New Delhi, Sept. 15 -- CaratLane was born in 2008, at a time when buying jewellery online was unheard of, especially in India. It was shaped by the goal for 'democratising' jewellery, particularly in the 25-40 years demographic, by using the potential of technology to create a better and convenient customer experience. By starting as a pure online brand, CaratLane could offer modern designs, competitive pricing, and complete transparency. It also meant that customer behavior was digitally captured from day one, offering insights that traditional jewelers didn't have. The early years were about building trust, innovating around digital catalogs and design centers, and proving that jewelry could, in fact, be bought online, Gurukeerthi Gurunathan, co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO), told TechCircle in an interview. Gurunatha shares CaratLane's tech-first strategy, from leveraging AI and data platforms to building omnichannel experiences, and reflects on how retail behemoth Titan's acquisition in 2016 accelerated the brand's growth while keeping its startup DNA intact. Omnichannel and AI strategy For the first five years, CaratLane was a purely online platform. Moving on to the next stage of expansion led to the opening of its first design centre in Delhi. "Customers could walk in, browse our catalog on a large Microsoft Surface screen, add products to their cart, and then complete their transactions digitally. It gave them the confidence of speaking to jewelry consultants face-to-face, while still keeping the purchase process online," Gurunathan said. Around this time, the leadership realised that customers still wanted to see real jewellery and make real transactions in-store. So CaratLane opened our first full-fledged showroom in Delhi; today, there are more than 330 showrooms across the country. As of today, CaratLane operates on an omnichannel strategy, integrating both online and in-store modes of operation. Although it was not a smooth transition. In the early years, CaratLane ran retail and online as separate businesses. They had separate teams, targets, and organisational structures. Naturally, this created friction as stores and online competitors competed for the same customers. "The turning point came during the COVID period, when everything became digital. That's when we realised we had to truly integrate and become omnichannel. This shift required a cultural change within the organization, but thankfully, our in-house engineering talent gave us a big advantage. We built two key omnichannel levers: customers can start their journey anywhere and continue it anywhere; and offering customers a single login so that they can view 100% of our national inventory, not just what's in their local store," he said. Over time, CaratLane layered on more experiences: booking products for trial at a store of choice, scheduling try-at-home, checking stock availability citywide, and even exchanging inventory across locations. Further, AI has been a great lever for CaratLane for the past few years. "AI has been an integral part of our journey for many years. In fact, we've had a dedicated machine learning team for close to eight years now, so in that sense, AI has always been embedded in our operations," said Gurunathan. Some of the key applications of AI and ML are prospect identification, smart inventory allocation, creative marketing, and customer insights and engagements.
Beyond these organisational applications, AI has also permeated daily workflows. Teams use generative AI for content creation, ideation, and design, while engineers increasingly leverage AI for code development. Open source technologies
Speaking of their overall tech strategy, Guruthan and his team favour a hybrid approach that balances open-source and enterprise-grade applications. "For example, financial applications need to be enterprise-grade for robustness and compliance, while other areas can run more cost-effectively on open-source. Different organizations will make different choices depending on their stage of growth, regulatory requirements, and whether they are part of a larger enterprise group. In our case, the cloud-first strategy combined with hybrid adoption has given us both agility and resilience," he explained. In the early days, CaratLane ran on Magento's enterprise platform before moving to the open-source community version. From there, the company's stack evolved significantly: Node.js, React, MySQL, and other open-source frameworks became its core. The Titan-owned brand has also built several of its own applications in-house, including CRM and point-of-sale (POS) system. Every CaratLane showroom today runs on a React Native iPad application developed in-house. "Our philosophy has always been to build on the cloud, host our own applications, and maximize the flexibility and scalability it provides." Gurunathan claims that CaratLane was among the earliest adopters of cloud, starting way back in 2012, before the largest provider, Amazon Web Services, had a presence in India. At the time, AWS operated out of Singapore. "Over the years, as AWS expanded into Mumbai, Hyderabad, and other regions. By around 2013, we had already moved fully to the cloud, which gave us the foundation to think differently about every aspect of our technology," he added. Some of CaratLane's other technology partnerships include Kissflow for workflow automation and jewellery sector-specific enterprise resource planning; Freshworks for customer support and ticketing; and MoEngage for customer engagement and targetted intervention. Technology investment CaratLane's technology team has around 220 staffers working across product and UX, IT operations, DevOps, tech support, and more. The composition includes product managers, UX specialists, backend and frontend engineers, Android and iOS developers, a machine learning team, and a data platform team that manages the data lake and core infrastructure. Looking ahead, Gurunathan said that the plan is to keep expanding, especially in areas like data, machine learning, and customer experience, as these are critical for the company's next phase of growth. Responding to a question on the company's overall tech investment, Gurunathan broke down the company's technology investments into three buckets: cloud infrastructure, SaaS applications, and people. Cloud costs have remained flat for the past two years thanks to optimisation, but are expected to rise as AI workloads scale. SaaS spending, he noted, typically expands in line with the growth of users and transactions. The biggest investment, however, continues to be people.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from TechCircle.