Auspicious beginnings
Seven years on, Platinum Guild's Vaishali Banerjee reflects on the metal's growing popularity in India

October 01, 2007

Platinum Guild International India's Vaishali Banerjee.

Convincing the world's most voracious consumers of yellow gold to splurge on an expensive white metal sounds like a blueprint for failure, but Vaishali Banerjee welcomes the opportunity. Since 2000, when she left the advertising firm JWT to manage Platinum Guild International's (PGI) India operation, Banerjee has built a platinum-jewelry-retail network that's grown from 12 stores to 375. Although audited sales figures do not exist, key retailers have reported growth of nearly 60 percent year over year. A sleek ad campaign promoting the metal's rarity has boosted awareness, while a quality-assurance program PGI launched among six local manufacturers has helped consumers—primarily young, fashionable women living in one of five major metropolitan areas: Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata—feel secure in the purity of their purchase.

Couture International Jeweler visited Banerjee at her office in north Mumbai's Bandra Kurla Complex, fast becoming the city's new business district, to find out how, in a country where the benchmark for everything precious is gold, you create a new benchmark.

Platinum pendant and earrings set.

Couture International Jeweler: What was it like introducing platinum into such a gold-obsessed culture?
Vaishali Banerjee: It was challenging but interesting, too, because at the time, platinum didn't exist in India. We started from point zero. We had to identify who the manufacturers would be because there were exporters selling to the United States and Japan but no one for the domestic market.

CIJ: What were the unique challenges facing platinum in India?
VB: The first barrier was that [the female consumer] didn't know anything about it. There was a perception: It's very sophisticated, elegant, classy—but she didn't know what the jewelry looked like. You must remember she knows everything there is to know about gold, she makes it in her own backyard, she gets craftspeople to come, she can argue at a retailer about how much it should cost. So the barriers were high. If you don't know about platinum, you don't see its value.

CIJ: Have you promoted platinum as "pure, rare, eternal"?
VB: We have focused on rare. Rare gets at the value: It's worth the price. And rare has a lot of emotional benefits because to the kind of woman we're talking, rare appeals. She's willing to pay for rare; she doesn't want everybody to wear it.

Traditional platinum pendant honoring the Indian goddess Lakshmi.

CIJ: What's the market like today?
VB: Most of the barriers are down. Our latest brand track study shows that the acquisition and preference for platinum has increased across all centers and occasions. That's important because we're actually changing consumer behavior. I'm not saying for a moment that the 22-karat image will go, but platinum is getting more accepted. There's more familiarity. Platinum came in at a much higher price with the promise that it's far more precious. It takes time to believe this.

CIJ: As the price has soared, have you focused on the bridal category?
VB: While we do sell bridal rings, what we promote is entirely fashion jewelry. Here weddings are very traditional, and until you get accepted, you cannot find a place in the wedding. So we looked at fashion jewelry because the [affluent, metropolitan] woman we are targeting buys jewelry two to three times a year. It could be for weddings, anniversaries or just because she has money to spend. It could be for Diwali. As the price has gone up, the task has been to build its value. She needs to see why she should pay for it. The challenge is, we have to develop design that is significantly different from gold. Gold is more traditional and more conventional. Platinum has to be more modern. However, it cannot be completely western or avant-garde because no one would wear it, so we have to balance.

Pendant and earrings set in matte-finish platinum and pearls.

CIJ: How have you struck that balance?
VB: Indians, as you know, are astrologically driven. There are good times and bad times for everything. Auspicious days and inauspicious days. Metals and stones are an inherent part of this. For platinum to be really accepted, we had to see what planets it was associated with, so last year we contacted an astrology magazine in Bangalore that does research. They found that the two planets associated with platinum are Venus, for the heart, and Mars, for the mind. Its astrological number is five, which is all about financial prosperity. Akshaya Tritiya is a day in South India where the ritual is to bring home a precious metal to mark a new beginning and bring good luck. We found huge relevance with that day. Everything you do on that day is white: You wear white, you offer white food. We printed the findings in the same Bangalore magazine. We've created a deity band, with traditional and more modern designs. This is our opportunity to present platinum in a very Indian context.