Managing Director, Sunaar The Jeweller, ANIL GOYAL shares with THE RETAIL JEWELLER how their “gold sold at zero making charges, all year round” approach is a disciplined, math-driven business model rather than a discounting gimmick, as the brand aims for 100 stores across North India without ever calling it a “sale.”
EDITED EXCERPTS:
PRATYASHA K (PK): You didn’t start as an independent retailer. Where did this journey begin?
ANIL GOYAL (AG): We have been Tanishq franchises since 2007, we still run four Tanishq stores today, though my brothers manage that side now. I spent close to a decade inside that corporate, process-driven system: presentations, feedback loops, panel reviews.
That corporate discipline is really where my own playbook comes from. By 2016, I felt ready to build something of my own, so I opened the first Saraf The Jeweller store near Chandigarh, at a location where we’d earlier run a Tanishq franchise. After opening our fourth Saraf The Jeweller store, we realised that bridal jewellery customers were largely missing from our clientele, as Saraf primarily focused on modern and traditional everyday jewellery. This led us to launch a new brand, Sunaar The Jeweller, in 2022, dedicated to gold and diamond bridal jewellery. With Sunaar, we entered the market with a distinct business strategy: zero making charges on gold jewellery.
PK: Sunaar The Jewellers’ ‘Zero making charges on gold’ is the headline of your business. How do you want the trade to understand it?
AG: I want to be very direct about this: zero making charge on gold jewellery, including plain, antique and studded, is not a marketing stunt, and it is not us “selling below the actual cost”. It is a loss-leader strategy, the same principle any large-format retailer uses, a Walmart sells milk or eggs near cost to bring footfall through the door, because it knows the real margin sits elsewhere in the basket. We do the same thing with plain gold. It sells at close to zero margin because its job isn’t to make money, its job is to make the customer walk-in and explore the counters enough to buy everything else there too.
The mistake people make is assuming “zero percent” means we don’t heavily stock gold jewellery, or that we quietly push people toward diamond because gold isn’t profitable for us. Go to my showroom, and you’ll find four inventory mix is deliberately balanced, roughly the same ratio of gold to studded jewellery that any serious retailer would carry. Plenty of operators who advertise “0% making” actually starve their gold counters and steer every walk-in toward diamond, because that’s the only place they make money. We don’t do that. If a customer only wants gold, they get a full, well-stocked gold counter, a true zero making. That’s the profit we willingly forgo, its not an illusion.
PK: So where does the model actually make money?
AG: In gold, there are two types of margins: there is a margin in gold and there is a margin in making. We created a model that earns enough to operate on margins in gold. Additional revenue (and profits) is generated from diamond jewellery, but again, disciplined, not aggressive. On the diamond side, we give a flat 50 percent discount on the full value. So, if the price is Rs 4 lakh, the customer pays Rs 2 lakh.
It’s built on a full-value base, so our gross margin in that category stays healthy. It’s the classic mixed-basket economics: the categories with real margin have to carry the category we deliberately price at cost.
In the retail business, what are the other factors that make this model operationally feasible? Volume, a very specific volume. In our experience, this model becomes viable only once a single store crosses roughly ₹50 lakh in average daily sales. Ideally, our diamond ratio is around 20 percent, which is also in line with the industry norm for studded jewellery. Without that level of turnover and volume, the model would not work. So, if we are doing Rs 15 crore monthly sales, around Rs 3 crore comes from studded jewellery.
That’s the number most people miss when they try to copy “zero making charges”, it isn’t a pricing tactic you can bolt onto a slow store. It’s a volume-dependent operating model. You need the footfall to support the pricing model; the pricing won’t work in isolation.
PK: If you had to describe your operating philosophy in one line?
AG: I’d put it this way: building the offer around what will move volume and letting margin follow from scale. I’m not chasing the highest-margin category; I’m chasing the highest number of transactions I can serve well, every single day, 365 days a year, no long lunch closures, no Sunday shutters. Profitability, for us, is a consequence of that discipline, not the starting point.
PK: Where does the network go from here?
AG: We’re currently operating around seven to eight stores across Chandigarh, Patiala, and Delhi (Lajpat Nagar).
The near-term target is 24 stores in the next 24 months as the current business projection supports the expansion; only when they are profitable, we’ll start working towards roughly 100 stores over the next three years, largely concentrated across North India, before we even begin talking about markets further afield.
Format-wise, we look for 2,000 to 6,000 sq. ft. formats with a minimum street frontage of about 23 feet. Frontage is the one thing we’re reluctant to compromise on, even when we’ve had to compromise on total floor area in a strong location.
PK: Any IPO plans, given the scale you’re targeting?
AG: Not until we cross 100 stores. Shareholding structure isn’t a constraint for us, we could explore a listing at any point, but we’d rather earn the scale and the profitability track record first. An IPO isn’t the goal; it’s a possible instrument, much later, if the business itself demands it.
Written by Pratyasha K
Retail Jeweller India Magazine
