From Gap to Category Leader - Palmonas and the Rise of Accessible Fine Jewellery in India

For decades, jewellery in India meant one of two things: fine gold pieces passed down as heirlooms, or cheap fashion accessories that tarnish after a wash. Working millennial and Gen Z women who wanted something beautiful, durable, and affordable enough for daily wear were largely out of luck.

Palmonas was built for her.

At Vertex Growth, we are proud to back Palmonas, India’s fastest-growing digital-first, omnichannel jewellery brand. The company occupies a category its founders call “demi-fine”: jewellery crafted with 14–18K gold vermeil and 9K gold at price points between US$25–250, designed not for the wedding aisle but for every day. It is design-forward, durable, and genuinely accessible, filling a gap the Indian market has been waiting to fill.

A Market in Transition

India’s jewellery market is one of the largest globally and is projected to grow at 12–14% CAGR to US$130–140 billion by 2029. The more important shift, however, is not the size of the market. It is the nature of demand.

With gold prices up significantly in recent periods, younger Indian consumers are trading down from traditional fine jewellery but trading up from fast fashion. They want pieces they can wear to the office, on a date, and to a festival: jewellery that says something about who they are, not just what they own. This shift from asset-led to adornment-led purchasing is structural, not cyclical, and it is creating a whitespace that brands like Palmonas were born to occupy.

India’s daily-wear jewellery market reached US$27 billion in 2024, growing at 17% CAGR. Within this, the accessible premium segment, comprising demi-fine and lab-grown diamond jewellery, is expanding 2–3× faster than the overall market, led by digital-first brands. Palmonas is not chasing a trend. It is defining a category.

The Palmonas Difference

Founded in 2022, Palmonas has rapidly established itself as the category leader in the demi-fine segment. The brand has scaled consistently since launch, driven by strong product-market fit, healthy unit economics, and a loyal repeat-purchase customer base. Contribution margins are broadly positive across both online and offline channels.

What sets Palmonas apart is its omnichannel conviction. At a time when most Indian D2C brands were doubling down on online-only playbooks, Palmonas recognised early that jewellery needs to be seen, touched, and tried on. They opened their first store in 2023 and have since scaled to 58 self-operated stores across seven major cities: Pune, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Gurugram, and Noida. Stores reach profitability quickly, with an average payback period of nine months from launch, and 70% of walk-in customers first discovered the brand online, validating a truly integrated omnichannel flywheel.

Celebrity Co-Ownership Done Right

One of Palmonas’ most distinctive assets is Shraddha Kapoor, who joined as Co-Founder in March 2024 with a significant equity stake. Shraddha is not a brand ambassador. She is an owner, and that distinction matters.

With 95 million Instagram followers, Shraddha is the most-followed woman in India and the most-followed Bollywood celebrity globally. Palmonas is marketed as “her brand”, and her content features it organically across her personal platforms. The result has been authentic brand credibility and materially lower customer acquisition costs during the brand’s most critical early phase.

We have seen this model succeed globally. Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty, Kim Kardashian’s SKIMS, and Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty have become multi-billion dollar businesses precisely because their celebrity founders do not just promote, they own. India’s demi-fine jewellery market had no equivalent. Palmonas changes that.

“In India, there was no one like Palmonas in the jewellery space — not just a celebrity ambassador, but a true celebrity-owned brand. Globally, we’ve seen this model work with Rihanna and Selena Gomez. It’s not just about ownership — it’s about authenticity. Consumers feel a genuine affinity when the celebrity and the brand naturally fit, and that’s what drives real brand pull.”

— Calvin Tan, Director, Investment

The founding team is also managing the natural risk of celebrity dependency with clear-eyed discipline. Multiple brand ambassadors now cover different jewellery lines, and the company is actively building a product-led brand identity that extends beyond any single personality. The brand is built to outlast the moment.

Why We Invested

Our conviction in Palmonas rests on three pillars.

• The category is structurally underserved.

  The demi-fine and accessible premium segment is growing 2–3× faster than India’s overall jewellery market, fuelled by rising incomes, gold price inflation, and a generational shift in how Indian women think about jewellery. Palmonas is one of the few challenger brands operating at meaningful scale with a true omnichannel model in this space.

• The unit economics are genuinely exceptional.

  Jewellery is one of the few consumer verticals where structurally high gross margins are achievable at scale, creating a durable path to profitability even through aggressive store expansion. Palmonas’ offline stores achieve rapid payback from launch, a discipline that is rare in Indian consumer growth.

• The team executes.

  The husband-and-wife founding duo brings proven D2C execution experience and a clear-eyed vision for Palmonas’ next phase: continuing to scale their store footprint while launching a 9K fine gold line as the brand’s second growth curve. Their roadmap to IPO readiness is grounded in fundamentals, not aspiration.

At Vertex Growth, we back category leaders built on conviction and craft. Palmonas embodies both, turning a timeless Indian passion for jewellery into a modern, design-first brand that a new generation of Indian women can truly call their own.

Executive Director, Investment, Vertex Growth