Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Valeriya Guzema has continued to create her minimalist, handcrafted jewelry in the country’s capital, Kyiv.
Power failures are common. Bomb alerts occur day and night. And artisans are scarce. “Almost all jewelers are men,” she said last month during a video call from her home in Kyiv, “and today a lot of men go to war.” Yet she has managed to maintain an atelier where 48 craftspeople make Guzema Fine Jewelry pieces for Ukrainian customers, who, she said, generate about 80 percent of the brand’s sales.
When Ukraine banned gold exports after the invasion, Ms. Guzema contracted with workshops in Italy and the United States to make her designs for the international market — pieces that range from a Freedom ring with zirconium beads ($220) to an 18-karat white gold Tennis Necklace with 18.2 carats of diamonds ($23,990).
And since October 2023, the brand’s global sales have been overseen by Mariana Lenha, the chief executive and a co-owner of Guzema USA, with offices in New York City. (Ms. Lenha has been a close friend since 2008, when the two women met while studying linguistics. “It was very important for me to hire someone I could trust,” Ms. Guzema said.)
Now, the brand is expanding in the United States with a string of collaborations and a boutique scheduled to open in early September on Wooster Street in Manhattan.
“I always knew that it was going to be our second home,” said Ms. Guzema, 34, recalling a visit to New York more than a decade ago. “I fell in love with the city.”
It may seem unlikely that a woman with no formal design training now runs such a business. After Ms. Guzema graduated from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv with degrees in linguistics and journalism, she started work in 2013 as an editor and fashion coordinator at Elle Ukraine, then became an onscreen reporter at HD Fashion & Lifestyle TV.
Since childhood, however, she had been passionate about jewelry — what she described as an “obsession” fostered by her maternal grandmother’s annual gifts — and she decided she wanted to make her own.
In 2015, she took $500 in savings — journalists don’t earn much money in Ukraine, she said — and eight gold teeth that once belonged to her maternal grandfather to an independent jeweler and asked him to turn 20 of her sketched designs into jewelry. “I always joke that my grandpa is my investor,” said Ms. Guzema, who continues to take pride in her total ownership of the Ukrainian arm of the company.
The jeweler used the teeth, which melted to 50 grams of liquid gold, for her first collection, which was stolen from her car just a few days later. She said she saved for six months to try again, and in 2016, Guzema Fine Jewelry was born.
Initially reliant on sales generated by her Instagram posts, “slowly, slowly, we became popular,” Ms. Guzema said, although she declined to disclose the brand’s annual revenue.
Now her designs are worn by the likes of Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s first lady, and the actress Milla Jovovich, who was born in Kyiv. The company has approximately 100 employees and, in addition to selling online, there are three boutiques: two in Kyiv and one in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv.
When the war began, Ms. Guzema thought she would have to find a new career: “I understood that jewelry is not the thing people need today.” But she continued to receive email requests, including one from a man who said that his wife’s birthday was the next day and that she wanted Guzema jewelry.
“That was the sign,” she said. “We understood that war is war, but people still want to live.”
Maintaining a supply chain after the invasion initially was a challenge. “However,” Ms. Guzema wrote in a follow-up email, “we work with stable and trusted partners and have successfully established a reliable supply process. At the moment, we are officially importing metal alloys, which allows our atelier to continue operating smoothly, without interruptions.”
In March, the brand began selling the first of its collaborations with U.S. connections: a snake chain choker (in a choice of metals, starting at $650) and bracelet (starting at $400), made with the fashion house 3.1 Phillip Lim. The snake chain choice was meant to echo the Year of the Snake, the Chinese zodiac designation for 2025. And Wen Zhou, the chief executive and co-founder of the fashion house, said she liked Guzema’s “philosophy of creating minimal yet powerful pieces, rooted in their heritage.”
It was followed in April by a limited-edition collaboration with Delilah Belle Hamlin, the Los Angeles model and musician who is the elder daughter of Harry Hamlin and Lisa Rinna. The seven-piece Metamorphosis collection, which has a butterfly motif, includes an 18-karat yellow gold butterfly ring, at $1,100, and an 18-karat gold chain that is meant to be wrapped around a wearer’s finger and wrist, so its gold orb is displayed on the back of the hand.
The brand now has 23 collections on its website, with its perennial best sellers among what Ms. Guzema calls its “transformers”: versatile pieces that can be worn and combined in multiple ways. Examples include rings that can fit on any finger — a favorite for men buying gifts, she said — and earrings that can transition from day wear to evening with the change of a clasp.
In contrast to Ukraine’s traditional gold and gem-heavy jewelry, “Guzema was one of the first who worked with minimalistic lines,” Violetta Fedorova, the editor in chief of Vogue Ukraine’s website, said in a recent video interview.
And since the war began, Ms. Fedorova said, Guzema has become a go-to jewelry brand for professionals who are hesitant to wear the national colors, blue and yellow, but want what she called a subtle “touch of Ukraine.”
It works “with Ukrainian symbols in a very modern way,” she said, referencing collections such as Kvitka, which means Flower. Inspired by the work of the celebrated Ukrainian graphic artist Heorhiy Narbut, it features the Blossom Brooch, a long-stemmed sunflower that is a symbol of Ukraine — in silver ($440) and in 18-karat white gold or yellow gold, both with a tiny diamond ($1,330). Profits go to an education program for servicewomen and veterans at the Ukrainian School of Political Studies, just one of Guzema’s four charitable efforts.
Despite the uncertainty over peace negotiations — “I cannot explain with words how hard the mental situation here is in Ukraine” — Ms. Guzema said she had been trying to focus on plans for the New York store.
“I’m so excited,” she said, explaining that she had signed the lease just days before. “I feel that our brand is like a teenager who is old enough to make one more step forward, to have a bright future. This is the step.”
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