You have picked jewellery. Now you need someone to make it. The first thing to know is that "jewellery manufacturer" is not one kind of business in India. It is three, and they run on three completely different transactions.
In imitation you buy finished pieces off a wholesaler's shelf, a dozen at a time. In anti-tarnish and demi-fine you buy a process, plating job work on brass or steel bodies, usually 100 to 500 pieces at a time. In 925 silver you buy metal by weight plus a making charge, and the real minimum is not a piece count at all, it is a batch weight. Pick the wrong lane for your budget and you will burn three weeks collecting quotes nobody can fill. If the lane itself is still open, settle it first in how to start a jewellery business in India.
Three lanes, three different deals. Imitation: finished trade stock from Sadar Bazaar in Delhi, Bhuleshwar in Mumbai, Burrabazar in Kolkata or the Chilakalapudi belt near Machilipatnam, bought dozen-level per design at roughly ₹30 to ₹150 a piece, in your hands within days. Anti-tarnish and demi-fine: job-work plating on brass or 316L steel bodies, Rajkot for the coating, Moradabad for brass components, roughly 100 to 500 pieces a design, 10 to 21 days. 925 silver: casting in Rajkot or Jaipur, 50 to 100 pieces a design, but the binding constraint is the unit's minimum batch weight, because at about ₹215 a gram for 925 alloy on late-July 2026 silver the metal is most of the cash. Tooling is cheap: a rubber mould runs a few hundred rupees to about ₹1,500, though ring moulds are cut per size, so a seven-size run tools like seven designs. Sampling costs less here than in any other D2C category, which is the advantage most founders waste. Qualify suppliers on process questions, not catalogues. Stage advances against what the supplier has actually bought. And write micron thickness and stone-setting method into the order, because lost stones and tarnish are what comes back.
The three lanes are three different transactions
Founders lose weeks because they walk into all three lanes asking the same question, "what's your MOQ". That question only means something in one of them.
| Lane | What you are actually buying | Who you buy from | Where | Real minimum per design | Lead time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Imitation, finished stock | Finished pieces that already exist | Wholesaler or trading house | Sadar Bazaar (Delhi), Bhuleshwar (Mumbai), Burrabazar (Kolkata), Chilakalapudi near Machilipatnam | 6 to 12 pieces | Same day to 10 days |
| Anti-tarnish, demi-fine | A process applied to bodies | Job-work plater plus a component maker | Rajkot for coating and finishing, Moradabad for brass components | 100 to 500 pieces | 10 to 21 days |
| 925 silver | Metal by weight, plus a making charge | Casting unit | Rajkot (plain, chain, machine-made), Jaipur (stone-set, CAD-heavy) | 50 to 100 pieces, subject to a minimum batch weight | 21 to 35 days |
Read the third row again, because it is the one that costs people money. A casting unit that says "50 pieces a design" and "300 grams minimum per batch" has given you two numbers and only one of them binds. At 4 grams a pendant, 300 grams is 75 pieces. At 2.5 grams a pair of studs, it is 120. The count moves, the cash does not: 300 grams of 925 at roughly ₹215 a gram, the late-July 2026 rate is about ₹64,500 parked in one design before a single making charge. The piece count is a rounding detail. The weight is the wall. Get both in writing and plan against the weight.
The other thing that shifts lane to lane is who carries the risk of a bad piece. In imitation you inspect and take it, and a defective lot is a relationship conversation, not a right. In job work the components are yours, so a botched coating run costs the plater a rework and costs you the metal on anything scrapped. In casting the unit holds your silver for three weeks, which makes it the only lane where a supplier failure is also a cash-flow event. The general shortlist-to-sample method sits in how to find manufacturers and suppliers in India. What follows is what changes in jewellery specifically.
Trader or manufacturer: three questions that tell you in two minutes
Every market is full of people who will happily sell you someone else's production at a markup. That is fine when you are buying finished imitation stock, because a good trading house carries range you would need ten factories to match. It is expensive when you think you are getting a factory price on a private-label run and you are paying a middle layer to forward your drawing. The vocabulary for the difference is in white label vs private label vs OEM.
- "What is the base metal and where does it come from?" A maker answers instantly: brass sheet, white alloy, 316L steel, casting grain, and names the supplier city. A trader goes vague and says "good quality material".
- "Split the price into metal, making and wastage." A casting unit will do it: metal rate per gram on the day, making charge per piece, wastage percentage. A trader quotes one landed number, because that number is where his margin hides.
- "Can you run my CAD file, or only your catalogue designs?" This sorts the room fastest. A unit with a CAD bench and a wax setup makes what you designed. A catalogue-only seller can only sell you what four hundred other sellers are already listing.
Then ask for a GST-registered tax invoice before you commit anything. Plenty of counters in the old lanes will still do the deal in cash. It is cheaper on the day and it costs you the input credit, the paper trail behind any quality claim, and a clean answer when a marketplace audits your sourcing. Seller-side detail is in GST for ecommerce sellers in India.
Supplier Scorecard™: score every shortlisted vendor out of 10 on five things before you discuss price, then let price break the tie. In jewellery the five are: can they answer the process questions, do they issue a proper tax invoice, will they put the spec on the invoice, what is their real minimum stated as both count and weight, and what happens when a lot comes back off-spec. A vendor who is ₹8 a piece cheaper and scores 4 on remedy costs you more than the difference on your first bad batch.
What a mould costs, and why rings tool like footwear
In casting, the per-design fixed cost is the vulcanised rubber mould cut from your master model. It is genuinely cheap, a few hundred rupees up to about ₹1,500 depending on the unit and how complex the piece is. Once cut, that mould injects wax for six pieces or six hundred, and it sits on the unit's shelf waiting for your reorder. This is the reason a 20-design silver capsule is possible on a budget that would not buy one injection tool in a plastics category.
Rings break the rule, and they break it exactly the way shoe soles do. A sole mould is cut per size, so a footwear brand tooling one design across a size run pays for the run, not the design. Ring moulds behave the same way. The master is made at one size, and every other size needs its own master and its own mould, or a CAD-scaled resin print per size. So a pendant is one CAD file, one print, one mould, call it ₹1,000 to ₹2,500 of tooling. The identical ring across seven Indian sizes is one CAD file, seven prints and up to seven moulds, ₹3,500 to ₹13,000, plus seven lots of sample metal and seven size buckets of stock to hold. Same design. Four to five times the tooling and a stocking problem the pendant never had.
The fix is boring and it works. Launch rings adjustable or as open cuffs, where one mould serves every finger. Add fixed sizes only for a design that has already sold, and then only in the three core sizes your own order data names. Buying a full size run on an unproven design is the classic footwear error in a smaller box, and the depth logic in inventory management for D2C brands applies unchanged.
Sampling is cheap here. Almost nobody uses it properly.
This is the category's real structural advantage and it gets wasted constantly. In skincare a sample run means a formulation plus a stability study. In apparel it means a full cut-make-trim setup for one piece. In jewellery a sample is a dozen pieces off a shelf, a ₹150 resin print, or one cast piece.
| Lane | What a sample is | What it costs | What it proves |
|---|---|---|---|
| Imitation | A dozen mixed pieces bought at trade price | ₹400 to ₹1,500 for the lot | Finish, weight in the hand, clasp quality, whether the catalogue photo lies |
| Anti-tarnish job work | 5 to 10 bodies run through the coating | ₹500 to ₹2,000, often a minimum chamber charge rather than a per-piece rate | Colour match, coverage on edges and joints, how it wears on real skin |
| 925 casting | CAD, a resin print, then one cast piece | ₹1,500 to ₹3,000 a design | Proportion, finished weight against your target, setting quality |
Do the arithmetic before you skip it. Sampling twelve designs properly costs ₹15,000 to ₹25,000. The bulk order you are about to place without sampling is ₹1.5 lakh. You are refusing to spend 10% to de-risk the other 90%, on a decision you cannot reverse, in a category where taste turns over every season. The CAD and cast cost bands sit in the ₹5 lakh jewellery launch plan, and the dozen-level version for a first order is in the ₹50,000 version.
The supplier relationships I have watched fail in this category almost never failed on price. They failed because nobody had agreed what "done" meant. In my supply chain years the cheapest control we ever put in was a one-page spec attached to every purchase order, signed before money moved. In jewellery that page is four lines: finished weight with a tolerance, metal or coating spec with an actual number in it, stone setting method with who owns the loss, and what happens to an off-spec lot. Suppliers do not resent that page. They quote better against it, because a vague order is a risk they have to pad. The founders who fight for ₹6 a piece and leave "good quality" as the spec are the ones who end up eating the batch.
Nickel: a returns problem long before it is a legal one
Most Indian imitation is brass or a white alloy, and nickel is usually what makes white alloy white and hard. It is also the commonest contact allergen in jewellery. A customer whose ears go red does not file a compliance complaint. She files a return, and then a one-star review with a photograph attached.
India has no nickel-release rule for jewellery. The EU does, and it is worth knowing even if you never export, because it is the only written definition of "skin safe" the trade actually quotes. Under REACH, nickel release is capped at 0.5 micrograms per square centimetre per week for articles in prolonged skin contact, and 0.2 for posts inserted into pierced ears, and where a non-nickel top coat is used that limit has to hold for at least two years of normal wear. Read the last clause again. The standard is not "it looked fine on day one".
So you have two honest options. Either you make the claim and you can evidence it, with the alloy and coating written on the invoice and a test report from a supplier who has actually run one, or you say nothing about nickel and describe the product for what it is: brass with 18K gold PVD, 316L stainless, 925 silver. "Hypoallergenic" on a listing you cannot back is not marketing, it is a returns liability in a nicer font. The cheapest upgrade in the whole category is the earring post. A 316L steel or 925 post on a brass body costs a few rupees more a pair and removes most of the complaints.
Payment terms, and the advance trap
Advances work differently in each lane, but the trap is always the same shape: money that has left your account and bought nothing except a place in someone's queue.
| Lane | Normal terms | What the advance actually funds | The trap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Imitation trade stock | Full payment against delivery, often on the spot | Nothing, the goods already exist | Paying to "reserve" a lot you have not seen |
| Anti-tarnish job work | Around 50% advance, balance before dispatch | Chamber time and consumables | Your components sitting in someone else's factory with no delivery challan |
| 925 casting | 50 to 70% advance | Silver bought against your order at the day's rate | An advance that runs ahead of the metal actually purchased |
One rule holds across all three: never let your advance exceed the value of what the supplier has actually bought or made for you. A 60% advance on a ₹1.2 lakh casting order is ₹72,000 and it is honest, because the unit buys silver on day one and carries the rate risk with your money. The same 60% on a ₹40,000 plating job is not, because the plater has bought nothing. Ask what the advance funds. A real vendor will tell you, and will stage the balance against dispatch without a fight. When a supplier pushes minimums and terms at you, the script is in MOQ negotiation with suppliers.
One line for your accountant before you scale the demi-fine lane. Plating and polishing performed on goods you own is job work, and because jewellery and imitation jewellery both sit in Chapter 71 of the Customs Tariff, that job work is taxed at 5% under entry 26(i)(c) of Notification 11/2017-Central Tax (Rate), not the 12% residual under 26(id) that a plater who normally coats machine parts will quote you. Check the rate on the invoice. Your finished jewellery still leaves at 3%, so credit builds up faster than you can consume it. That is an inverted duty structure, but do not assume you can refund your way out: in Union of India v. VKC Footsteps the Supreme Court held that unutilised credit on input services is not refundable under it. Raise it with your CA in month one, not in month fourteen when a year of working capital is stuck.
If your first order is under ₹40,000 and no design has proved itself → buy finished imitation stock at dozen level and treat the whole lot as tuition. If one aesthetic has already sold through and you have ₹1 to 2 lakh → move to job-work plating on brass or 316L bodies, because that is the cheapest way to own a spec instead of a shelf. If you have ₹3 lakh-plus of metal cash you can leave parked for 60 days → go to 925 casting, and get both the per-design count and the minimum batch weight before you plan a single design. If a unit will not put the weight floor in writing → you are talking to a trader, keep dialling.
The QC that catches what actually comes back
Two things drive damage and claims in this category. Stones fall out and plating turns. Everything else is noise, so build your checks around those two and stop inspecting for things nobody returns.
Stone setting. Ask how the stones are held before you ask the price. Prong and bezel settings are mechanical and they survive. Glue-set stones are the volume default in imitation and demi-fine, and adhesive is what fails, in a hot courier van, in a monsoon, after four months in a handbag. On receipt take 10% of the lot, or the square root of it if the lot is large, and press-and-twist every stone with a wooden probe. Then pack one piece exactly as a customer would receive it and drop it a metre onto a hard floor. If a stone shifts, the lot goes back for rework before it touches your shelf.
Plating. Put a coating type and a micron floor in the purchase order, never the word "good". BIS publishes IS 4252, the Indian Standard for electroplated coatings of gold and gold alloy for decorative and jewellery use, which sets out coating thickness and gold content requirements. It is a voluntary standard, but naming it turns a vague argument into a contract term, and a serious plater keeps a thickness gauge on the floor and will read the number back to you. The wear-test spec for the anti-tarnish lane, micron bands and salt-spray hours, sits in the ₹1 lakh anti-tarnish plan.
Timing. Inspect at receipt, not at dispatch, and photograph every defect against the design reference the same day. A claim raised on day one with photographs is a rework. The same claim on day twenty is a discount request you will probably lose. And put an anti-tarnish zip pouch in with every plated and silver piece, because sealed stock stays saleable while open stock arrives dull and comes back as "old". Packing that survives an Indian courier network is in ecommerce shipping and packaging protection.
Before any advance, put seven lines on one page and get them signed. Design reference with photo and code. Finished weight in grams with a tolerance, plus or minus 5%. Metal or coating spec carrying a number, 925 stamped, 316L, 18K PVD at a stated micron. Stone type, size and setting method, plus who bears loss in transit. Price split into metal rate per gram on the day, making charge per piece and wastage percentage. Quantity and delivery date, with the remedy for late or off-spec written as rework at their cost. Payment schedule tied to dispatch, not to the calendar. On a 200-piece silver order at 4 grams, a missing weight tolerance is the difference between 800 grams and 880, roughly ₹17,000 you never budgeted.
Commissioning the private-label run before proving you can sell the trade-stock version. A founder with ₹2.5 lakh goes straight to a Rajkot casting unit, commissions 12 designs, pays 60% advance and waits five weeks. Three designs sell. The other nine are ₹1.4 lakh of silver in shapes nobody wanted, and unlike an imitation lot you cannot clear them at ₹99, because the metal alone cost more than that. Melting gets you maybe 80 to 90% of the silver back and none of the making charge. The same ₹2.5 lakh, run as ₹20,000 of samples plus a dozen-level trade-stock test first, would have named the three winners before a mould was cut. Sell the aesthetic first. Own the tooling second.
Execution checklist
- Settle your lane before you dial anyone: finished imitation stock, job-work plating, or 925 casting. Quotes across lanes are not comparable.
- Ask every casting unit for two numbers, minimum pieces per design and minimum batch weight in grams, and plan your cash against the weight.
- Run the three process questions on the phone before you travel: base metal and its source, price split into metal, making and wastage, and whether they can run your CAD file.
- Insist on a GST tax invoice from the first order, including in the wholesale lanes where cash is normal.
- Sample before you commit: a dozen trade pieces, 5 to 10 coated bodies, or CAD plus resin print plus one cast piece. Budget about 10% of the bulk order.
- Launch rings adjustable or as open cuffs. Cut per-size moulds only for designs that have already sold.
- Write the one-page purchase order: weight tolerance, metal or micron spec, stone setting and who owns loss, three-line price, dates, remedy, payment schedule.
- Stage advances against what the supplier has actually bought, and ask what the advance funds before you send it.
- Inspect at receipt on 10% of the lot: press-and-twist every stone, drop one packed piece a metre, check the plating reading against the order.
- Say nothing about nickel unless you can evidence it, and pack an anti-tarnish pouch with every plated and silver piece.
Your next action
Pick your lane, then send an identical one-page brief to five suppliers today. Same photo, same target weight, same quantity at two levels, same three questions. Do not negotiate yet, just collect. Inside 48 hours you will have five quotes you can genuinely compare, and the two or three vendors who split their price into metal, making and wastage will have separated themselves from the ones who sent back a single number. That comparison, not a search result, is how you find your maker. The sourcing and negotiation frameworks referenced here come from Ravikant Tyagi's operating system for founders doing exactly this.
If you'd like the complete execution system, calculators, SOPs, templates and operating frameworks behind this process, continue inside D2C Acquisition.Lab.
