As self-purchase, everyday luxury and personal storytelling redefine the jewellery market, Vaibhav Karnavat, Founder, House of Quadri, shares his perspective on the industry’s evolving landscape.
Author Credit : By Vaibhav Karnavat, Founder, House of Quadri !
A few months ago, a woman walked into our flagship Mumbai store and bought herself a pair of diamond earrings. There was no occasion, no partner trailing behind her, no anniversary on the calendar. She’d just closed a big deal at work and wanted something that would remind her of it every time she wore it. I remember thinking, ten years ago, this exact moment would have looked completely different. She might have waited. She might have asked someone else to buy it for her. She might not have walked in at all.
And this new age customer is in many ways the story of the future of fine jewellery. Pre-empting this change, I have spent the past four years building House of Quadri, and what I find most gratifying is not a trend but the reasons for people buying jewellery have changed, quietly, almost without anyone announcing it.
It’s Not Another Person’s Idea Anymore
For as long as anyone can remember, fine jewellery followed a script written by other people. Someone proposed, so you bought a ring. Someone got married, so you bought gold. The jewellery industry didn’t have to think very hard about why; the calendar of life events did the thinking for us.
That’s no longer the whole story. People are buying for themselves, and for reasons that have nothing to do with a milestone anyone else would recognise. A promotion. A hard year finally behind them. A trip they took alone and loved. I’ve had customers tell me, almost shyly, “I don’t really have a reason; I just wanted it.” Or “I wore it more than often than I thought I would”. That sentence would have sounded strange a decade ago. Now I hear some version of it every week.
It changes how we think about the business, too. You can plan around weddings, there’s a season for that, a predictable rhythm. You can’t really plan around someone deciding, on a random Tuesday, that they deserve something beautiful. But you can build a brand that’s ready for that Tuesday and that’s the entire point.
I grew up around the classic idea of jewellery: heavy gold, brought for weddings and festivals and locked away the rest of the year. It was treated almost like a fixed deposit you could wear twice a year. A lot of Indian households still think this way, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I’ve watched a different instinct grow alongside it, especially among people in their twenties and thirties: they want jewellery they can actually live in. Something that fits their lifestyle.
We’ve built House of Quadri around that instinct deliberately, we call it “follow the feeling”. It sounds like a slogan, but it came from something real: customers kept asking us, almost apologetically, “Can I wear this every day, or is it too much?” Every time someone asked that question, it reaffirmed the belief that jewellery will move out of the locker and into the real world.
It’s also opened up space for things that didn’t really exist before rings exchanged between partners who have no wedding planned and pieces bought to celebrate time spent together rather than a proposal. None of that fit neatly into the old categories. It does now.
If you’d looked at jewellery industry sales five years ago, you’d have seen fewer, bigger family driven purchases. Now we see people thinking about themselves more and increasing frequency; “what’s my style?” “what personal meaning does this piece hold for me”
Curating a personal look and trousseau is normalised. A pair of earrings this month, a stacking ring added a few months later, slowly building something that’s entirely their own combination. Gold prices going up has pushed this along too; heavy traditional pieces have become a stretch for a lot of people, so lighter, design-led jewellery has become the more honest choice, not just the trendier one.
It’s just the start of personalisation. We get requests to engrave a date, a name, and sometimes just initials that mean something only to the person wearing them. We started with around 40 designs when we launched House of Quadri; we’re well past 800 now, and the growth wasn’t really a strategy, it came from realising that nobody wants to wear the same five “iconic” designs as everyone else. They want a piece that feels like it was made with their story in mind.
People ask what more than Lab Diamonds – And they are about to experience the possibilities
This is the part of the conversation that’s changed the most in my time running this business. Customers used to question ask about legitimacy of lab diamonds and their certification trying to understanding this new product. Now, almost as often, they ask what more than lab diamonds.
That question is a big part of our jewelry development with lab-grown diamonds, not as a substitute but as a stone with the flexibility to explore many creative endeavours. Special cuts, colours, shapes and sizes which were never thought possible have now opened a domain which is really pushing creative exploration to the limit. And that’s the direction in which HOQ is moving towards, really thinking about what we can do with the material more than the material itself. Jewellery which you can now dream of, can be made IRL, and that too with burning a massive hole in the earth and your pocket.
What I Take Away From All This
If I had to sum up everything I’ve watched change, it’s this: people are choosing lifestyle products across all categories and ours being one of the last to arrive at the party. Customers are increasingly conscious of the brands they identify with, and beyond the product, what they’re looking for is a personalised, human experience that makes them feel understood. None of that fits the old idea of fine jewellery as something rare, occasional, and inherited.
I don’t think that makes jewellery any less special, if anything, it makes it more personal. The brands that will matter most over the next few years won’t be the ones who simply put their old catalogue online. They’ll be the ones who actually rebuild around this person, the one who walks in on an ordinary Tuesday following her feeling, just because she decided she’d earned something beautiful.
Editor’s Note: This is an authored article contributed by Vaibhav Karnavat, Founder, House of Quadri. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of High On Persona.