I never even liked jewellery....
For most of my life, jewellery felt like something you wore for a reason. A wedding. A festival. Someone else's occasion. It was never really just for me.
Then, in my twenties, I went through a phase I don't talk about much.
I was working, building a career, trying to figure myself out and somewhere in all of that, my confidence hit an all-time low.
I had developed body image issues. People had opinions about how I looked, and they weren't shy about sharing them. Slowly, I stopped feeling beautiful. More than that, I stopped feeling like myself.
And somewhere in all of this, almost by accident, I started wearing jewellery again.
Not for a wedding.
Not because I had somewhere to go.
Just because I wanted to.
I remember putting on a pair of earrings and feeling…different. Not transformed. Not suddenly full of confidence. Nothing that dramatic. Just a little more like me.
Of course, jewellery didn't fix everything. But it gave me something small to hold onto while I found my way back to myself.
And it made me think: How many other women have had a moment like that?
A moment where something as small as putting on a pair of earrings makes you feel a little more put together, or simply remember the woman you were before you started questioning yourself?
That question stayed with me. And eventually, it became House of Devina.
As the idea of House of Devina took shape, Vaibhav, my husband and co-founder, was the person I could talk to about every version of it. The idea, the doubts, the decisions, the very real question of whether we should actually do this. So we did.
We started seeing Indian jewelry differently. We kept coming back to what had always caught our eye: old photographs of Indian women clad in beautiful ornaments, the jewelry our mothers and grandmothers wore.
Punjabi jadau, kundan, and polki were closest to me, as I was born in Bikaner, Rajasthan, and raised in Amritsar, Punjab.
Terracotta walls, old-world colors, and the richness of Indian dressing took on more meaning the deeper we delved into the history of our craft and culture.
But we didn't want to recreate the past. We wanted to take what we loved about it and make it feel like it belonged to a woman today.
That became the starting point for House of Devina: beautiful Indian jewellery that makes a woman feel like herself.
The first collection, Pehchaan, is the most personal expression of that idea. Because Pehchaan means identity. And for me, that is what this was always about. Not becoming someone else. Finding your way back to yourself.
House of Devina is for the woman who wears jewellery to a wedding, a festival, a dinner, or a gathering, but also on an ordinary day.
For the woman who dresses up because she feels like it.
For the woman who has changed, grown, lost parts of herself, found new ones, and is still becoming.
We don't want to tell her who she should be. We just want to make something that, when she puts it on, makes her think: There I am.
That is what I want to build with House of Devina.