fact, even the footfall that we drive into the store is through digital marketing only.
We try and see that we are targeting all the pin codes around a particular place to make sure that enough people are browsing on the website. And then we use our media like WhatsApp, and SMS to nudge people to walk into that store. So we use digital media to drive offline footfalls.
But we are also understanding that in the last couple of years, we have opened stores where the digital penetration might not be so high. In cities like Kota, Patiala, Hisar, etc. - a lot of tier II and tier III cities where as and when needed, we are also doing offline marketing. But even if it's offline marketing, it is very scientifically driven because I know what are the pin codes that I'm expecting the footfall to come in. So I know where to do my offline marketing.
The majority of our ad spending is digital. But as and when needed, we are using a lot of experiential, whether it is repeat activities inside the store or whether it is some offline activity, setting up a kiosk or whatever is needed, we are doing that.
In terms of traditional media, I use that kind of media because I can control whom I want the ad to see. A lot of digital screens in societies, a bus shelter is in a particular pin code etc. - we prefer planning those at a hyper-local level.
Unfortunately, in TV and other such media, there is a lot of spillover and wastage, and it's also very expensive, so it doesn't suit the kind of marketing that we want to do. But if the need of the hour calls for it, we might utilise TV. I'm in 150 cities, and if television will give me maximum reach at a reasonable cost, then I might consider it. Everything has to have an ROI and everything has to have returns.
Because we are a digital company, every piece of data is available to us, so we're able to track the impact of most of the campaigns. So we will be open to doing experiments. But we also feel our customers are more digital because we have a bullseye TG, who's this independent 30-year-old woman, very tech savvy and makes her own decisions when it comes to buying jewellery. We call her ‘Indulging Ishita’. It's like a customer profile, a customer persona. She loves to pamper herself and express herself through jewellery. All our research also tells us that she spends hours doing the same.
Our objective is also to get personalised in our communication with our customers. And we are doing that to some extent in our emailers, in our WhatsApp, because we use customers' occasion information which they have shared with us. We literally want an experience of ‘N=1’. So every communication I see from the brand, I should feel this is written only for me. And digital media helps me do personalisation at scale.
The ‘Khul ke karo express’ campaign is mainly on digital media. We've also tried some cinema advertising in certain cities where people love to watch cinema.
Social media is where we've gone very aggressively with the Khul ke karo express’ campaign. The last campaign that we launched was CaratLane Postcards which was also very innovative.
How do you look at focusing on innovation, specifically in two areas - product development as well as your advertising and marketing strategy, to stay ahead in the industry?
We are doing a lot of experiments with the latest fad in marketing, which is AI tools.
We want to see how we can leverage that to make our marketing more interesting. We are doing experiments, but honestly, one of the things that we struggle with is that anything that AI generates looks so unreal in terms of the imagery and our customers have constantly given us feedback that they want more relatable marketing. So, while we are evaluating all these innovative marketing tools, we want to create content which is very relatable to the consumer.
Therefore, we will tread with caution because we don't want to appear as just another brand out there, but we want the customer to feel that ‘this brand gets me’.
All our innovation is mainly focused on the services that we are delivering to the customer, like Postcards. It is something that's a real problem for the customer that they want to make their gifting or even self-gifting moments memorable. So we are going to focus on innovation in that – on how can we make the experience smoother, and more memorable and how can we experiment with the jewellery.
The gold price is increasing, but we still have to be there in the affordable jewellery space, and we can't suddenly stop making any jewellery less than Rs 20,000 because our customers need that jewellery. It's a very important acquisition tool for us. Our less than Rs 20,000 catalogue. So, we have to innovate in our manufacturing techniques, like we have enamel-based jewellery and other things so that we can continue to deliver our promise of affordable, great-looking jewellery.
A lot of innovation will have to be done in the manufacturing, the delivery of services and marketing. And while we are evaluating innovation, we will want to keep it more relatable.
Jewellery brands, as a category, are seen advertising and marketing heavily during the wedding season and festive season. What is CaratLane’s distinct strategy to help it stand out from the clutter, specifically during that period?
Akshay Tritiya, Dhanteras and Valentine’s Day are very organic, with high intent for the category itself. So all brands benefit from that. And during that time, we have two or three things that we do.
You have to have the best designs with you. You have to launch the best collections because whatever is your offer, the offer does not matter. The offer is at the end, the last mile. The design is what gets the customer to the store.
Very rarely, customers don't buy because you're not able to give them an extra offer. Once they love the design, then they will rationalise their purchase, saying that, they love the design, actually, but it is about the design. So we make sure that we are working hard in the first half of the year, and our catalogue is really up to the game in the second half of the year so that we can put out the best collections.
And the second thing is, no, we are also developing other occasions, because the way we see it, if we are affordable, why should the customer only buy during Dhanteras and Akshay Tritiya? Because she has so many gifting needs. She has needs for herself. Today she got a promotion, tomorrow she climbed Mount Everest. We want her to even commemorate all her milestones so she can buy jewellery ten times a year, for all I care.
So, we are building new occasions. Therefore, what we've done is we are building on Women's Day. It was only known for cosmetic and fashion brands. But in the last two years, we have built awareness and said that women deserve that. You gift yourself a diamond jewellery. And we also give a good offer on that day to enable them to do that. So it's become one of our big days other than the traditional days.
Then we have something called Golden Monday, which is an international concept of Black Friday etc where everybody in the US gives these discounts. So we have created that also as a big occasion for us. We are saying that first salary is when you buy for yourself and gift your parents because they made this.
So, instead of running against this and trying to break out of the clutter, which we will do through our designs, our stores and our experience, we are also trying to move the market and build more micro occasions for women to buy jewellery so that all our stress is not on these two or three big days. We want multiple big days in the category.
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