– Mithun Sacheti
Mithun Sacheti is best known as the founder of Carat Lane, India’s quintessential 21st century jewellery brand. It was launched as an e-commerce startup, evolved into an omni-channel brand, and later came under Titan Industries (of the Tata Group) in 2023.
In November 2025, Mithun spoke at the Leadership Series session at BDB outlining some of the key learnings from his journey into e-Commerce.
Stepping into e-Commerce
We didn’t start looking to build on an internet business. But, we did not have the money to go and put inventory out there in stores which were getting larger and larger. So the whole thought was, how do we sort of build visibility… because if you want to sell to many more people, you need a lot more of them to interact with you in the first place. The internet seemed the best possibility and we chose it as a medium. The Right Price Point The question before us was to identify the price point at which there would be a maximum number of buyers. And then figure out how do you create beautiful jewellery at that price. That one single statement was the defining statement of our business. If you can, you’ll solve for the number of buyers automatically. It’s a mathematical equation.
Building from scratch
When we started I think everything was a challenge. I had to convince a leading courier company that you can do this jewellery delivery business, which they had no idea about. Banks could not understand why somebody would want to buy jewellery online. So we had to give a Rs 5 lakh deposit to be able to collect Rs 20,000 transactions. And we had to scale just-in-time manufacturing, to have the basics on hand when we needed. In fact we gave one kilo of gold to have a large amount of castings ready to use as soon as thei were required. So we were solving anything and everything. The biggest fight however, is in the mind. Keep thinking and asking yourself how can I improve the life of the customer, solve some problem she faces, attract her so she buys today.
The New Consumer
At Carat Lane, we never let our average selling price (ASP) cross Rs 22,000 – 23,000. Young consumers were earning well. So, the Rs 20,000, 25,000 price point attracted the daughter buying jewellery or a boyfriend buying jewellery. They didn’t have to take approval from their parents, who had bought only through price per gram, etc. So we were creating a new market and going after that. And that’s the market that sits on the internet as well.
Attracting consumers
Initially, we were trying to compete with Flipkart, Myntra and all of these guys saying we too can do faster delivery. Then we stopped and began to figure out what attracts our customer. And after almost five years we realized that we were primarily selling images. If those were not attractive enough, then we would have a problem selling jewellery. At first we probably took this too far. So, the jewellery and the images didn’t match. An example was our heart pendant. We would have 30% returns, because consumers felt that the product looked smaller than the image on the Internet. Then someone suggested we change the name. “Let’s call it the tiny love pendant.” That simple move changed everything and 30% return became 5% return.
Social media marketing
The life of these media channels is 15 years, 20 years at max. Beyond that, they don’t really survive. And so your marketeers need to get younger and younger as time goes by. They need to be a microcosm of the kind of audience that’s going to buy from you and that their understanding of this media should be very, very strong. The older people bring experience into the equation.
Omnichannel approach
Even when you are selling online, you’re competing with the brick and mortar store. The choice before the customer is should I buy from brand A or brand B. She doesn’t think whether I bought from an online shop or a physical shop…. She buys from a jewellery shop. Our experience showed that customers were adding to cart but not pressing buy now.
That gap told us that they like our product but not buying it. And when we spoke to enough customers we realized, if you don’t have a store you’re not going to solve this. They want the store so that they know this jeweller does exist.
Our first store had minimal inventory and that was a complete disaster. The next looked too much like a traditional jewellery store and didn’t work as well. The third one, in a mall in Bangalore was where we really got it right.
So you do trials. What will take my conversion from half percent to one percent to two percent to three percent?
The same for collection and returns. The customer is best served when he comes and picks it up in the store, when he comes and returns it in the store as well. So even if he placed an order online, he’ll have the option to pick up in store. Or the store would deliver to him. Both these options are available. So we would like to give more credit to the store. You have to design your system for that. You can’t speak online versus offline. We actually learned the word omnichannel later but we got the operating model right.
The next step
Business is like climbing steps. You climb one and stop, you’ll reach a plateau. So you need to find the next step … and there’s always an endless level of number of steps.
If you stop improving and you sit back and start thinking that I have arrived, that’s the day from which the slope goes the other way around. You go up by the steps but come down by the elevator.
New tech
AI and VR are going to happen. AI certainly is happening and some of the outcomes are amazing – like translating videos into multiple Indian languages to reach different parts of the country, or cold calling customers without letting the repeated refusals dampen your pitch. We need to understand these and see how they can work for us
New e-Commerce venture
Don’t try to improve someone else’s model. At best you are trying to do something which is already done, and only trying to do it better. You can’t go with the same idea and say I need to raise capital.
You have to go to solve a new consumer problem. VC capital is not looking for the next Carat Lane. They are looking for the next consumer idea in the jewellery industry.
Recent spike in Gold prices
How do you cope with the sudden increase as a jeweler? If you don’t do something different, then it’s just a normal pass-through of raw material cost to the customer.
Where is the innovation in that? Can you do something to reduce overall costs – say harden the metal more, to be able to create more strength at a lower weight? Is there a better alloy? The guys who solves questions like that will grow big.