The Clicks That Weren't Paid For

INHANSS enters the D2C Brand Champion category on a quarter its founder describes as its most diversified yet.

For most jewellery brands selling on a large marketplace, visibility is something you buy. In her nomination for the D2C Brand Champion category, Amita Roy makes close to the opposite argument for INHANSS.

Roy writes that around 77% of INHANSS impressions and 67% of clicks on Myntra were organic during the quarter, based on figures she reports exporting from Myntra's partner portal. The same data, she writes, showed INHANSS appearing among the most clicked names across several non-branded jewellery searches. Meta, she reports, remains the brand's only paid acquisition channel.

The quarter's movement, all self-reported, is in the rates rather than the totals. Operating revenue rose 33.6% between June and August. AOV improved 19.4%. The repeat purchase rate moved from 23.17% to 25.92%, which is the number Roy leans on hardest, since it points at customers returning rather than customers arriving. On Myntra specifically, she reports 44.6% revenue growth across the same three months and a seller tier upgrade from Bronze to Silver by June. Ten of the brand's live sales channels generated orders during the quarter, across 686 net operating orders.

Offline, she reports completing a 377-piece retail stock deployment for INHANSS's third physical retail presence, in Kolkata, scheduled to open on 4 September, taking the brand into a new offline geography.

What Roy returns to repeatedly is how small the operating team is. INHANSS runs with a team of just two freshers, with AI functioning as an additional execution layer across product imagery, listings, website development, content and founder workflows. Roy writes that this system has allowed a very small team to operate a catalogue of 1,315 SKUs across 470 designs and more than 86 colourways with far greater execution capacity.

The next move is a category shift rather than a channel one. Roy writes that INHANSS is expanding into handmade handloom sarees through a manufacturing partnership with a Noida-based handloom manufacturer, with exclusive designs developed for and sold under the INHANSS label through its own D2C channels. Beyond that sits crystal-integrated sarees, carrying the same crystal and colour language from the jewellery onto the garment. The first look is being developed for a public reveal in early September, with the Unhu Startup Emporium named as one of the first live testing grounds.

That decision, she writes, came out of watching customers in person. Repeated observation at the Emporium and conversations with existing customers showed how naturally women pair the jewellery with sarees and respond to colour-led styling. The commercial hypothesis follows from there: own more of the styling occasion, with the aim of increasing basket value while giving customers a more complete styling solution.

Roy is direct about how much of this traces back to the community. She reports Unhu-linked revenue growing close to 3.8x between June and August. Across nine Growth Circle sessions with Kshitij Doval, she writes, a seven-customer PMF exercise surfaced a trust and expectation gap in four of the seven interviews, leading to stronger visual proof and follow-up systems, while positioning work moved INHANSS from "handmade jewellery" to something she now describes as looks-first and styling-led. She is also onboarding a performance marketing partner found within the community, and reports several fellow founders styling and publicly crediting the brand on their own channels.

Her contribution runs the other way too. Roy holds media responsibility within Unhu, coordinating across the Delhi and Dehradun teams on four Founder Spotlights and four Startup News stories this quarter, alongside content for the magazine. She currently ranks first on the Unhu app both all time and for the week.

Her case for the award does not rest on size. The quarter, as she puts it, was about becoming "clearer, more efficient, more discoverable and more repeatable." ~Editor Shobhit Mehandiratta