Akunna Nwala-Akano, the founder of the Kuku’s Hair salon chain in Lagos, Nigeria, found herself at loose ends in April 2020. Like many people around the world, she was fearful of losing loved ones to Covid-19 and struggling to make sense of life under lockdown.
“I was downright depressed,” Ms. Nwala-Akano, a lawyer by training, said on a video call last month from London, where she and her family were on vacation. “I was trying to promote my hair business. I’d never done TikTok in my life. So I said, ‘OK, I’ll go into my dressing room and I’ll make TikTok videos for hair.’”
Then, inspired by a grandmother’s jewelry collection, she began designing her own pieces and, by 2021, had arranged for them to be made overseas. Her first creations, a diamond necklace and earrings in a fan motif, referenced her family’s roots in eastern Nigeria, where making fans, especially in raffia and leather, is a traditional handicraft. “Designing was a distraction from thinking about losing people,” she said. “And then before I knew it, everybody was like, ‘Have you seen Kuku’s jewelry?’” (“Kuku is the short form of Akunna,” she said, calling it a pet name that family members use for her.)
Today Akano, the fine jewelry brand born of Ms. Nwala-Akano’s time in lockdown, employs 14 people and opened its first store in September 2024 on Lagos’s Victoria Island. Ms. Nwala-Akano, who during the call displayed a striking diamond pavé necklace featuring a 74-carat rubellite tourmaline, now has set her sights on international expansion.
“I’m going to be the Messika, the Graff, the Cartier coming out of Nigeria,” said Ms. Nwala-Akano, 43. “I’m going to play catch-up with those old jewelry houses, and I’m going to stand shoulder to shoulder with them.”
Human Potential
You may not realize it, but buying fine jewelry today is a fundamentally different experience than it was before the pandemic. The digital innovations and supply chain disruptions that earned headlines during Covid’s initial spread have made gems and precious metals easier to purchase, but also more expensive.
The biggest impact, however, may have come from the influx of designers such as Ms. Nwala-Akano, who pivoted to jewelry during lockdown. Adept at using social media, conscious of sustainability and committed to sharing their idiosyncratic points of view, these newcomers have helped redefine what sells, whether it happens through stores, online platforms or social feeds.
“The pandemic caused many people to rethink their priorities and put steps in place to bring their dreams and passions to life,” Maia Adams, the co-founder of Adorn, a jewelry consultancy in London, wrote in an email. “I certainly noticed a rise in popularity of independent, founder-led brands, some of which had existed before the pandemic, others that emerged during or shortly after it.”
Take, for example, Alexia Karides, the founder of Ysso, a demi-fine jewelry brand manufactured in Athens with its headquarters in London.
In March 2020, Ms. Karides, a lawyer who had been working for a skin care brand, was stuck in her London flat with nothing but time. She began to ruminate on how she might build a jewelry brand around the sculptural gold-plated jewels that her mother, Stalo Karides, an archaeologist and art historian, had been making in Athens since 2015.
“I’d been talking about it for years by this point,” Ms. Karides said on a video call last month from her parents’ home in Athens, where she was photographing the brand’s next campaign. “The reason I hadn’t launched before was because I was thinking, ‘What would people think? Will they like it?’ There was all this self-doubt. Being alone during Covid, that came apart.”
In contrast, Meghan Griffiths, the founder and designer of Angharad, a fine jewelry brand in London, always knew she would be a creative entrepreneur. But until the pandemic forced her to seek refuge at her parents’ farm in the English county of Hampshire, she didn’t have the space or time to devote to her own work.
“My parents kindly gave me one of the outer farm buildings,” Ms. Griffiths, 30, said on a video call from her current workshop in Hatton Garden, London’s jewelry district. “I got a bench and got the initial equipment that I needed just to start designing.”
In 2021, she founded Angharad, a name taken from “The Mabinogion,” a collection of early Welsh prose that she discovered in her parents’ home (Ms. Griffiths has Welsh heritage and Angharad also happens to be her middle name). “One of the characters is called Angharad Golden-Hand because she used to wear all this gold,” Ms. Griffiths said. “And I was like, ‘It’s a sign.’”
Similarly, when Zulaikha Aziz, the founder of Mazahri, a fine jewelry brand that uses motifs drawn from her native Afghanistan, officially introduced her website on March 20, 2021, she, too, was encouraged by a kind of mystical significance.
“It was an auspicious date because it was Nowruz, the Persian New Year, and it was like a new beginning,” Ms. Aziz, who left Afghanistan with her family when she was a child and later trained as a lawyer, said on a video call last month from her home in Laguna Niguel, Calif.
The idea for the brand first came in 2014 when Ms. Aziz was traveling to Afghanistan to work as a legal adviser on a democracy and governance project. “There’s an area in Kabul called Koch-e Murgha, which translates literally to Chicken Street,” Ms. Aziz said. “And there are rows and rows of jewelers who’ve had stalls there for hundreds of years. I would go in and talk to some of them and look for vintage pieces because I really love vintage gold Afghan jewelry.”
The security situation in Kabul had gotten progressively worse, Ms. Aziz said, but by 2018 and 2019, when she was working on a project for the Asia Foundation, it had deteriorated significantly. “There was a bombing of an N.G.O. near our guesthouses, so they evacuated us to another safe space, and they put us under lockdown,” she said. “We weren’t allowed to leave except for work. I had a lot of time on my hands, and I started sketching designs.”
When Ms. Aziz returned to California in September 2019, she decided to pursue a graduate gemologist degree at the Gemological Institute of America (G.I.A.) in Carlsbad, Calif. She had just finished the diamond course in March 2020 when the school canceled in-person classes. (She finished her coursework, but never took the colored gemstone exam to complete the degree.)
“It was an uneasy time,” Ms. Aziz said. “Something inside of me just kept saying, ‘Do this. This is your passion.’ But it was difficult because it was tragic for my family, too. We lost two family members in Afghanistan to Covid, an aunt and an uncle that I had just spent a lot of time with.”
Supply-Side Shocks
The business challenges that the pandemic posed were nothing compared with the scale of human loss, yet the supply chain disruptions stemming from the lockdowns damaged the industry in lasting ways, said Wim Vertriest, the G.I.A.’s manager of field gemology, who is based in Bangkok.
“Many artisanal miners could no longer convert the gems into cash because there were no brokers around, so they turned to other jobs to sustain their livelihood,” Mr. Vertriest wrote in an email. “To this day, we see areas that used to be very productive and where gems are abundant, but there is simply no renewed interest in mining the gems.”
Stuart Robertson, the president of Gemworld International, a wholesale gem pricing provider in Glenview, Ill., said the echoes of the pandemic continue to affect the pearl industry, too.
“If you’re mining garnets and you can’t mine them, they stay in the ground,” Mr. Robertson said. “But if you’re culturing pearls and you can’t get to them, you lose one to two years in that cycle and it has ripple effects for several years.
“In the finer end of Tahitian and South Sea pearls, wholesale prices are up on average 45 percent to 50 percent,” he added. “Unlike a tariff, which is a tax, this is literally because of scarcity in the market; demand overtook supply.”
The diamond sector also has been reshaped. “The rise in popularity of lab-created gemstones can, in part, be traced back to the pandemic,” Ms. Adams of Adorn wrote in an email. “Natural stone supplies were disrupted as mines shut down and furloughed consumers were having to spend more carefully.
“With their accessibility, lower prices and messaging that often centers on sustainability, lab-created stones may have felt like a better fit for the times,” she wrote.
Myriad Parallels
As jewelers and jewelry-related businesses take stock of what the pandemic did to the trade, many say that the all-too-familiar fears provoked by the recent economic instability, record gold costs and tariff threats have produced a kind of déjà vu.
Yet David Hakimian, the founder of DEH Jewelry Solutions, an agency in New York that specializes in product development and production management for fine jewelry lines, has been seeing other parallels.
Then, Mr. Hakimian saw a surge of interest from new designers; he estimated that about 40 percent of his current fine jewelry clients started doing business with him during the pandemic.
And recently he has seen another rise in inquiries. “Since February alone, we’ve been approached by six aspiring designers, many of whom are not coming from traditionally creative fields,” Mr. Hakimian wrote in an email. “What I find particularly compelling is the irony that both now and in 2020, we’ve seen a significant rise in gold prices and broad economic volatility.
“These aren’t conditions most would consider ideal for launching a fine jewelry brand. And yet, we may be witnessing the beginning of a new wave of influential designers — just as we did five years ago.”
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