Everyone Told Her Marketplaces Don't Work for Jewellery. INHANSS Tested the Assumption on Myntra

Most early-stage jewellery founders are told to stay away from marketplaces. Returns are heavy, price comparison is instant, margins get complicated, and the customer belongs to the platform rather than the brand. Amita Roy heard all of it before she listed INHANSS on Myntra, and she writes that none of it struck her as unreasonable. What bothered her was a different risk, one she says founders discuss far less often: rejecting a channel before the customer has had a chance to say whether it works.

INHANSS is still early-stage, and Roy describes the marketplace team as largely herself and two freshers, learning catalogue, advertising, settlements, pricing, returns, inventory and marketplace search while the rest of the business kept running.

The first outside signal came from the platform itself. INHANSS was selected into Myntra's Rising Stars ecosystem, which Roy reports brought both support and advertising credits through the initial learning period. Selection into that programme is Myntra's own read on which young brands are worth backing, and for a brand with no marketplace history it was the first indication that the experiment was worth continuing.

The signal Roy found more interesting came from search behaviour.

In the search insights Myntra shares with sellers, she reports that INHANSS began surfacing among the top-clicked brands on several non-branded queries. On "crystal jewellery set" she reports the brand appearing alongside Peora and Anouk. On "crystal ring," alongside Swarovski and Svarn Jewels. Colour-led searches, including black, brown and orange jewellery, showed a similar pattern.

The number that reframed the exercise for her was the split between paid and organic. Across the wider search dataset analysed, Roy reports that approximately 77% of impressions and 67% of clicks were organic rather than sponsored.

Her reading of that is deliberately narrow. She writes that it does not mean INHANSS has cracked Myntra. It means the assumption she started with deserved testing.

Three lessons came out of it.

The first is not to inherit somebody else's conclusion. "Marketplaces don't work for jewellery" collapses too many variables into one sentence: which jewellery, at what price point, at what gross margin, at what return rate, for which customer. A channel is not profitable or unprofitable on its own. Suitability sits in the interaction between product economics and how people actually shop on that platform. For INHANSS, Roy writes, a catalogue built around colour and styling choice started behaving less like assortment depth and more like search-market fit, because the customer was not searching for the brand

name at all. She was searching for a crystal set, a pearl necklace, or a look that matched an outfit.

The second is about ownership. The standard objection to marketplaces is that the customer belongs to the platform, which Roy accepts as technically true. But customers have arrived in INHANSS's own chats and content and mentioned, sometimes only after the conversation had already started, that they had bought from the brand on Myntra. She is careful not to overstate it, noting the loop has not been quantified and that not every marketplace customer becomes a direct one. The question she now adds is whether the platform introduced the right customer to the brand, not only whether the brand owns that customer afterwards.

The third is the one she would most want another founder to keep. Marketplace dashboards make orders, GMV, clicks and ad ROI easy to celebrate, and none of those figures automatically mean money was made. Roy separates orders from delivered orders, delivered from retained, GMV from settlement, settlement from profit, and platform-reported ad ROI from actual contribution. Even an arrangement described as zero commission, she writes, can still carry marketing contributions, fixed fees, logistics, taxes, payment charges, reverse costs, advertising and returns. The question that matters is what stays with the business once all of it has been deducted.

Out of that, Roy offers five questions she would now ask before scaling any marketplace:

1. Is there genuine customer demand, visible in organic search and click behaviour rather than only in ad-driven orders?

2. Which products naturally work on the platform, instead of uploading the full catalogue and assuming every SKU deserves equal visibility?

3. What does contribution look like on retained orders, after returns, rather than on shipped orders?

4. Is paid media creating incremental demand or replacing organic demand?

5. What strategic asset is being built: profit, organic ranking, brand discovery, customer acquisition, geographic reach or marketplace credibility?

If none of those hold, she writes, more GMV is unlikely to be the fix.

There has been measurable movement alongside the search visibility. INHANSS entered Myntra at the Bronze seller tier and moved into Silver within its first few months on the platform. Across the April to July build-out, Roy reports roughly 45% average month-on-month growth. The next operating milestone is Gold, though she is clear that tier progression matters only if profitability, catalogue health and retained customer economics improve alongside it.

The experiment is not finished, and Roy says so plainly. Catalogue improvements are still pending, returns need to come down, and paid advertising has to prove itself once it is funded increasingly from the brand's own pocket.

Her closing point is about method rather than marketplaces. A founder does not need to know whether an experiment will work before starting it. They need to know how they will recognise it working once the data arrives. ~Editor Shobhit Mehandiratta