Coming from a lower middle-class family where all breathe a life of hard work, integrity and values, enveloped as an introvert amidst the boys and yet part of every sport through school and college, that’s life before Adulthood.
Between 18 to 21, Vacations meant vacation jobs at Parle’s, at Indian Express, at the Taj that kind of opened me up to Money & People.
But this story begins with my fluke entry into the jewellery industry in 1992 as an Admin Asst at Rs 1600/- per month, moved up to Area Sr. Officer(Japan) at Rs 2350/- and then Rs 7000/- per month.
Chose to learn jewellery manufacturing like a skilled worker so that I get to head India’s first platinum jewellery export factory in 1995 and my salary changed to Rs 15000/- per month. Three years of running a factory and learnt the entire jewellery technical.
Being a People’s Person and a Task Master, was moved out to setting up a diamond jewellery retail chain nationally with the Chairman and MD as Core Team. Began with the back-end role of Inventory, Quality Control, Costing, Pricing, Tagging and then was put in the forefront of retail as the Store Manager of the pilot store. National Markets being the goal, was made head of Operations and travelled the country to set up stores across Delhi, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara, Hyderabad etc and we were 17 stores soon enough. Was then given charge of Marketing and Merchandising for these stores. Here my interactions grew with affluent business families as well as the leading Filmstars to Sportstars, to Miss Indias to Politicians. By now I was no longer Introverted and Conservative, but had retained the middle class values.
The branded jewellery industry in India had begun, but we realized that the real brand is the family jeweller and hence we moved on to set up Hammer Plus Jewellery in 2001 as a domestic distribution company. Here my role involved creating jewellery collections alongwith the MD and marketing it to various retailers throughout the country. I travelled extensively as GM of National Sales and forged relationships with almost 400 jewellers across the country.
This made my jewellery retail insights far stronger on the regional markets and my personal brand too was at a high. I now felt differently about myself, from an employee mindset, I had now developed an entrepreneurial streak but not that of a trader. I wanted to build a service company focused to the jewellery industry but whose fundamentals were built on Knowledge, Skills and Attitude,
So though I was born a non jeweller, I was destined to doing 4 different facets of the jewellery industry giving me domain expertise.
Since 2005, I’m a leading Coach and Consultant in the gem & jewellery industry who charges Rs 10000/- an hour and has a tiny team who work under the umbrella of NYUZ (pronounced news). Check www.nyuz.com for what all we do in the jewellery retail real-world influencing space.