The Girl You Still Are: Inside Zhianka, the Jewellery Brand Built on Memory

How an Odia word, a quiet homecoming, and a founder’s deep-dive into nostalgia is giving rise to one of India’s more quietly compelling new jewellery movements

Most businesses have a founding moment, usually a neat, quotable version of it. Zhianka's founding moment is harder to package. It happened on a quiet afternoon, in a room full of unopened boxes, when a young woman came home after five years away and started going through things she had forgotten she had kept.

Old teddy bears. Faded photographs. A small pair of baby bangles, wrapped in cloth and tucked into a corner of a drawer. Trinkets that had once lived on her shelf, then migrated to a box, then to a storeroom, then to the back of her own memory.

That woman was Urjaa Mishra, founder of Zhianka.

Urjaa had been living the typical post-college life: consulting projects, Bangalore traffic, a career that moved fast and demanded you move with it. Her jewellery had changed to match, minimal, muted, responsible. The kind you wear because it goes with everything, bothers no one, signals the right level of seriousness. It was all very grown-up. And something about that bothered her, sitting there with those baby bangles in her hand. The colourful pieces, the butterfly clips, her eccentric toy jewellery jewellery she had once loved, had quietly disappeared. She had not thrown them away. They had just stopped feeling like they had a place.

"Somewhere along the way, the playful pieces had quietly disappeared.", Urjaa Mishra, Founder, Zhianka

A Name That Carries Warmth

Zhianka (pronounced jhiyankaa) is not an invented word. It is drawn directly from Odia, specifically from the word ଝିଅଙ୍କର (jhiyankara), meaning belonging to girls, itself rooted in ଝିଅ (jhia), the Odia word for girl. But jhia carries a warmth that straight translation does not quite capture. In Odia culture, jhia is not just a word for a child. You can be thirty, fifty, even seventy, and still be called jhia, spoken with softness, familiarity, warmth. It is an endearment that does not expire. It belongs to you regardless of what age the mirror tells you.

In choosing this name, Urjaa was making a quiet declaration: this brand is not for the girl you were, but for the part of you that is still her. Zhianka is, in her own words, for the little girl in us, but made to be worn by the older us. That specific version of girlhood, the one who collected things, played lagori in the summer dust, pressed her face against the school canteen window on tiffin day, is still in there. Zhianka is built on the belief that demi-fine jewellery can acknowledge her.

What Urjaa Mishra Is Actually Building

Urjaa graduated from Christ University in Bangalore and spent her initial years in consulting and market research, including stints at 1Lattice and Teachmint. That analytical background matters more than it might seem for a jewellery brand. Most early-stage founders spend their early months on Instagram aesthetics and packaging. Urjaa spent them studying materials science, understanding base metals, coating thickness, plating technologies, and why most affordable jewellery tarnishes within weeks of regular wear.

The answer she landed on, 18K gold PVD coated stainless steel, was not the romantic choice. It was the defensible one. Stainless steel is sweat-resistant, hypoallergenic, and holds coating far better than the brass-and-dip combination that most brands in the Rs. 1,000–3,000 segment default to. The result is genuinely waterproof jewellery that can be worn daily through gym sessions, monsoon humidity, and warm Indian summers without fear of tarnishing or skin irritation. The pieces are meant to be worn every day, not saved for occasions.

That combination of emotional intelligence and material rigour is what makes Zhianka worth paying attention to. The brand is not nostalgia as a marketing hook. It is nostalgia as a design philosophy, applied to things built to last.

The Woman Behind the Brand

Urjaa Mishra is not hiding behind Zhianka. She writes publicly about the process of building it, the uncertainty, the money decisions, the career change that led her here. She has been transparent about coming from consulting, about moving cities, about the version of herself from a year ago who would be surprised by the life she is building now.

She lost nearly 15 kilos during this period of transition. She reversed some health issues that had accumulated quietly over years of demanding corporate work. She describes a phase when things had just started settling, physically and mentally, after a stretch that felt the opposite. None of that is branding. It is just what actually happened. The fact that she shares it makes the brand feel like it comes from somewhere real, because it does.

She has also sought out mentors like Dr Rosalin Patasani Mishra and advisors along the way. A pivotal conversation with Bijoylaxmi Kar, entrepreneur, Rotary Club President, and motivational speaker, helped Urjaa think through brand narrative, placement strategy, and the tension between premium positioning and accessible pricing. That tension is real, and Urjaa knows it. She is working through it carefully rather than pretending it does not exist.

The Gap Zhianka Is Built to Fill

The Indian jewellery market is, broadly, split into three distinct worlds. At one end is traditional bridal and occasion jewellery, gold, kundan, polki, temple, built entirely around weddings, festivals, and gifting cycles. The entire design and distribution logic of this segment flows from those demand moments, and outside of them, it has little to say. At the other end are the luxury houses and designer-led labels, which offer bold, out-of-the-box statement pieces, beautiful, conversation-starting, and priced accordingly. In between, the clean minimalist and trend-led segment has grown steadily, offering simple chains, small hoops, and understated everyday wear to women who want something more refined than fast fashion but do not have occasion-wear budgets.

What is largely absent across all three is something specific: jewellery that is minimal yet joyful, colourful without being loud, playful yet refined enough to wear to work. Pieces that carry a bit of character, that make someone ask “wait, what is that?”, but are built to last, priced accessibly, and designed for everyday life rather than special occasions. That is the gap Urjaa noticed. Not just an underserved price point, but an underserved emotional register. She has written thoughtfully about nostalgia as an underexplored variable in jewellery design. Her argument is that most brands treat nostalgia as a seasonal mood, a throwback campaign here, a vintage-inspired collection there, rather than as a core design lens. Zhianka's bet is that nostalgia is structural, not seasonal. That there are women who want to carry a piece of their girlhood with them, not as a costume, but as a quiet acknowledgment of who they have always been beneath everything they have become.

"Not what gets chosen once, but what gets worn without thinking. That's what Zhianka is building toward."

The Collections: Memory Made Wearable

Zhianka launched with two collections, each built around a specific universe of Indian girlhood rather than a generic nostalgic mood.

Ghar Ghar, is anchored in the domestic world of growing up: the miniature kitchen set, the dolls with elaborate wardrobes, the padlock on the main door. Pieces carry names like Kaccha Aam, Ghar Ka Taala, Kitchen Set, Doll House, Favourite Teddy. Kaccha Aam does not require explanation to anyone who grew up in India, the raw mango season, the salt and red chilli, the particular shade of unripe green. The necklace does not recreate the mango. It recalls the feeling. Ghar Ka Taala, similarly: the padlock, the key, what it meant to be trusted with it. These are quiet, specific charm pieces that land differently for everyone but land nonetheless.

Recess, goes further back, to school recess before smartphones existed and boredom had been optimised away. The anti-tarnish gold charm necklaces and bracelets here carry names like Tiffin, Half Time, Lagori Love, Peepal Climb, Magic Pops, Water Break. Each piece is made from medical-grade stainless steel with 18K PVD coating, making them water-resistant and skin-safe for everyday wear. The collection tagline says it simply: 'There was a version of recess that felt infinite.' These pieces are a small attempt to hold that feeling, not recreate it, just touch it lightly on the wrist or collar, and let the memory do the rest.

Alongside these collections, Zhianka maintains everyday layering and comfort pieces, clean, minimal, anti-tarnish gold necklaces and bracelets designed to be worn with everything, every day. Prices range from roughly Rs. 900 to Rs. 2,800. The brand ships PAN India.

What to Watch

Zhianka is early. It is bootstrapped, ships PAN India, and has kept its catalogue focused and purposeful. Nothing has been thrown at the wall. What is interesting about where this brand is headed is the gap between what it currently is and what the concept can become. The nostalgia-as-design-philosophy framework is not exhausted by Ghar Ghar and Recess. There are childhoods from different parts of India, different decades, different textures of girlhood, all of them waiting to be held in a piece of waterproof, long-lasting demi-fine jewellery. Zhianka is doing something so universal yet so specific in a way with nostalgia-led jewellery as a brand and design philosophy that essentially no other brand has done.

Urjaa has the analytical background to research those memories systematically and the emotional intelligence to translate them into objects people want to wear daily. That combination is genuinely rare. For now, she is doing the work: shipping orders, writing thoughtfully about brand-building, having the conversations that matter, and staying focused on what makes Zhianka different from the multiple other jewellery brands that launched this quarter.

She is building something that lasts. You can feel it in how she talks about the materials, 18K gold PVD coating, medical-grade stainless steel, anti-tarnish construction designed for real life. And you can feel it in how she describes the afternoon that started all of this: not as a eureka moment, but as a quiet recognition of something she had been carrying all along.

Some things do not need to be invented. They just need someone patient enough to find them.