India — Jewellery
India: can jewellery turn manufacturing power into global brands?
· 7 min read
With 29.96 billion dollars in gem and jewellery exports in FY 2024-25, India holds a structural position in the global value chain. It combines deep craft and industrial capabilities with a domestic market where jewellery remains adornment, inheritance and store of value. Yet manufacturing for the world does not guarantee capturing the largest share of the value created.
India's Ministry of Commerce and the Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council have now set a target of 100 billion dollars in exports by 2040, emphasising innovation, design, added value, global brands and technology-enabled trust networks. This roadmap changes the question: the goal is no longer only to produce more, but to make origin, quality and narrative legible enough to justify lasting preference.
The HUID hallmark turns compliance into client proof
India's hallmarking system combines the Bureau of Indian Standards logo, purity expressed in caratage and fineness, and an alphanumeric HUID unique to each piece. Clients can verify that identifier through the official BIS Care application. This infrastructure first protects buyers against purity discrepancies, but it also establishes a decisive habit: asking for verifiable proof at the point of purchase.
For a house, the risk would be to treat HUID as an end-of-production formality. It should instead sit within a traceability chain connecting materials, workshop, control, finished piece, invoice and after-sales service. The hallmark does not tell the jewellery's whole story; it provides the anchor from which the house can document provenance, maintenance, alteration and transmission.
Move from manufacturing cost to creative value
Indian craftsmanship is recognised worldwide, but part of its value is still captured by principals that own the client relationship, brand codes and distribution. Moving upmarket requires a clear separation between productive capability and creative property: a design signature, an identifiable technique, a collection vocabulary, archives and coherent pricing.
That calls for product-development discipline. Each collection should define its clientele, use, price architecture, the craft gestures it makes visible and the number of references required. Without that selection, abundant expertise becomes a catalogue. With it, a house can repeat a signature without repeating itself, increase perceived value and better protect margins against fluctuations in gold and gemstone prices.
Make traceability a service experience
An international clientele expects more than a certificate at checkout. Clients want to retrieve the piece, understand work performed on it and arrange resizing, care or family transmission from another country. A digital record can bring together regulatory proof, gemmological characteristics, service history and care advice, with access appropriate to the owner.
This system improves service and operations at once. It reduces searches when a piece returns to the workshop, secures identification, supports insurance and gives the house a view of its creations' real lives. With clear consent and proper data protection, traceability becomes an after-sales relationship rather than a mere response to distrust.
International expansion begins with operations
Opening a market is not simply a distributor or a campaign. It requires coherent cross-border pricing, repair lead times that are stated and met, a stock of critical parts or components, teams able to tell the collection story and a clear procedure when authenticity is questioned. A premium promise becomes fragile as soon as cross-border operations rely on exceptions.
The best-positioned Indian houses will test a small number of markets and serve them completely. A shared dashboard (net margin by channel, service lead time, availability, repeat purchase, quality incidents and identified clients) shows where to accelerate. Manufacturing power opens doors; execution quality, design and service continuity build a global brand.