Brand Saga Latest Stories

Brand Saga: The marketing and celebrity playbook behind GIVA’s rise

From digital-first beginnings to a 200-store footprint, GIVA leveraged influencer-led campaigns, celebrity tie-ups, and a culture-driven marketing strategy to make silver jewellery aspirational and accessible across India.

author-image
Pranali Tawte
New Update
Brand Saga GIVA

The arrival of the wedding season brings a renewed focus on jewellery, with brides, guests, and gift-givers searching for designs that reflect both tradition and personal style. It’s not just one day or one purchase, it’s a calendar of occasions: engagements, mehendi, sangeet, pheras, and receptions, each driving an emotion-heavy spend on jewellery. Amid this seasonal sparkle, let’s take a look at one such jewellery brand, GIVA,  that aims to balance the wedding rush with everyday demand to position itself as a brand rooted in meaning, reflected right from its name.

Founded with the belief that jewellery should celebrate the beauty of life in its simplest moments, GIVA’s name draws inspiration from the Sanskrit word “jeeva” (जीव), meaning life. The brand’s initial rhombus logo aimed to capture this essence, symbolising the magic of tiny sparkles: a twinkling eye, a warm smile, a fleeting moment of joy.

Before GIVA took shape, its founders Ishendra Agarwal, Nikita Prasad, and Aditya Labroo conducted extensive market research to decode how modern Indian consumers were evolving. The findings revealed that while consumers in the United States spend around ₹9,000-₹10,000 on average per jewellery purchase, Indian consumers spend nearly three times that amount. This research became the foundation of its marketing and digital strategy. Jewellery in India has long carried both emotional and financial weight, gold and silver are often bought to commemorate milestones or as investments for the future. But GIVA’s team discovered a new mindset emerging where consumers were open to exploring jewellery that wasn’t gold, yet still valuable and meaningful.

Another insight was the reluctance to buy gold jewellery online. Artificial jewellery offered variety but lacked perceived value; fine jewellery offered trust but not convenience. Consumers had to choose between the two. GIVA saw an opportunity in that gap, to create a brand that offered both style and substance through sterling silver. In 2019, the brand launched with a seed capital of ₹10 lakh, a focused product line, and its own website. In its first quarter, GIVA managed to break even with its initial go-to-market plan.

Initial marketing

GIVA’s first foray into marketing combined a sharp focus on digital channels with strategic messaging that highlighted the value and accessibility of sterling silver jewellery. The brand leveraged social media platforms and content-driven campaigns to introduce its collections, educate consumers about alternatives to gold, and build trust in online purchases. These efforts created early awareness and helped GIVA connect with young, style-conscious shoppers looking for everyday and occasion jewellery.

Digital marketing formed the backbone of GIVA’s rapid growth. The brand’s high engagement rate and consistent digital presence drove strong early traction, helping it record a revenue of ₹1 crore in its first financial year. Encouraged by this response, GIVA quickly expanded to major e-commerce platforms like Flipkart, Amazon, and Nykaa, ensuring wider accessibility.

In October 2024, GIVA closed an extended Series-B funding round of ₹255 crore led by Premji Invest, with participation from Epiq Capital and Edelweiss Discover Fund. The round also included secondary transactions, allowing early investors partial exits. The company’s revenue surged by 66%, reaching ₹274 crore in FY24. However, its net loss widened to ₹58.6 crore, reflecting a 29.6% increase. Less than a year later, in mid-2025, GIVA raised another ₹450 crore in a round led by Creaegis, with existing investors also participating, marking a significant step in its omnichannel expansion.

As the brand widened its digital footprint and sharpened its early marketing playbook, the next phase demanded something more tangible, a face to carry its story forward.

The face of GIVA

As GIVA scaled, it recognised the need for a recognisable face to anchor its growing brand personality. Anushka Sharma, known for her blend of authenticity, simplicity, and modernity, became GIVA’s brand ambassador in 2021. With Sharma, GIVA aimed to strengthen its visibility in India’s competitive silver jewellery market while also aligning itself with an aspirational yet approachable public figure.

In 2022, GIVA launched a campaign featuring its brand ambassador, Anushka Sharma. The film showed the actor trying on various earrings from GIVA’s collection and finally selecting a pair only after her pet dog gave approval, the idea being to highlight that jewellery can celebrate ‘love in all its forms’ (including non-traditional relationships). The communication goal was to shift the narrative from jewellery being only for major occasions to everyday purchase, self-expression and gifting. The campaign was rolled out across OTT platforms such as SonyLIV and Disney+ Hotstar, as well as digital channels like Instagram and YouTube. 

Association with Anushka Sharma proved to be a pivotal move for brand recognition. Her widespread appeal and credibility not only expanded GIVA’s audience but also humanised the brand, making it feel more accessible. Her presence is a recurring thread across GIVA’s campaign slate.

The collaboration extended beyond ads, Sharma launched her own signature collection with GIVA, featuring gold and silver designs that reflected her minimalist aesthetic. 

Celebrity tie-ups

GIVA’s celebrity strategy has evolved into a multi-layered approach aimed at building trust, widening appeal, and strengthening its cultural relevance. Beyond its longstanding partnership with Anushka Sharma, the brand has steadily expanded its roster of familiar faces to speak to different audience cohorts.

Collaborations with Neha Kakkar, Shruti Haasan, and Diana Penty helped the brand tap into varied style sensibilities.

The tie-up with Bhumi Pednekar for the GIVA x Bhumi collection further extended this approach.

GIVA has also experimented with film-led collaborations, using cinema as a cultural entry point to reach younger, trend-driven shoppers. The brand released a dedicated jewellery collection inspired by Shah Rukh Khan’s film Jawan. A similar approach was seen with the Shabaash Mithu collection, inspired by the biographical film on cricketer Mithali Raj.

Together, these tie-ups function as strategic touchpoints, each one extending the brand’s personality, broadening its cultural footprint, and enabling GIVA to engage with consumers through familiar and trusted faces.

All of this forms the backbone of GIVA’s everyday visibility, laying the groundwork for a digital ecosystem that keeps the brand top-of-mind.

Building a digital presence

On Instagram, GIVA has built a community of 1.2 million followers, and the platform serves as one of its most active brand touchpoints. A scroll through the feed shows a pattern that the brand relies on a blend of polished product imagery, topical content, influencer integrations, and a steady stream of light, playful posts.

A recurring element on the page is Anushka Sharma, whose presence appears across campaign films, stills, and promotional edits. Her inclusion serves both as brand recall and as a consistency device across seasons. 

Surrounding her content is a wide influencer layer: micro-, mid-tier, and lifestyle creators who style GIVA pieces in casual, festive, and workwear contexts. These posts typically follow a familiar template, close-up shots, “get ready with me” formats, or short styling reels, and they help the brand maintain a constant flow of fresh content.

Seasonal and cultural relevance is a key pillar. The brand routinely builds posts around topical events such as Halloween or Karwa Chauth, positioning jewellery as part of everyday celebrations rather than only milestone moments.

Alongside these, GIVA has increasingly used CGI-led visuals,  short clips where pieces float, rotate, or illuminate to draw attention.

Zodiac-themed posts appear regularly too, tied to GIVA’s astrological collection, and tend to attract higher engagement from younger followers.

Notably, the brand occasionally breaks from its aesthetic with humour, meme-style posts featuring cats or dogs wearing or reacting to jewellery. These act as engagement spikes, softening the luxury cues with approachability.

Beyond Instagram, where the brand maintains its most active presence, GIVA’s YouTube channel serves a different function, acting as an archive for campaigns and a hub for long-form storytelling. Almost every major brand film, seasonal edit, ambassador-led narrative, and collection launch sits here in long-form format. On YouTube, GIVA has around 72.6K subscribers. 

Apart from brand films, YouTube hosts a range of influencer-led long-form content. These videos include jewellery styling guides, unboxing formats, review-style walkthroughs, and haul videos where creators break down purchase experiences in detail. 

One of the more structured content formats on the channel is the “GIVA Grand Gestures” series. These episodes featured celebrity couples narrating moments of affection, surprise, or partnership while exchanging GIVA pieces as tokens of emotion. 

While digital campaigns built the brand’s community and engagement online, GIVA knew that visibility in the physical world was equally critical to reaching a broader audience. 

OOH and print presence

Beyond digital, GIVA has extended its storytelling into the physical world with out-of-home and print campaigns. Billboards, mall installations, and bus wraps have helped the brand maintain visibility in high-footfall locations, reaching both existing and new audiences while reinforcing its aspirational yet accessible positioning.

GIVA OOH 2

GIVA OOH 3

In print, GIVA has taken an unusual approach. A recent obituary-style ad highlighted the environmental cost of mined diamonds while introducing the “Heer” lab-grown collection, aligning the brand with sustainability and conscious luxury.

This omnichannel growth was supported by a careful blend of offline and online strategies, ensuring that GIVA’s presence was felt both in-store and across digital touchpoints. The brand’s marketing ecosystem, from celebrity collaborations to influencer campaigns, created engagement, translating awareness into footfalls and purchases. 

What began with a single store in May 2022 expanded swiftly into a 200-store network by April 2025.

GIVA brand saga GIVA marketing GIVA marketing journey