About Corals
Our story
Jewellery from Kerala, a family business in Clyde, and a strong opinion about how imitation jewellery should be sold.
Corals started with a wedding and a broken clasp. A set ordered from overseas arrived four days before the muhurtham with two stones loose and a haram that had been strung on thread rather than wire. There was no phone number to call, and the replacement would have taken another six weeks.
What we do differently
We buy our pieces in Kerala — palakka, nagapadam, kemp and temple work, the styles the region is known for. Everything comes to Clyde first. We unpack it, go over it piece by piece, and anything with a lifted stone or a thin patch of plating never makes it to the website.
We are a small family business, not a warehouse. That is why we hold fewer designs than the big overseas sites, why you can collect an order from us in person, and why there is someone to call if something is wrong.
On the word "imitation"
We use it plainly. These pieces are brass with a micron gold plating, set with synthetic kemp stones, coloured glass and enamel. They are not gold and we will never imply otherwise — no karat marks, no weight-in-grams pricing, no "one-gram gold" ambiguity.
What they are is the same craft. The dies, the oxidising, the way a stone is set in a raised cup rather than glued flat — that is identical to how the gold version is made, by people who make both. A bride wearing our haram at a reception looks like a bride wearing a haram. She is just not wearing sixty thousand dollars, and she can dance in it.
Where we are
Clyde, VIC. We are online only — there is no shopfront — but we do occasional pop-ups around Deepavali and the wedding season. The mailing list is where those get announced.
Questions about sizing, or want a photo of a piece on a real neck before you buy? Email [email protected]. We answer, usually the same day.