D2C jewellery retailer Giva is probably keeping an eye on Bluestone Jewellery’s public listing.

The offering, open 11–13 August, drew a modest 2.7X subscription—lower than some of the exuberant debuts of other new-age consumer brands. The stock lists today, 19 August. Bluestone, of course, is among the more establishedThe KenIn Titan’s Caratlane shadow, Bluestone found its stride. Now, it has to step out of it players in the online-jewellery space. But Giva, backed by Premji Invest and fronted by actor Anushka Sharma, was founded with a slightly different playbook.

Rewind six years.

In 2018, Ishendra Agarwal was a consultant at BCG in Mumbai, puzzling over why affordable-luxury jewellery brands like Pandora had average order values (AOV) of $90 in the West, while Indian shoppers were largely confined to a choice between fine jewellery starting at Rs 40,000 ($460) and low-cost “artificial” options.

That gap became the seed for Giva. While Bluestone and Caratlane focused on gold and diamond jewellery, Agarwal placed his bet on silver.

He realised that gold may be deeply ingrained in the Indian psyche, but silver offers better margins and higher footfall. And so, in 2019, Giva was born.

The silver-jewellery-focused retailer has since posted a year-on-year growth of around 50% to touch Rs 280 crore in revenue in FY24, according to business-intelligence platform Tofler. It took Caratlane and Bluestone six and nine years, respectively, to reach similar levels.

In 2022, the company shifted to an omnichannel approach and now spans 247 stores across 25 cities. Its FY25 revenue was Rs 510 crore, according to Agarwal; and its website gets over 400,000 daily visitors.

In late June, it raised Rs 530 crore ($60 million) in a Series C funding round led by Creagis and existing investors, such as Premji Invest, which valued it at $465 million.

It’s still posting losses—Rs 58 crore in FY24—but so are competitors like Bluestone, which reported a Rs 142 crore loss that year. “Caratlane achieved profitability [in 2020] but people don’t realise that it took nearly 13 years to get there,” said a former executive.

Sure, Giva’s unusual silver-first strategy sets it apart from other jewellery retailers. But that differentiation can only take the company so far. Giva is slowly finding out what it means to scale a brutally expensive business.