Amarendra Vummidi, Director, VBJ, speaks to The Retail Jeweller, as the 125-year-old family jeweller aggressively modernizes its business with a first-of-its-kind retail model in the country that unifies diverse retail experiences from mid-mass to super-elite, under one roof. He discusses consumers’ mixed consumption behaviour, their need to satisfy different lifestyle tiers, and plans to roll out 60 stores over the next ten years.
Edited Excerpts:
VBJ boasts a remarkable 125-year history. Every few decades, retail models naturally shift, but what was the specific catalyst behind your current aggressive expansion plans and the eventual move toward an IPO?
Every 25 to 30 years, there is a dynamic shift in how business is conducted. The way my grandfather and great-grandfather sold jewellery—traveling 180 kilometers from Chennai to temple towns with a little trunk of crafted nose rings for auspicious days—is lightyears removed from modern realities. Today’s customer demands scale and accessibility. People don’t travel inter-city just to look at jewellery unless it is an exceptionally large bridal purchase.
To serve a loyal clientele that spans regions and to capture new demographics, we need economies of scale and brand presence in multiple locations. An IPO is a natural milestone on that path. When expanding at our pace, you cannot rely entirely on debt. Once we reach a point where debt servicing isn’t optimal for the pace of the business, equity becomes the logical path forward. But whether we go for an IPO or not, our core DNA—design, manufacturing, and deep customer interaction—remains completely unchanged.
As a family jeweller with a deep design legacy, how do you see the next phase of growth that demands scale, and how will it contrast with corporates?
We absolutely value the corporate players for the incredible work culture and scientific merchandising frameworks they have introduced to the Indian jewellery market. Their approach is highly structured, and it has worked wonders. However, the key differentiator is that they are retailers operating on an investor-first model; we are traditional jewellers who view this business as an art form.
A corporate entity is bound strictly to the numbers and quarterly performance, which sometimes means overlooking the design nuances built into the DNA of a legacy brand such as ours. For a family jeweller, our ultimate master is the customer, not just the investor sheet. Our goal is to blend retail science—price brackets, average yearly turn rates, demographic mappings—with the emotional and artistic integrity of jewellery crafting.
This massive new 16,000-square-foot flagship store in Chennai is a bold new direction and a distinct modern angle for the VBJ brand. Could you walk us through the vision and how it sets the stage for where you are heading?
Absolutely. This store represents our first major step toward a new era for VBJ, particularly in how we present premium design and high luxury to the modern consumer. When a customer walks in, we want them to experience multi-level retail models. The entire store is systematically categorized into unique product segments appealing to different customer need-states and designed for seamless navigation to enhance shopping experience. The ground floor is dedicated entirely to our gold jewellery. Moving up, the first floor houses our extensive bridal jewellery, diamonds, and the signature conceptual collections. The second floor is the crown jewel of this location—the exclusive domain of VBJ Atelier. This floor is built with a completely different, minimalistic, and international aesthetic designed to offer an immersive experience in true fine and high jewellery. Also, our entire in-house design team sits directly on the retail floor, allowing clients to instantly collaborate and sketch bespoke jewellery customizations right then and there.
This flagship store introduces a multi-tier structure under one roof—from mass-market offerings to ultra-premium luxury with VBJ Atelier. Do you believe that elite customers are ready to rub shoulders with the masses, or do they desire more exclusivity? Did you consider separate retail store for these models?
Segmenting luxury into standalone boutiques can be an immense operational struggle. We believe that dividing customers into rigid socioeconomic boxes is a retail myth. A super-HNWI customer buying an ultra-luxury high-jewellery statement set will frequently shop on the mass floor for a standard birthday gift or everyday jewellery. Similarly, an upper-middle-class buyer will readily cross over to the luxury floor to purchase a singular, deeply meaningful masterpiece for a major milestone. Under our unified model, we plan to segment the brand into three distinct structural streams. VBJ Core, Catering to mid-mass and upper-middle-class volume categories, contributing roughly 70% of our top-line revenue; VBJ Atelier, a highly refined, design-led tier focusing on fine jewellery for the discerning HNWI class, project-mapped to bring in 20% of revenue; and the Super Elite Line, an upcoming ultra-luxury vertical comprising scarce, collection-only masterpieces engineered internationally, driving the remaining 10%.
One of VBJ’s core strengths is its massive in-house design infrastructure. How did you cultivate this culture?
It started organically. My mother was incredibly artistic and originally designed our collections because she intuitively understood what women wanted out of their jewellery. As the business scaled, we formalized that into a professional team of 17 designers who are a mix of formally trained talent from NIFT and NID alongside internally discovered talent and develop roughly 70% of our total merchandise in-house.
As you scale toward your mid-term target of 60 stores over the next 7 to 8 years, how do you protect that core design language from diluting?
It comes down to tight centralized control. If you have ten different entities pulling the brand in different directions, the language fragments. Our core merchandising and design teams sit together on the same table as our production unit every single day.
As we expand outside of South India, our core aesthetics—the fit, the finish, the color palettes, the quality of closures—will remain rigidly consistent. However, the specific design motifs will dynamically adapt to the regional context of the new geography.
With gold prices consistently escalating, inventory-heavy traditional formats are facing massive sustainability challenges. Does this reality shift how you manage your capital and stock velocity?
The rising price of gold is an exceptional challenge for the entire industry, and there is no simple textbook answer. While we have seen an overall value increase of 20–25%, raw transaction volumes have dropped, meaning we are dealing with a significant delta. Historically, jewellers aimed for a rigid 3x or 4x inventory turn, but macroeconomic forces are reshaping that reality.
Our approach is dynamic. If the client’s purchasing power dictates lower weights, we immediately pivot our design engineering to deliver beautiful, visually impactful pieces with lighter gold mass. However, in the South Indian market, a massive portion of the demographic still prioritizes pure gold weight as a foundational family investment for the next generation. We are adjusting our operational margins to minimize the impact of the cost of gold and mapping every individual piece’s performance scientifically to ensure we balance extensive variety on the showroom floor without choking our capital efficiency.
What does the immediate 24-month roadmap look like for VBJ?
Our short-term plan is to establish an additional eight stores within the next 24 months. In Chennai, our current footprint will expand with three new locations—including dedicated expansions into T. Nagar and Kokapet. Our existing single-floor legacy outlet will be completely reformatted into an exclusive, multi-floor silver destination, while the new 16,000-square-foot flagship handles our core gold, diamond, and Atelier portfolios.
Concurrently, regional flagships are being deployed in Coimbatore, Trichy, and Hyderabad. The Hyderabad destination will feature an entirely unique architectural framework, offering soaring ceilings and intense opulence explicitly tailored to the distinct visual preferences of the Telugu market. On the international front, alongside our highly successful Dallas showroom, our second United States location will open its doors in Milpitas, California, this coming September. We are building the structural muscle, the capital framework, and the mindshare necessary to transition from a regional icon into a truly powerhouse national brand.
Written by Maithili Patange
Retail Jeweller India Magazine
