How An Indian Jewellery Brand Went Global | Anushree Pacheriwal, Tiramisu

Her first 100 customers were at Meta headquarters in Menlo Park. She had never planned it that way.

Anushree Pacheriwal co-founded Tiramisu in 2024 with her husband. She started with 13 lakhs, built a community of over 5,000 women before opening a store, and achieved a 35% repeat rate that Ragini called unheard of in the category. The brand now has around 30 retail points including a standalone store at Chennai airport.

Tiramisu sits in demi-fine jewellery, the category between fashion jewellery and fine jewellery. Gold-plated, handcrafted, real-looking pieces that a woman can wear from a 2am flight to an 8am office meeting and not take off for a week. The category barely existed as a named thing in India when Anushree started. That was most of the point.

She spoke to Ragini about why she chose gold-plated over silver or gold, how celebrity placements happened without a PR budget, and why the first year of any brand should be treated as a focus group rather than a revenue target.

She found her first customers at Meta headquarters

Anushree did not launch in India first. Her first set of customers were women at Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California, where she used her brother's credentials to get in. She took exhibitions to California, Paris and Dubai before bringing the model back to India. By January 2025, the first Paris pop-up drew around 200 women, most of them French, not Indian.

The logic was deliberate. She wanted to know whether the product had universal appeal before localising the marketing. French women buying Indian handcrafted gold-plated jewellery without any cultural context told her what the product could be at its broadest. She brought that confidence back and used it to pitch India.

Why gold-plated and not silver or gold

Silver was profitable but the category was going up in price. Fine gold required experience she did not have. Gold-plated sat in a gap: real-looking jewellery at a price point that both a millennial with a high-spending lifestyle and a Gen Z buyer could access. The finishing and craftsmanship, she is explicit, had to be as good as fine jewellery. Not almost as good. As good.

The category she named for herself is stress-free jewellery. A piece that looks real, travels well, survives a long-haul flight, and does not make the wearer anxious about losing it. The 24-hour earring collection, one of their recent launches, is built around exactly this: a solitaire you can sleep in and wear to a board meeting.

Build the community before you build the store

Anushree spent the first phase of the business building a community of over 5,000 women through exhibitions and direct sales before committing to a retail location. Her reasoning: when you open a store, you want a customer base that already exists, not one you have to create from a sign.

That first phase was also the most honest market research available. Customers who buy at an exhibition, in person, with no return policy safety net, are telling you something a survey cannot. She treated every sale as a data point and every non-sale as a more important one.

Celebrity placements without a PR budget

Ragini noticed the volume of celebrity placements on Tiramisu's Instagram and asked how a brand less than two years old was achieving it. Anushree's answer is one of the most transferable things in the episode: the most important thing is picking the person whose audience matches your product, not the person with the most followers.

She gave pieces to people she genuinely thought would wear them, without scripts, without contracts for the first wave. An A-list celebrity wearing your product organically, she said, is a validation that no paid campaign produces in the same way. It is not because of who they are. It is because they chose it.

The 35% repeat rate and what it means

Ragini described a 35% repeat purchase rate as unheard of in the jewellery category. For context, jewellery is one of the lowest-repeat categories in retail because purchases are often occasion-driven. A 35% repeat rate means more than a third of buyers come back without being prompted by a wedding or a birthday.

Anushree attributes this to the everyday positioning. A product worn only at weddings gets purchased once a year at most. A product worn daily or weekly gets replaced, gifted and added to. The repeat rate is a direct consequence of building for the daily occasion rather than the special one.

The airport as a retail format

Tiramisu now has a standalone store at Chennai airport and a presence at other airport retail points. Anushree describes the airport as one of her most instructive retail formats because of how it compresses the buying decision. A traveller has no time for comparison. They respond entirely to what immediately resonates.

The airport taught her that emotional buying under time pressure is real and frequent. A woman boarding a flight, seeing a piece she connects with, and buying it in three minutes tells you something about the product that a carefully considered purchase on a website does not. It also tells you that the product works at first glance, which is the hardest brief in jewellery.

One year as a focus group

Her clearest advice for anyone starting a brand is to treat the first year as a focus group. Be present at every customer interaction. Explain your vision. Listen to what people say when they put the piece back down. That information is irreplaceable and cannot be recovered later through surveys or analytics.

She put 13 lakhs into the first three months, including her own salary when she eventually started paying herself again. The bootstrapped discipline shaped how she thinks about cost today: every rupee of marketing spend is measured against repeat, not against first purchase, because first purchase can be manufactured and repeat cannot.

Listen to the full conversation with Anushree Pacheriwal on Fynd Out with Ragini.