‘Our brand is built not with marketing money, but with our engagement with customers’

It started as an online brand, but CaratLane is now positioned as an omni-channel jewellery brand with around 260 stores across 100 cities. At Pitch CMO Summit 2024, Atul Sinha, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, CaratLane, in conversation with Sonam Saini, Assistant Editor, exchange4media, discussed the- The Omnichannel Approach to Drive Customer.

As the theme of the conference was about leveraging the technology to drive customer-centricity, the conversation started off with CaratLane’s newly launched feature- Postcard. It's a feature that lets users record personalised video messages and embed them into any CaratLane ring, which can be scanned by the recipient and relived forever.

Sharing insights on the concept, Sinha shared, "We buy jewelles for special occasions or as gifts. We understood that people would buy jewellery, and they would last a lifetime, but the emotion associated with that era, at the time of presenting, would not. We were thinking about how we might capture the feeling of gifting the jewellery and allow customers to save it for posterity, so they could look back on it and relive those moments, and that's when we introduced the postcards feature."

Speaking on the challenges faced in executing the initiative and audience response to it, Sinha said, “We have an in-house technology team. We worked on this for
over one and a half years before we could bring it live for our customers.”

The feature was launched just before Valentine's Day. “In the first month itself, we had more than a thousand messages being uploaded along with the ring that the customers had bought. So definitely it had a great response.”

On offering a seamless experience to their consumers, Sinha mentioned that the brand started online but began opening physical stores later was because they found in early years that many customers were coming to their website, going all the way to add to cart, but they were not finally converting. “There were many who were converting, but many were not. And adding to cart is the most powerful signal of intent to purchase for a customer.”

So when they drop off at that stage, you want to understand why, said Sinha. “We said the only way to try and solve this is to start opening stores and allow these customers who are not ready to buy online to be able to experience us in stores. It was a very big learning journey for us.”

He mentioned that the brand faced a lot of challenges when they opened physical stores, including bargain for an extra discount.

According to Sinha, they have removed any kind of reason for a customer to think one channel may be better than the other. “Our policies are 100% the
same across channels.”

He further added another challenge that they faced was staff incentives. “Omnichannel is not just about opening stores and having online presence. They brand also give 100% credit to the customer service person irrespective of whether the customer is buying online or offline. In our initial years, we were trying to fix all of these problems, removing the frictions faced by an omnichannel brand and now we've moved to a stage where we are actually building an experience for customers by leveraging customer understanding.”

Sinha shared that more than 90% of the final transaction happens in stores but the customer journey starts online. “Nearly 80-90% of the customer journey starts online. So, by the time they come to our store, they have already experienced and they know our designs and pricing. Without this online space, that 80 to 90% business that's happening in stores would never be happening. It's fully integrated and the customer is not thinking online or retail. They are just thinking about buying jewellery and where can they get the best jewellery?”

Sinha also shared interesting insights on the profile of customers that buy jewellery online and offline. He said that more customers online come for gifting, but men tend to buy more online.”

Now that CaratLane is a part of Titan Group. Speaking on the learnings, Sinha shared that money can buy pretty much everything but not trust. “For us, this association with Titan allowed us to build trust with customers and in a way, leap into the trust building space. We were beginning to build a customer base and trust with them but this allowed us to really take a leap into that space. One of the first things that we did in 2016, after this association, was we rebranded ourselves to say CaratLane- a Tanishq partnership, because that truly expressed who we were as a brand, an independent brand, but in association with Tanishq. We also learned a lot from Titan about how to run physical stores, because we didn't know how to do that.”

“Titan had been watching this space for a long time. They did not have the deep understanding of how online customer behavior is and how do you engage and build that online traffic and convert that into stores or footfall traffic. And that was a space where we were able to add value to them.”

On elevating the customer experience, Sinha shared that at CaratLane, they have worked on a lot of things to make the moment special for customers. “We have a belief in CaratLane where we say that it's the small things that make a difference.”

On the marketing strategy, CaratLane focuses more on digital. He shared, “Our brand is built not by the marketing money that we are spending, but with every engagement that we have with the customer in our stores. I feel that our true brand builders are our jewelry consultants or sales staff in stores or online, because with every interaction with the customer, they are building an experience that the customer has about Caratlane, and that's really what the brand is.”

He further added, “marketing plays a very important role in building awareness, because I need to get them into the store in the first place. Given that we cater to a younger audience, and to an audience which buys more for everyday wear, this audience lives their life mostly in the digital space. We actually do most of our advertising in the digital space, whether it's through Meta, Google, YouTube, and Instagram. We live in a world where communication is actually one to one. We're not running an advertisement where 100 million people across the country are going to see the same ad. So, the communication is different to each individual, depending on their profile and depending on what they are likely to engage with us.”