Tanishq set to launch 5,000 sq. ft jewellery store in Dubai’s Gold Souk by September 2024: Aditya Singh

According to Singh, Head-Jewellery International Business (GCC), Titan, the store is under construction now, and will probably take another 3-4 months to be ready for customers 

Dubai: Tanishq is coming up with a large format showroom at Dubai’s Gold Souk, and it will open before the next tourist season starts, Aditya Singh, Head-Jewellery International Business (GCC), Titan Company Ltd, has said.

“We are coming up with the largest jewellery store in the entire Gold Souk – it’s a 5,000 sq ft store and it will be there before the coming tourist season around September 2024. That store will be like nothing this region has seen, a store to watch out for,” Singh declared, adding that the store is under construction now, and will probably take another 3-4 months to be ready for customers. “We are building a lot many things inside the store, including an educational tour for tourists on, say, how the gold gets mined, how it is transformed from ore to metal, what kind of craftsmanship goes into jewellery-making, etc,” Singh added. 

On Tanishq’s USP in the highly competitive Middle East market, Singh said ever since the brand started operations in Dubai in 2020, studying the market well and researching trends, the differentiating factor for it has been design excellence. “A lot of Indian-origin jewellers here are from Kerala and they have been around much before we even thought of entering the Middle East. So, their designs were very similar and people from the South had an easy connect with such jewellers in Dubai. When Tanishq came here, customers who were feeling left out said: ‘Our jeweller has arrived in town’,” Singh related. 

Affirming that customer experience at all Tanishq stores is another differentiator, Singh said, “Our MD keeps saying this and it is passed on to every staff member – ‘Customer walks out of the store without a bag is acceptable; but customer walking out without a smile on the face is not acceptable’. We have lived by that mantra.”

On strategies in the pipeline to enhance the brand’s customer experience, Singh said, “We have just launched the ‘Drops’ programme, similar to schemes we have in India: customers save for some months and the company adds some benefits to it in the 12th month; however, due to certain regulations in the UAE, as a non-financial entity, we can’t exactly replicate that. So, we have created a programme which suits the market here: customers can buy 24-carat gold coins when gold rates are low and when they want to buy jewellery, they bring back all the coins, and all the making charges they have paid will be given back as discount. We are talking to certain banks in Dubai to explore the possibility of converting this into an online scheme, a sort of digital gold.”

Tanishq opened its first store in Dubai’s Meena Bazar in 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, it has expanded to various parts of the UAE across Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah. In 2023, the brand entered Qatar with two stores in Doha. In November the same year, the brand launched a boutique store in Singapore. It has four stores in the United States – at New Jersey, Dallas and Houston in Texas, and one in Chicago that opened in February 2024. 

Written by Anindya Rai Verman

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