Sandeep Kohli, CEO of Aditya Birla Jewellery’s Indriya about the brand’s aspirations, strategies and what it is doing to disrupt India’s jewellery buying experience
In July this year, Aditya Birla Group (ABG) Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla announced the $100 billion diversified group’s foray into jewellery retail with Indriya. The Group, which has a significant presence in fashion and lifestyle retail through its subsidiary Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail (ABFRL), chose to park the jewellery business under the larger umbrella rather than ABFRL while committing Rs 5000 crore towards growing the business.
ABG has big plans for the brand, aiming for it to be among India’s top three jewellery retailers in the country over the next five years.
And it appears as if it is wasting no time trying to get there… it marked its foray by opening four Indriya stores in a single day (2 in Delhi, 1 each in Indore, and Jaipur).
The plan is to dazzle people with sprawling stores larger than Rs7,000 sq. ft. in size, which is about 30%-35% larger than those of most competing national brands. The stores will offer an extensive assortment of 15,000 curated jewellery pieces with over 5,000 exclusive designs.
Currently, the brand is present in Jaipur, Indore, Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Ahmedabad through 10 stores with only one store located in a mall at Vegas Mall in Dwarka, Delhi and another one coming up at a mall in Mumbai.
The group aims to expand to more than 10 cities within six months and has onboarded FMCG veteran Sandeep Kohli to lead the group’s journey into the intricate business of fine jewellery.
Kohli, the CEO of Novel Jewels (ABG), who looks at the business like a startup spoke to IndiaRetailing about the brand’s aspirations, strategies and what it is doing to disrupt India’s jewellery buying experience.
How does Indriya benefit from ABFRL’s 20 year-retail expertise?
Our chairman said at the launch that being in the fashion and lifestyle business, getting into jewellery is a natural extension for us. We are gaining a lot of expertise synergy from ABFRL but we operate independently like a startup.
The Tatas and Reliance have already established themselves in the segment. Do you think it is the right time to enter the segment?
Having been a part of consumer-driven and competitive industries for over 30 years, my perspective is that this is the most exciting time for any category.
Point number one is that 60% of the jewellery category is still in the unorganized family jewellery segment, and 40% is national brands, or multi-city, multi-store brands. And this 40% of the organized sector is growing at a much faster rate than the 60%.
This category is on the cusp of change—it’s a time when consumers are already in the acceptance mode. Not only that, but they are also in the desirable mode wanting to buy branded goods. So, you cannot come at a better time and give another option to consumers.
There are advantages to being the first player, but there are also advantages of coming in at the right time into the industry. The government policy is also changing, favouring more organized players, and more transparency in this industry. So the stage is set for somebody like the ABG to actually come in at this moment.
Point number two is that ABG is a trusted name among consumers, which we can leverage in this category to serve consumers better.
Point number three is that if you look at most of the branded players in this industry have been there for some time. We come in as the only large-scale branded player bringing in a lot more freshness, a different angle of expertise and consumer insight, without having the burden of any legacy systems behind us.
So it is apt that we have chosen this particular time to get into the industry. And we have had an absolutely fantastic first few weeks.
How do you differentiate?
We want to be a design-led brand. Our point of difference is going to be the designs and experiences that we create for consumers. We are well-positioned to do that because we do not have any legacy.
Most of the other brands have their stores designed and created for a long time. We are using the latest technology whether it is in the back end or front end, which is serving the consumers. And the technology today is different from what it was in the past.
All these can help us create much better experiences for the consumer.
Can you elaborate on how design will be a differentiator?
More than 75% of the designs in our store are exclusive; you will not find them anywhere else. We have a strong in-house design team that works with a large ecosystem of experienced vendors in the Indian jewellery industry. We have a high rate of refreshment of designs.
How will you offer a differentiated experience?
People visiting our stores are saying they have never seen a jewellery store like ours. They do not look like typical jewellery stores.
That is exactly what we set out to be…we wanted to give consumers a sense of space. At the end of the day, jewellery is an emotional purchase. The emotions are about the jewellery piece itself and the investment.
So, we want to make sure that the decision is made in an environment they can trust, in an environment in which they feel comfortable, where they can talk to people who can help make this experience come to life.
Tell us more about your in-store experience
I call each store a creation. The way we have created the store is different. It is amazing how the same brand has created a store which is relevant to Ghatkopar and RCity with a certain assortment and a store in Borivali has been created differently with a certain assortment.
Most of our stores have a wedding lounge as more than 50% of the jewellery that is bought in India is bought at the time of a wedding. Here, people can come and change into the clothes they are going to wear on their special day and try the jewellery to see how they are looking. People can come with their families and sit down, away from the hustle on the shop floor and make this important purchase.
This is all based on consumer insight and consumer research.
Is your staff trained differently too?
Our jewellery consultants have been trained in a four-to-six weeks bespoke training programme created for them. The training is not about how to sell but about the jewellery, the art and craftsmanship, the material and jewellery designs that exist in India and how they can help people make choices with that understanding.
Many of our consultants have told me that they have been selling for years and knew how to sell but did not know much about what they were selling. Such feedback is heartwarming not because it is a validation of our training programme but, because when they feel like that, they will delight people they are serving in our store much more.
Feelings are important to us. They are an important part of our brand name as well. Indriya in Sanskrit means senses. Jewellery has the capacity to excite all the senses. And that is exactly what we intend to do with our brand—we want to excite all senses and create a great experience.
We want to create a new-age jewellery company that will revolutionize the jewellery buying experiences for the new-age consumer. We try to bring innovation in whatever we do whether it is design, how we manufacture, technology or the people experience in our store.
Even our advertising is different.
Can you elaborate?
For years advertising about jewellery has been about relationship stories. But you cannot tell the story unless you talk about the jewellery in the story. Because the story is about the love a woman has with a piece of jewellery.
So we are trying to bring the conversation back to jewellery, craftsmanship and design.
And we function like a startup. All the time thinking about how we can keep getting better fast. We work with the mindset that our next store must be better than the first.
Can you share more about how you use technology?
We are using the best technology platforms at the back end. For instance, we use AI in many parts of the business like design.
On the front end, our jewellery consultants share information on a piece of jewellery with the help of a tablet.
Technology is also used to make sales information or billing experience smooth for customers.
What is the magic number of stores you want to reach in the financial year 2025?
We want to be in 20-25 stores in the first year. We want to be in different cities, high streets, and malls. We are one of the few brands that opened four stores in three different cities on the day of the launch. That is something people had never seen in the jewellery industry. The first 20-25 stores give us the experience of being in different types of cities, opening slightly different formats of stores—some of them are standalone, some in malls…some in large cities like Delhi…this will give us a good understanding, which we can leverage as we scale up quickly in the next few years.
What will be the size of your stores?
The stores we are launching are among the largest in the vicinity of that area. So, for example, our Bund Garden, Pune store is almost 15,000 sq. ft. Also, we have a 10,000 plus square foot store at Karol Bagh in Delhi. In the mall also, we will be the largest jewellery store.
The reason for having large stores is that we want to give a good experience to people, from a design and shopping experience perspective. Because of the size, we are able to have a large assortment in the store. In every category, we will have between 20 to 40% high assortment. Which are well displayed.
So, we display jewellery and not just place it. And we display more for people to be able to see it.
It is akin to fine dining versus fast food.
A majority of stores you opened are in non-metros—Pune, Indore, Jaipur….
Delhi and Mumbai are metros…We do not open on a whim but have a very good understanding of every city that we go into. We select locate our localities based on where serious jewellery shopping is happening.
A lot of research has gone into selecting the places where we can establish ourselves as a brand.
We go to where the consumer is and will not try to take the consumer to where we want.
Obviously, we will do a Pareto analysis of where it makes sense to be first and where it makes sense to come later. So, we will do that because that makes good business sense.
Which are the next five cities that you’re focusing on?
What I can tell you is that our next two stores are coming up in Mumbai and Pune in the next 10 days. They will be at R City Mall in Mumbai and Pimpri in Pune.
So that will make us ten stores in almost, just over ten weeks.
You want to be where the consumer is. The consumer is omnichannel. Do you have plans in this direction?
A lot of discovery happens online, but shopping happens offline. So that is where we will be. We will give a great online discovery experience—in fact, our website has been appreciated both by consumers as well as techies—and get into e-commerce at some stage, but that’s not the focus for the first twelve months for sure.
You come from FMCG which has low ticket items, how do you feel being in jewellery retail which has high ticket purchases?
It is absolutely fantastic. While I am the CEO, I am also a management trainee, learning about consumers and the industry. That’s the mindset that I’m in.
At the end of the day, you are trying to delight the consumer both in FMCG and in jewellery. Of course, the shopper journey is different, but there are many things which are the same, like principles of creating awareness and how you build a brand.
There is some similarity between buying a beauty product and buying jewellery. Since I was handling beauty at HUL, to that extent, some things are muscle memory which I can bring to the table to make us sharper and better. While we are a great team whose collective experience is huge, I bring in a sense of consumer centricity, whether it is in the area of how people think about beauty or how we can delight the consumer to every extent.
Most new brands focus on creating maximum awareness when they launch but I don’t see you on every hoarding…
I would call it a very targeted stealth mode. Being a new-age company, we are doing a lot of experimentation. We did a dipstick amongst our targeted consumers in our targeted areas. The results that we got on awareness and consideration are absolutely unbelievable.
We are present on digital channels. We’ve got an Instagram handle which has absolutely fantabulous response rates.
We talk about jewellery like art, we don’t talk about it like anything else.
What are your three top priorities for now?
We want to scale up. We want to learn. And I’m keeping that as a priority, especially for a young brand a new startup like us. Learn by listening to consumers, and what our own people on the shop floor are saying. So, learning and scaling up, are my two big priorities.
