From Legacy to Lab-Grown, CKC Rewrites the New Rules of Luxury

Traditionally, jewellery might have been the starting point for a wedding or engagement look, with the outfit built around it. Today, he sees the sequence being reversed among a younger generation. The outfit comes first, followed by jewellery that is expected to complement it while also making the wearer stand out.

“I think today’s luxury is more in terms of something that is very different,” says Chaitanya . “It could be in material, it could be in style, it could be in fashion, or it could be something complementing them already.”

He sees a generation that wants its jewellery to be visible and distinctive rather than simply conventional. “They want to be able to be seen or want to be visible and it should be something that’s distinctively standing out,” he says.

That changing idea of distinction is also playing out in the diamond business, although Chaitanya is careful not to describe the growing presence of lab-grown diamonds as a replacement for natural stones. “There’s no shift. It’s an addition,” he says.

For C. Krishniah Chetty, natural diamonds, he says, will continue to remain an important part of the business and of luxury. Lab-grown diamonds were introduced as another option, particularly for a young population for whom a natural diamond may not always be financially accessible.

“Because today, India is a very young population and not everyone can afford a natural diamond,” he says. “And today everybody wants a 50 cents or a 1 carat diamond ring for their proposals or their weddings or engagements. And today you have the opportunity of that where you can make a lot more affordable.”

The result, in his view, is not simply a different way of buying diamonds, but a wider pool of consumers who can enter the category. “There are a lot of new clients who are now coming in because this option is available,” he says.

Chaitanya is also cautious about attaching a simple sustainability label to lab-grown diamonds. For him, the conversation needs more nuance.

“I think that sustainability is something that’s quite relative,” he says, pointing to the machinery and chemicals involved in producing lab-grown diamonds. “I don’t believe the word sustainable is the right word. But I think that it’s a lot more controlled environment.”

What matters, he says, is that consumers understand what they are buying rather than simply accepting a label. “The reality is that I think the today’s shopper wants to be conscious. But at the same time, they need to be informed what conscious means.”

Technology is another part of this changing luxury equation. At C. Krishniah Chetty, Chaitanya says, artificial intelligence (AI), is increasingly being viewed as a tool for speed, customisation and analysis rather than as something separate from the traditional jewellery-making process.

The change is particularly apparent in customised jewellery. Earlier, a customer could meet a salesperson, have a design sketched by hand, have it rendered and then converted into a CAD design before seeing the proposed piece. The process could take anywhere from an hour to several days.

“Now you are able to do the whole thing, and you don’t have to be an artist or a person who went through, you know, how to make jewelry by hand,” Chaitanya says. With salespeople having access to phones, cloud platforms and connectivity, changes requested by a customer can be incorporated into a prompt and an image generated in less than a minute.

“You are able to actually take orders, and you are able to convince the clients by looking at the image. And we are cutting down a lot of expenses, time and effort,” he says.

Speed, he believes, matters because the customer can lose interest if a decision takes too long. AI is also being used to analyse information and data in greater depth, changing not only the customer-facing side of the business but the way information is processed internally.

For Chaitanya , the bigger question is therefore not whether AI will affect the jewellery industry, but whether people working in it will learn to use it. “They now have to really learn how to use AI. If they don’t learn to use AI, they will get left behind,” he says. “And today I feel that AI is not the issue, it’s how to utilise it.”

His assessment is straight forward: “I don’t think AI will replace jobs, but it will replace you with someone smarter, younger, if you are not able to utilise it the right way.”

For a jewellery house that has been around for 155 years, the need to adapt is hardly new. C. Krishniah Chetty’s endurance, Chaitanya says, comes down to the ability to maintain the strength of the organisation while keeping pace with changing styles and technology.

“First of all, for any company to last this long, there’s only one thing I would say. It’s hard to stop love,” he says. But affection for a brand, in his view, has to be supported by the people behind it. “We have to ensure that everything internally is good from our teams to keeping up with the styles and technology or whatever it is as of now. We have to stay abreast.”

He puts particular emphasis on the organisation itself. “I think that it all comes down to the people who are within the organisation. If it’s strong, everything else will be strong. And that’s the foundation that we have always had.”

The relationship with customers is equally important. Chaitanya describes it as a process of nurturing, staying in touch and making clients feel valued at a time when loyalty is difficult to secure.

“Today, for any brand, loyalty is very hard to come by,” he says. For him, the fact that customers continue to feel a connection with the house is part of what allows it to remain relevant across generations.

Chaitanya is the sixth generation of the business, and he describes his role not simply as preserving what came before but as using it as the starting point for what comes next. “One part of it is, yes, we are custodians of what’s been built,” he says, before going on to say, “And that’s something that cannot be taken for granted. I think that is the foundation of what is yet to come.”

The past, in his view, is not something a legacy business can leave behind. “We need to use that as a space to propel us into a lot more,” he says. “You can’t go where you are going as long as you know where you came from.”

That approach extends to the way the house thinks about relevance. Chaitanya says its roots provide the credibility, but staying relevant requires the organisation to empower its teams and factories to experiment with materials, technology and artificial intelligence. “To stay relevant is just being more efficient and faster,” he says.

That willingness to experiment can also be seen in crash.club, the venture associated with Chaitanya , where the questions are as much about what jewellery can become as what it has traditionally been. That spirit of experimentation has also shaped crash.club’s work with lab-grown diamonds. In consecutive years, the venture sold what it describes as India’s two largest lab-grown diamonds, a 20.06-carat emerald-cut stone in 2024 followed by a 21.82-carat round brilliant-cut diamond in 2025. It also created a self-supporting all-diamond ring made from a single lab-grown diamond, without a metal setting, pushing the question of how far the material could be taken in jewellery design.

For Chaitanya , experimentation is part of a broader willingness to ask questions rather than simply follow established conventions.

That thinking extends beyond the product itself. The name crash.club comes from his fascination with rhinos, which began when he was 13 and saw a white rhino during his first trip to Africa. A group of rhinos, he explains, is called a crash, while the club refers to the customers who become part of it.

He says a portion of the venture’s revenue has gone towards rhino conservation since 2013, including work with WWF. He describes contributions towards black rhino conservation, anti-poaching cameras, ranger training and testing intended to prevent infections among the animals.

The story of crash.club also reflects the way Chaitanya talks about luxury more broadly. The product, technology and consumer may change, but the idea is to give the business a reason to exist beyond the object itself.

That question of what comes next becomes particularly relevant when Chaitanya looks at the future of lab-grown diamonds in India. He expects the category to expand significantly, driven by India’s young population, economies of scale, investment into the sector and increased production capacity.

“I think there’s going to be a massive growth because the population is young.” He estimates that the lab-grown diamond industry could grow “by at least 6x in the next couple of years”, while stressing that this is his own estimate based on what he is seeing in the market, including expansion, outside investment and the increasing number of machines being purchased in India to produce lab-grown diamonds.

For Chaitanya , then, the new rules of luxury are not necessarily about abandoning what came before. They are about adding new possibilities to an established foundation. Natural diamonds can coexist with lab-grown. Craftsmanship can sit alongside artificial intelligence. A 155-year-old business can retain its history while experimenting with new materials and technologies. And luxury itself can move from being defined primarily by heritage and rarity to being about how distinctive, relevant and personal an object feels to the person buying it.

The underlying principle remains much the same as the one Chaitanya applies to the business he inherited: know where you came from, but do not mistake preservation for standing still.