How Amreen Iqbal Built Piece of You From Bespoke Jewellery Requests

The first pieces were never intended to become a business. Amreen Iqbal was designing custom jewellery for people she already knew, creating one-off pieces to mark moments that felt too personal for anything mass-produced. These were not designs driven by fashion cycles or resale value. They were made for birthdays, for losses, for relationships people wanted to acknowledge quietly, without explanation.

“Over the years, I found myself designing custom pieces for family and friends to mark personal milestones and emotions,” she says.

As those requests repeated, they began to form a pattern. People were not asking for luxury in the conventional sense. They were asking for meaning, delivered with the quality and seriousness of fine jewellery.

“There was a clear gap in the market for fine jewellery that was deeply personal yet accessible through a seamless digital experience,” Iqbal says.

That gap became Piece of You.

Piece of You Jewellery

Growing up inside the jewellery system

Iqbal did not arrive at this insight from the outside. She moved to Dubai at the age of four and grew up immersed in the jewellery business through her family’s company, Pure Gold Group. Jewellery was not symbolic in her household. It was operational. It meant factories, craftsmen, sourcing decisions, retail floors, and the daily pressure of selling high-value objects to customers who expect perfection. 

“I grew up surrounded by gemstones and craftsmanship through my family business,” she says. “But I was personally drawn to jewellery that felt intimate and meaningful rather than purely ornamental.”

Pure Gold Group itself grew into a large regional operation, with more than 125 stores across the Middle East and Asia, supported by factories in India and China and over 2,000 craftsmen and professionals.

After completing her business degree at the University of Bath, Iqbal returned to Dubai in 2005 and joined the family business. Over the years, she worked across design, human resources, finance, and corporate communications, eventually becoming Director of Corporate Communications at Pure Gold Jewellers.

Those roles gave her a full view of how jewellery businesses operate at scale. She saw how branding creates trust, how retail systems prioritise volume, and how bespoke work often becomes difficult to sustain once inventory pressure and repetition take over.

Piece of You, she says, was her way of combining the heritage and manufacturing strength she had grown up with, with a form of jewellery that allowed space for individuality and storytelling. 

Turning bespoke work into a company

Piece of You was built as a direct-to-consumer, made-to-order brand. Each piece is produced only after a design consultation, rather than pulled from inventory.

“Piece of You operates on a direct-to-consumer, made-to-order model that allows us to maintain quality, reduce excess inventory, and focus on customisation,” Iqbal says. “Our core USP is personalisation at scale,” she adds. “Every piece is designed to tell a personal story while maintaining the highest standards of fine jewellery.”  The structure mirrors how the brand began: through conversation, not display.

The jewellery market that Piece of You is operating in is vast. Industry estimates place the global jewellery market at roughly $360–$370 billion annually, with steady growth expected through the rest of the decade as disposable incomes rise and luxury consumption expands in emerging markets.

Within that, customisation is no longer a fringe category. Market forecasts estimate the customised jewellery segment at around $37 billion in 2025, growing to over $42 billion in 2026, with projections suggesting it could cross $100 billion by the early 2030s if current growth rates continue.

At the same time, online jewellery sales are accelerating. Industry projections estimate that online jewellery could add nearly $80 billion in incremental market value between 2024 and 2029, as consumers become more comfortable buying high-value items digitally.

Iqbal describes the same shift from inside the business. “Consumers today are more informed, value-conscious, and emotionally driven,” she says. “They want meaning, customisation, ethical sourcing, and convenience.”

Piece of You Jewellery

Competition is coming from everywhere

That growth has also changed the competitive landscape. Large, established jewellery brands increasingly rely on aggressive discounting during peak shopping periods to drive volume. This behaviour reshapes how customers think about jewellery purchases, encouraging comparison, price sensitivity, and delayed buying decisions across the entire market.

At the other end, digital-first jewellery brands have scaled quickly by normalising online buying, fast fulfilment, and clean digital experiences. Companies such as Mejuri and Brilliant Earth have shown that it is possible to build hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales while positioning around ethics, design, and transparency. Brilliant Earth, for example, reported annual revenues exceeding $400 million, demonstrating the scale that values-led digital jewellery brands can reach.

Then there is the structural shift in diamonds themselves. Lab-grown diamonds have grown rapidly, putting pressure on prices and forcing consumers to reconsider what they are paying for. This has introduced a new layer of competition, not just between brands, but between product categories.

Against that backdrop, Piece of You’s focus on ethically sourced natural diamonds is a deliberate positioning choice rather than a neutral one.  

Trust as the real constraint

For Iqbal, the most difficult part of the business is not design or demand. “One of the biggest challenges has been building trust in a high-value category like fine jewellery in an online environment,” she says. “Educating customers, managing expectations around customisation timelines, and maintaining consistent quality requires constant attention.” 

Piece of You is backed by the manufacturing infrastructure of the Pure Gold Group, allowing it to scale production while maintaining control over craftsmanship. For every order processed, the company also contributes to Feed a Meal, a practice embedded into its operations rather than framed as a campaign.

Piece of You is operating in a market that is growing fast, becoming noisier, and getting more price-sensitive by the year. It bets that even as jewellery becomes easier to buy, a meaningful segment of customers will continue to seek pieces that start with their own story rather than a catalogue.

“Success depends on differentiation, trust, consistency, and customer experience,” Iqbal says. “In jewellery, credibility and craftsmanship take time to establish.”

The company began with custom pieces made quietly for people she knew. Its challenge now is to preserve that same intent while competing in a global market measured in hundreds of billions of dollars.