Melorra: For Women In Transition

With her brand Melorra, Saroja Yeramilli is ditching traditional techniques for 3D printing technology to craft jewellery.

Who says that gold and diamond jewellery has to be boring? At least, Saroja Yeramilli does not think so. The good thing is that she did not stop at thinking, but decided to do something about it.

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In 2015, Saroja overheard banter between a mother and her daughter at a jewellery store. The mother was trying to convince her reluctant daughter to buy fine jewellery. The daughter was not keen on buying something that does not suit her western outfit and corporate setup. Saroja observed that women’s lives have dramatically changed. Women are far more social, a lot more educated, extremely well travelled and techies at heart, and yet jewellery companies are not taking notice of them and their shifting preferences. They were still churning out traditional designs.

“India has the maximum amount of gold and diamond jewellery locked up in banks as compared to any country in the world,” Saroja says. The reason is that design ethos, manufacturing techniques, retailing standards, pricing has not changed to cater to the modern Indian women. This thought gave birth to a business plan, which has the potential of disrupting the jewellery market.

Saroja’s two-decade-long experience in the corporate sector including a stint with Tanishq helped her shape the business. Her calling card includes initiating Tanishq stores in the US and making it the first retail company from India to do so. This gave her a vantage viewpoint of the domestic as well as the foreign jewellery market.

However, unlike most aspiring entrepreneurs, she had an unusually smooth journey and it’s also one of those rare instances where the seed funding happened in less than four months. In mid 2015, she managed to raise about $5 million, and in that moment, we knew, that this woman was here to stay. The investors were delighted to be a part of Melorra’s story because they felt that Saroja had the right credentials to build an online prêt line, which hasn’t been a very successful story in India so far.

A year later, she, along with former colleague R. Krishna Kumar, leveraged her business smarts and the rapidly scaling e-commerce movement in India to build a native digital jewellery brand that brings the latest trends at affordable prices. “I felt that with my kind of experience in scaling businesses profitably as well as building many marquee brands in India, I was quite ready to start my own brand and that’s how I came up with the idea of Melorra,” says Saroja. With an ambitious aim of redefining what jewellery has meant to Indian women so far, it takes only a week for Melorra to turn a hot Instagram trend into an accessible one.

At a studio in Bengaluru, Saroja works with a team of seasoned designers with several years of experience in India, the US and the UK. The cardinal rule in their process is trend spotting. Their team spots styles that make the cut for today’s fashion scene across global runways and interpret the same to create jewellery collections that change every week. These trends are then curated under different categories, which give the design team cues on the materials, motifs, colours and patterns. “We stick to a consumer-centric approach, where our designers get regular feedback from young, modern women in order to be in sync with their needs.”

From detailed technical drawings of each piece to sketches, the designs are brought to life through Computer Aided Design and further turned into virtual 3D models rendered with real material input. The designers at Melorra use an innovative 3D printing technology to manufacture intricate and accurate jewellery as and when a customer places order. 3D printers fire out fine layers of gold or silver dust to build up solid objects that look and feel exactly like traditionally cast pieces.

Offering minimalistic and contemporary jewellery, delivered right at doorsteps, the label believes in see-now-buy-now fashion. Sleek and stylish by day and elegant by night, these pieces can take you from desk to date with ease. The order can be placed from an app or a website. The young brand has earned a sturdy clientele. Take for example, its latest collection, Millennial Pink. The jewellery has a dash of salmon, blush, bubble gum, and coral colours representing every woman’s individuality. Saroja is now toying with the idea of launching an international website in the coming year to cater to a global audience.

Melorra crafts beautiful pieces of bespoke, wearable art that connect on a deeply personal level with the wearer. It tells us that we don’t need an occasion to treat ourselves to jewellery and that we don’t need to save up for months to buy a pair of diamond earrings. The rules have changed for good and Melorra is right at its centre.

From the August 2017 issue of L’Officiel India.