In conversation with Gurukeerthi Gurunathan, Co-founder, CaratLane to know the insights of the business.
If you had to pen down your top 3 learnings from 2021, then what would that be?
Online Adoption:
The brand saw a huge jump in the number of people browsing online and opting to buy through whichever platform they wish to. The online influenced retail orders for CaratLane was 60 %.
Celebrating small and big milestones
People are seeking ways to celebrate the small joys, big moments and everything in between.
From your brand’s perspective, what changes did you bring in internally to build a ‘road to recovery last year?
Provided seamless transition from online to offline with in-house tools such as Oneview, customer dashboard, using ML & AI to identify prospective customers.
The hyperlocal marketing campaigns helped us to focus on conversion at a pin code level, thereby improving over all business conversion.
The marketing strategy is focussing sharply on the omni-nature of the brand.
Currently, at 131 stores across India, along with Try at Home in over 17 cities, the brand has also expanded internationally with a strong presence in the USA.
What is your vision for 2022 for your brand?
Accessibility: Using technology, we want to reduce as much friction as possible from the customer’s buying journey.
Gifting: We hope to make more memorable gifting experiences for our customers.
Affordable & Modern Designs: To create affordable and modern designs for different occasions.
How are you laying the bricks for growth and success in the New Year? Is it going to be an omnichannel journey or putting action to digital transformation or accelerating processes with technology or something else?
It’s a combination of all. Our focus is going to be on improving the discovery journey for a customer – right from discovering the brand, finding the designs and identifying the channel of choice. We have always used technology to solve consumer problems and will continue to do so.
Our omnichannel journey is healthier than ever with all our marketing and sales efforts driven in that path. We want to build a business that makes it easy for customers to discover, try & buy beautiful jewellery.
How much has the company grown under your leadership in the pandemic period?
Even though Q2 is always the leanest quarter of the year, we recorded our highest ever revenue of Rs.289 Cr. Our online influenced orders at stores stand at 60 %.
While brand searches have grown by 48 % last year, new customer acquisition has grown by 105 %, demonstrating increase in brand awareness and high brand intent.
Elaborate on the initiatives (marketing and digital) which were a success in this period?
Our website is engineered to deliver a better user experience with the right information available to the user at any stage of their journey. With better product recommendations, identifying signals of different types of customers that gives us more information to understand them better, our tech and product initiatives are designed to deliver a seamless experience.
In 2021, we launched our first ever gifting film “The Worst Gifter” which is a narration of all the stories of our customers who’ve bought anniversary gifts. With this, the idea that fine jewellery can be accessible and definitely affordable was established while also tugging at the idea of “Gifted on a Special Day, Made Special Everyday”. We launched exquisite collections inspired by the wheat fields, the shola craft of Bengal and expanded our occasion wear category with competitive pricing that delivers the certain look and feel people seek.
Kids’ jewellery has been another big focus for us with first of its kind collaborations with Peppa Pig, Dora the Explorer and PowerPuff Girls.
