Valentine’s Day is a time when many look to pop the all-important question, “Will you marry me?” to their partner. It’s this insight that CaratLane – the omnichannel jewellery brand from the Tata Group, leverages for their latest campaign for its all-new engagement rings collection, designed to celebrate love in its many forms. In addition, CaratLane has also launched a specific Valentine Day campaign as the brand sees the Valentine’s Day and engagement campaigns strategically as two separate campaigns. Commenting on the Valentine’s Day campaign, Shaifali Gautam, Chief Marketing Officer, CaratLane says, “There is a lot of gifting that happens around Valentine’s Day - people gift their partners, loved ones including friends, sisters or even mothers gifting to their daughters. At CaratLane, we provide a platform where we have always supported and promoted such microoccasions. Our strategy is clear - offer a product at a great price point, starting at Rs 3,999/-, which caters to our core TG which is younger audience and looking at gifting.”
Looking at the engagement campaign, with two crore weddings estimated to be held in FY26, CaratLane is foraying into the wedding space. Gautam says, “We want to be the destination for engagement.” In addition to preset jewellery and solitaires, the highlight of this collection is the 73-faceted CaratLane Gulnaara solitaire as against the normal solitaire which is typically 53-faceted. Gautam says, “We are offering our consumers a large array of over 400 engagement rings, which nobody else provides in the market today. The prices start at Rs 25,000. That has always been our USP. A tight product at an attractive price that consumers are looking for.” An attractive price-point means that CaratLane sees a significant bump-up in the run-up to special occasions. Gautam says, “We usually run any campaign for about 30 to 40 days leading up to the occasion. This gives us 25% incremental sales over any other regular month.”
CaratLane has also brought about an innovation, Postcards to help people express their love. Postcards allows customers to embed a heartfelt digital message into any ring. The recipient can scan the ring to relive the cherished memory forever, adding a personal touch.
Gautam says that what’s sacrosanct at Caratlane is that any campaign or collection launch started with research. The insights and cues to what consumers wanted was leveraged for building a campaign. For the engagement campaign, CaratLane conducted a research to find out what motivates a man when he goes down on the knees. Gautam says, “We realized that engagement rings are purchased a lot by men. We built a story about a man proposing to a girl and what are the jitters going on in his mind. We've taken forward this insight into building our campaign film.”
From Tactical To Brand Building
For almost over a decade, 80% of CaratLane’s media spends was targeted to Digital - programmatic followed by performance, remarketing, YouTube ads and other equivalent digital platforms. This changed in the last two quarters. Gautam explains, “About six months back, we consciously decided to make a shift in our media spends. As on today 80% spends which used to happen on programmatic, has been reduced to 50%. We have consciously started investing in traditional mediums.” She continues, “The reason behind that is that we have 305 stores across 128 cities, including smaller cities. We want to be relevant and are investing into traditional mediums like print ads, outdoor, radio. We're doing a lot of on ground activities for our consumers. This media mix shift is giving us a very high brand recall. From tactical communication, we are moving to brand building and brand communication. With the move to traditional media, we have a good media mix today.”
However, she emphasizes that even with 50% programmatic spends, CaratLane’s media mix spends on programmatic is higher than any other jewelry brand in India. This strategy helps the brand learn about the consumer journey of every consumer right from the top funnel to mid funnel to the last mile. These learnings have helped the brand to continue engagement with its consumers with CaratLane seind multiple purchases occur on important milestones such as anniversaries. Gautam says, “Our repeat is almost 55%. This is a testimony of how well we speak to consumers in their language because we have a personalized journey for everyone. We know their special moments - birthdays, their spouse’s birthday, anniversary etc. We meaningfully intervene into the consumers’ life to make them feel special on their birthdays, anniversaries by inviting them to our stores and celebrating their special occasions with them. We have been able to take our service to another level because of the consumer insights through the journeys that we capture in our databases.”
The Omnichannel Experience
While 90% of CaratLane’s consumers browse online, they then prefer to shop offline, especially for a higher price point. Typically, while many brands, particularly e-commerce brands, offer special app discounts, CaratLane has taken a strategic play here. The company looks to provide a totally seamless omnichannel experience by refraining from online discounting by pricing products at the same price-points, online or offline. The brand also ensures that the collections go live across both platforms at the same time. While overall 10% of sales come from online, for special occasions like Valentine’s the online checkout significantly goes up.
Betting On Big Ticket IPs
CaratLane has also looked at licensing to extend its consumer base. An example is its licensing deal with Warner Brothers for Harry Potter and Disney for The Lion King collection. Explaining the rationale Gautam says, “A lot of consumers buy our products as collectibles. For example, the Lion King collection was timed with the release of the movie Mufasa: The Lion King. When there is a topical theme or character, the collection ends up doing really well. We ensure that in a year, we have at least three to four IPs. We launch with limited designs for a limited period of time, and this gives us eyeballs. When we launched the Lion King collection, we saw a tremendous response. In fact, the final result was far higher than the goal we had set. Whenever we have these collections based on famous characters, that tend to have a large following, it drives up our sales.” The Lion King collection was targeted to kids - a very large category for CaratLane growing at a higher growth rate than other categories.
Licensing for popular franchises also gave the brand an opportunity to engage with consumers at a very different level. For Lion King, CaratLane invited kids to launch the collection and held special screenings of the movie for them. Gautam says, “Once we create a bond with the consumer at a personal level, the repeat rate and brand loyalty goes up. We become the first choice whenever they want to buy jewelry.”
The Way Forward
Commenting on the year gone by, Gautam states, “It has been an exciting year for us. We set out the year with a certain goal and we are on track. In Q3, we surpassed our own benchmarks and this period gave us Rs 500 crore of sales in a month. We closed Q3 with 27% growth over last year.”
Looking ahead, CaratLane looks to add 40 more stores in the next financial year, by expanding into seven new towns, and adding more stores in existing cities where it is present. After the Valentine’s engagement campaign, the brand will be rolling out one more campaign for Women’s Day in this quarter. She states, “We are optimistic of closing Q4 with strong numbers. We are looking at overall 15 to 20% growth in revenue. We will continue to experiment more with our media mix. The two spaces that we have identified are the engagement space and personal rewards that has done well for us.” On a final note she adds, “70% of our shoppers are women. We want CaratLane to be the platform which motivates them to wear their wins – small or big, from getting their driver’s license to overcoming a major life obstacle and be the platform that allows them to speak out and realize the wins on an everyday basics.
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