Meet The New Consumer

The changing face of the Indian customer means business opportunities for jewelers. But how to identify these consumers and their demands? JCK India tries to figure it out. Not so long ago people earned and saved enough for seven generations to live happily ever after. People lived frugally and bought land and gold so that their progeny was secure. All this is changing. Forget seven generations, people now don’t even want to think of tomorrow.

Live life king size here and now, that’s the motto. They still buy land and gold but the motives are different. No longer are girls adorning themselves because of religious dictates or societal pressures of the suhagan with the mangalsutra and a wrist laden with bangles. Slowly but surely winds of change are wafting in from distant lands.

The shrinking of the world has widened the choices in fashion accessories of which jewelry is an integral part not just for women but for men too. Concepts of muted, chic, everyday jewelry can be seen in work places, like banks and corporate offices, which now have a fair sprinkling of the fairer sex. Also, sheer or solid gold, with its 24k value tag, is giving way to stones, precious and semi-precious, with little concern for its resale value.

Geeta Ram, mother of Ashwati who works for Infosys in Chennai said, “What stridhan can I give my daughter when she herself is earning a fat salary? She is her own stridhan.” Ashwati is getting married in December this year. Her trousseau shopping included couture jewelry of diamonds and colored stones. Geeta bowed down to her daughter’s wishes and traditional jewelry shopping just did not happen.

While the love for gold in India is as old as the Gods themselves, the reasons for buying ornaments are changing. The traditional reasons remain a marriage in the family or festive buying like Diwali and Dussehra. But newer urges and impulses are emerging as winners. There is a large appetite for adventure and willingness to experiment. It is more about wearing jewelry for its non-tangible value of innate satisfaction rather than the calculating financial implications.


New Interest in Jewelry

So why and how is the new Indian shopping for jewelry? The galloping wealth among urbanites and more so among people around 25, has spawned homogeneity in lifestyles. Therefore the struggle to make a statement or stand out in a crowd is even more intense, discrete and strategic. This was the consistent and imperative message one got from consumers of all shades. There are vestiges of a hangover from the past only with the older generation.

These can be seen in their unbroken links with the family jeweler (sunar) and their buying gold on religious occasions, be it bits or in chunks. But these residues from the past may soon be wiped out with the new trends of buying to satisfy the deep rooted sense of individual aesthetics and having something that is unique, rare and exclusive.

The only way to stand out is to flaunt an exclusive brand name or a design so rare that it takes your breath away. No one is merely impressed with just a lot of gold or diamonds to flaunt wealth. The search is on for that exclusive piece and the longing for that beyond the reach nametag.

And so Vijaya Aney one day bundled all her gold jewelry, which was lying in the bank and took it to the jewelers to melt. She sold it to acquire one and a half karat super deluxe diamond solitaire earrings, another pair of earrings with a circle of rubies and a single diamond at the centre and a diamond pendant. She has never regretted her decision. “I know in my lifetime I would never need to sell my gold for any financial crisis,” says Vijaya who teaches law at K. C. College and is the wife of a successful senior lawyer, Srihari Aney.

In fact, that one act has freed her from the psychological burden of hoarding jewelry as investment or security. She now indulges in adventurous jewelry shopping. She bought a blue beryl dangling earring which was basically stones in their natural state swinging from a gold hook and one earring of a different shape from the one on the other ear.

A pick from Nalini Designs of Chennai, Vijaya said she was astounded to see the kind of daredevil designs with new age stones that Nalini Panday, the designer and the proprietor, was creating in the supposedly conservative gold market of Chennai. She said although she bought the blue beryl earrings with trepidation, it is a piece which never fails to get the wows, in spite of the mad concept of each ear having a different shape.

She was thrilled to see a hundred year old kundan maang tikka, which Nalini Panday had strung in red silicon based Japanese wire with a sprinkling of gold beads and pearls, a bold marriage between the ancient and the avant garde. “The piece looked both classy and contemporary,” Vijaya said.


Fearless Experimentation

Another symbol of this fearless experimentation visible among women is 80-year-old Mukta Deshpande of Nagpur. Always perfectly groomed even at her age, clothes and accessory have always been a passion with her. Fond of wearing jhumkas and dangling earrings she could not indulge in this passion because her husband never approved of it. After her husband passed away a couple of years back, she dived headlong into buying jhumkas.

Not only that, during her recent visit to Mumbai she bought eight pairs of artificial earrings, bold and fancy in their look. She recalled with a chuckle how two decades back she had scolded her daughter-in-law for restyling gold jewelry but today she herself did not bat an eyelid while buying junk jewelry for Rs 4,000.

Sejal Parekh, Interior Decorator, in her own right and wife of Oncologist Dr Deepak Parekh, has all the resources to buy solitaires and the high-end jewelry which money can buy. But, her heart is in junk jewelry. For years now she has bought ‘rubbish’ and ‘junk,’ as she calls it, from Jamini Alhuwalia on Carmichael road.

Although junk, she says, she pays as much as Rs 2,000 plus for Jamini’s innovative ideas. She loves Jamini’s penchant for mixing material like leather, glass, etc. What about the trousseau for her two daughters? There is enough of heirloom family jewels which she has allocated for them. But, even her daughters value her ‘junk’ and very often fight over allocation of this jewelry more than the real stuff.

Neena Gupta, actor, likes to shop for a mix of junk and the real stuff. In the real stuff she would rather go for kundan or sheer gold, which she buys from her source in Delhi. The only showroom she trusts implicitly is Tanishq because of the Tata name attached to it. This is an often-expressed sentiment among many buyers. She buys most of her semi-precious stuff from Amrapali in the Oberoi’s.


Cherished Possessions

Nothing is more satisfying than getting that silent, sly glance of a jealous admirer. So when Savitri, 22, went with her mother to Dubai ten years ago, gold was also on their shopping list like so many Indians who visit Dubai. There were, of course, all those shops in the souk, which sold the regular chunky gold stuff for the prudent Indian buyer. But, Savitri, chanced upon a D’damas store.

She couldn’t take her eyes off the jewelry with its gauze and intricate work done with gold. She bought a necklace of Japanese workmanship. It was a filigreed chain in yellow and white gold in which the white shone like diamonds. She paid for the workmanship and the design as much as she did for the gold in it which made her mother wince. This pain, her mother now admits, has turned into pleasure because the chain invariably gets admiring inquiries. “Resale value, nil, but satisfaction of possession immense,” she says.

Sathya Saran, Editor “Me”, who was associated with the Miss India Beauty Pageant during its best years, is an epitome of the hugely successful workingwoman with her femininity, grace and eloquence not ravaged by the vagaries of a demanding profession. Whether in a sari, slacks or salwar kameez, chic and sometimes chunky pieces of jewelry complete her ensemble to work every day. She loves buying colored stones be it precious or semi-precious.

She finds experimenting with precious stones through high heat and chemicals exciting. Now one has multicolored sapphires, diamonds, pearls. Speaking from not just personal preferences but also from the information that she has access to as a journalist, she is amazed to see the kind of work Indian designers like Farah Khan, Neelam Kothari and Neeta Bhosale are achieving with unlettered goldsmiths.


Changing Trends

Keeping up with the times and what’s in is an integral part of fashion and therefore uniformity in the market is a natural fallout of this phenomenon. It is not surprising to see the new trends in all the major metros and in smaller but upcoming towns. Therefore it is not only orthodox Chennai which is patronizing contemporary jewelry but Marxist Calcutta too is not far behind. So, Meeta Banerjee is completing her daughter’s trousseau shopping in Fort Knox, the new landmark for the ultimate in jewelry.

Nowhere are jewelry and new trends more visible than in Delhi. A city most acutely conscious of social status and keeping up with the Joneses, the whole range from chunky kundans to trinkets in diamonds are pursued. But the younger lot pit jewelry last on their priority list of owning a car, house, gadgets and traveling. Sure, jewelry is chased but if cash is low then anything cheap would do to adorn oneself.

Sanjaya Khanilkar, who hails from Delhi, is an avid shopper and surveyor of the market. She too is enamored of the new stones visible in the market. She, however, feels that some kind of certification and evaluation of these stones would greatly enhance confidence among buyers who are fence sitters like her. She has had a bad experience with stone buying.

Advised by her astrologer, she bought a topaz for Rs 30,000. Now, she says, she has found other gemologists assessing its value from Rs 3,000 to 20,000. This is disheartening, she says. If only this business of evaluating stones is systematized, women who buy for both aspiration and investment, will not hesitate to buy diamonds or even other stones.

Thus, it can be said that the new Indian buyer is “stoned”! Whatever be the base metal, gold, platinum, silver or even the newcomer, titanium, stones are the aspiration and fascination of the new buyer.