For more than 12 years, Ayushi Gupta worked with the materials traditionally associated with fine Indian jewellery: gold, diamonds and polki. When she decided to build her next chapter around silver, the challenge was not learning how to design jewellery. It was whether the design language and clients she had built over the years would follow her into a material often placed in a very different part of the market.
That question became the starting point for Silveda, the New Delhi-based 925 sterling silver jewellery brand Ayushi launched in 2024. Her aim was to bring the finish and visual presence of fine jewellery into a more accessible price category, with original fusion designs created for weddings, celebrations and statement dressing rather than treating silver primarily as casual or everyday jewellery.
The timing is relevant. India's gold market has been dealing with significant affordability pressure: the World Gold Council reported that domestic gold prices in Q2 2026 remained 59% higher than a year earlier, while Indian gold jewellery demand fell 15% year-on-year by volume. Consumers have increasingly responded through lighter pieces, lower-carat products and other ways of managing the cost of jewellery purchases.
Ayushi had begun thinking about that affordability gap before Silveda launched. Her response, however, was not simply to replace one metal with a cheaper one.
Taking a Fine-Jewellery Eye Into Silver
Ayushi's connection to jewellery started through design rather than family inheritance or retail. In her Women Listed Awards application, she describes being drawn to fashion, interiors and visual design from a young age, but identifies an introductory jewellery-design class as the point at which those interests found a more specific direction.
Over the years, she built experience designing gold, diamond and polki pieces. By the time Silveda took shape, she was therefore approaching silver with an established understanding of proportion, occasion jewellery, finishing and how a piece sits as part of an overall look.
This became central to the brand proposition. Silveda describes itself as a designer-led 925 sterling silver jewellery business, with fusion pieces intended to combine traditional references with more contemporary styling. The current Women Listed Fashion & Accessories directory also lists Ayushi Gupta and Silveda within its product-business ecosystem.
But moving from an idea to a finished product proved slower than choosing the material.
Ayushi says it took approximately a year to find artisans who could execute the designs to the standard she wanted. That detail matters because a designer-led jewellery brand is only as differentiated as its ability to translate sketches into repeatable physical products. An intricate idea loses its advantage quickly if the finishing, setting or construction cannot support it.
Rather than building the collection around pieces already circulating widely in the market, Ayushi says she chose to develop designs from her own desk and then build a network of karigars capable of producing them.
Choosing Original Design Over Mass-Market Trends
That decision became one of Silveda's early growth choices.
Silver jewellery is not an empty category. Customers can find products across price points on marketplaces, specialist websites, social media and traditional retail. Competing only on metal or price would therefore give a young brand little protection from comparison.
Ayushi's strategy has been to make design carry more of the value.
In her Awards application, she describes Silveda's pieces as fusion-led and original, with a premium, polished finish intended to feel closer to fine jewellery. The claim that every design is unique to Silveda is a company assertion rather than something that can be independently established across the entire market, but the underlying business choice is clear: the brand wants customers to choose a piece because of the design rather than because it is the cheapest available version of a familiar style.
That distinction also explains why weddings and occasion dressing matter to the company's positioning. Silver becomes more commercially interesting when it is not seen simply as a substitute for gold, but as a separate material capable of carrying statement jewellery at a different price point.
For Ayushi, that required another test: whether clients familiar with her earlier fine-jewellery work would accept the move.
She says the response was stronger than she had feared. Customer feedback is still handled personally, with the brand tracking direct messages, repeat purchases, referrals and occasions where clients return after being complimented on pieces they have worn.
For a young consumer brand, those repeat and word-of-mouth signals are more useful than simply accumulating social-media visibility. They indicate whether the product is beginning to earn recognition independent of the founder's initial network.
Building a Bootstrapped Jewellery Brand
Silveda remains a relatively young business. In her July 2026 Women Listed Awards application, Ayushi described the company as bootstrapped and profitable, operating pan-India with a team of 10-20. She placed annual revenue in the Rs 50 lakh-Rs 1 crore range and reported growth of between 25% and 100% over the previous year. These are founder-reported figures and should be read in that context rather than as independently audited financial data.
Its public visibility has also begun to widen. In April 2026, the Economic Times Women Conclave published Ayushi Gupta of Silveda among its list of ET Inspiring Women Leaders. The listing provides an additional public connection between Ayushi and the brand, although it is better treated as industry visibility than independent assessment of the business.
The next ambition Ayushi describes is more aspirational: moving further into celebrity styling, high-profile wedding dressing and collaborations that can position Silveda alongside luxury occasion jewellery.
That strategy makes sense only if the brand protects the thing it currently relies on most - its design identity. Celebrity visibility can introduce a jewellery label to a larger audience, but it cannot replace product distinction once the audience arrives.
When Luxury Comes From More Than the Metal
Ayushi's founder journey is interesting precisely because she already knew the premium end of jewellery before choosing a more accessible material.
Silveda is not the story of a designer discovering jewellery through silver. It is the story of someone asking which parts of a fine-jewellery experience can remain when the material changes.
The answer she is building lies in design, finishing, artisan execution and how the product is positioned. Her year-long search for the right karigars is as relevant to that proposition as the choice of sterling silver itself, because accessibility without craftsmanship would have created a very different brand.
For women entrepreneurs entering established consumer categories, there is a useful distinction here. Lowering the material cost does not automatically require lowering the brand aspiration. But maintaining that aspiration means giving customers another reason to value the product - through design, function, experience, craftsmanship or some combination of them.
Ayushi Gupta is still early in proving how far that proposition can take Silveda. What she has already done is make a deliberate shift from selling value through precious metal alone to asking design to carry more of the weight.
Discover Ayushi Gupta and Silveda on Women Listed.
