Divine Solitaires, India’s first & only loose solitaire brand that is exclusively focused on natural diamond solitaire jewellery, has opened its first round of seed funding seeking an investment of $10 million. The Mumbai-based company is gearing up to aggressively scale its business to become a $250–300 million enterprise over the next 3-4 years.
Launched in 2006 by brothers Jignesh Mehta and Shailen Mehta, Divine Solitaires has since grown into a trusted natural-diamond solitaires brand, adding 15 to 20,000 customers every year, with over 35% first time diamond customers. The brand aims to allocate 60% of the funds raised in brand building and awareness, with the balance capital invested to support working capital optimisation, IT infrastructure and team expansion.
Last 4 years have been fairly volatile and ambiguous for the industry specially with the addition of a tech driven new product category – LGDs. Interestingly the dust seems to have settled and its now very clear that consumers have already made their choices accordingly to their tastes and personas. While it is now very clear that LGDs will carve out a new space as a new product category, there will always be a significant market of Natural diamonds that will continue to exist. With no other focussed product brands in this category, Divine Solitaires holds a huge potential with hardly any competition in this segment.
“In India, the solitaire diamond jewellery market, is currently estimated to be around INR 25 to 30,000 cr., and is also the highest growing segment in the jewellery industry with around 10-12% category growth YoY. As the only focused brand in this category, we aspire to be the undisputed leaders by covering at least 20-25% of this market share in the next 5-7 years. We seek investors who are aligned with the market dynamics as well as with our vision of aggressive medium-term growth and expansion,” says Mr. Mehta.
Over the last year, Divine Solitaires has significantly improved its profitability by more than 30% over the previous years by improving operational and inventory efficiencies and adding more product lines in the kitty like Intense and Vivid Yellow Diamonds, Oval and Pear-shaped diamonds and smaller sized diamond keeping the brand ethos of highest quality guaranty and complete price transparency, that is very unique in the industry. In addition, the brand has also added a very innovative product called Diamond coin which is an alternate to gold coin gifting.
Divine Solitaires has a sales-to-stock ratio of 3.5x, which is by far the highest in the industry, built on a resilient operating model that mitigates commodity price volatility. The order value at Divine Solitaires ranges from INR 25,000 to 80 lakh and above, but a bulk of the orders fall within the INR 75,000 to INR 5 lakh range.
Divine Solitaires products are currently available at 215 stores across 108 cities pan India and growing rapidly under a Shop-in-Shop model through partnerships with some of the most reputed jewellery retailers in each market. Though the brand offers 360-degree omnichannel touchpoint, almost 95% of business is conducted offline at partner stores.
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