ilovediamonds in talks to close first round of funding of $6 m

Bengaluru headquartered, light weight diamond jewellery portal, ilovediamonds.com is in advanced stages of talks to close its first round of funding of $6 million from institutional and angel investors in 30 days. The funding will be allocated to developing new product lines, building a distribution network, brand communications and marketing activities.

Founded by husband and wife team Pankaj and Gulan Chetan with the idea of making diamond jewellery affordable to every Indian, ilovediamonds went live last week and targets a demographic profile of 18-42 years.

The portal offers an assorted range of 1,500 styles of jewellery spanning necklaces, earrings, finger rings and bracelets. Prices start at ₹4,100 and go up to ₹1 lakh, with just 5 per cent of the entire collection priced between ₹1.1 lakh to ₹1.2 lakh.

“Our objective was to set up an omni-channel, affordable, diamond jewellery brand that will allow us to reach out to first time jewellery buyers pan India, through a strong distribution network and a chain of ‘trust stores’ that we will open in 25 cities over the next 18 months” founder and CEO, Pankaj Chetan told BusinessLine .

The company has opened three trust stores, with its flagship 2,500 sq ft store in Bengaluru and one each in Chennai and Coimbatore, where customers can try out and buy jewellery. Plans are on to open trust stores sized between 400 sq ft to 1,000 sq ft at prime locations in Nagpur, Baroda, Pune, Gurgaon, Vijayawada, Hyderabad and Chandigarh.

Chetan used his own funds as seed capital to create the technology, product base and in setting up the first three trust stores.

In addition, funds raised from an angel investor is currently being used to expand the business. ilovediamonds kicked off its brand launch campaign ‘My First Time’ on TV, Facebook and Youtube last week and has allocated ₹6 crore for the brand launch and marketing campaign over the next three months.

“In a few days, we have already garnered 1.81 lakh views on Youtube, 11,000 likes on our Facebook page and attracted traffic of 14,647 unique visitors to our website” said Chetan, who is a third generation jeweller and an internationally certified gemologist.

The company has established a joint venture in Mumbai for manufacturing, with a production capacity of 70 pieces of jewellery per day, and counts Caratlane.com and Bluestone.com as its competitors.

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