The ring — a chunk of lavender jade surrounded by a halo of diamonds — sits on a pink macaron, which itself is positioned on a swath of white lace. It all looks so romantic and fanciful on Pratiksha Jewelry’s online shop. But make no mistake: The new jewelry line from Dallas-based Tisha Vaidya is no pet project.
She did the market research. She ran the data. She networked and connected and leveraged. Tisha graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business with a MBA and worked in finance in New York for a number of years. This is serious business.
Plus, jewelry is part of her heritage. “This is our DNA,” Tisha says. “Our family has been in the diamond and gemstone trading and cutting industry for over 35 years, so I grew up in that culture from a young age, analyzing diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires.”
Tisha started seriously thinking about a jewelry line in grad school. She noticed a gap in the market. On one side, she saw fashion brands offering trendy, low-quality costume jewelry for a couple hundred bucks apiece. On the other, there were high-end, brand-name jewelers selling classic designs for thousands upon thousands.
Pratishka Jewelry, she explains, is filling the space in between. “There’s just simply not a national brand that addresses this area: a hybrid of fashion jewelry elements using real, high-quality materials that are going to last a long time,” she says.
Pratiksha’s By the Yard necklace, for example, is an on-trend long strand, made of 14-karat gold (no risk of a green neck) and studded with 11 solitaire diamonds (no cubic zirconia, no druzy). It’s yours to layer for less than $700-$900, depending on length.
Tisha is able to keep the cost of these quality materials low by cutting out the middlemen. She handles most of the design and buys gemstones straight from the mines and work directly with her own manufacturer. There’s not a wholesaler in the middle spiking the prices.
“There are markups that exist in the jewelry retail space that are sometimes 300 to 400 percent above what the manufacturer is actually selling to the retail store, and we thought, wait a second, there’s really an opportunity here to disrupt it,” Tisha says.
Who knew there could be such a vast lesson in economics behind one killer cocktail ring?
Madison On Tilt white topaz and diamond halo ring, $425.
