Rubies and icons come from Russia with love
Annushka Ducas set up a jewellery company in 1990 to help her mother out with some cufflinks. Since then she and Links have come a long way.
Annushka Ducas has come back from Russia with a jewellery collection. For a woman who wasn’t the founder of Links of London this would mean a major over-spend in the street markets of Moscow’s bohemian Arbat quarter.
But for jewellery designer and mother of four Ducas, a trip into her Russian family history turned into the inspiration for her latest collection.
A late 30s combination of career woman and yummy mummy, Ducas is a marketeer’s dream. Not only does she look good — wearing one of her own necklaces of course — she has society credentials.
Her mother ran wet-fish supplier Rockport, which brought fresh Sussex fish to the West End’s top restaurants. Her father, who separated from her mother when Annushka was young, was an ex-Sunday Times journalist and New York literary agent. Throw in a godfather who owns Annabel’s — the nightclub where David Blunkett recently met a new lady friend — and a white Russian background and Ducas is an excellent advert for Links.
Given that, you might wonder why she came to the interview flanked by two PR people who were dressed head-to-toe in black. But then minders are de rigueur in Moscow, so perhaps this was another Russian import.
Ducas set up Links in 1990 to fulfil a commission from her mother, who wanted to give cufflinks as Christmas presents for Rockport’s favourite chef clients. Ducas turned the idea into a commission for Harvey Nichols and then a made-to order corporate gift business. Fifteen years on, the business has 20 stores in Britain and 15 worldwide.
And the latest range, which is called Annushka, is a million miles from where the business began, in corporate freebies and cufflinks.
As you would expect from a woman whose celebrity clients include Angelina Jolie and Princes William and Harry, there is a glamorous tale behind the collection.
Ducas’s father died last year, leaving her only a rouble and an orthodox cross that had belonged to his mother, the daughter of Russian emigrees. Ducas’s father had been separated from her mother for years and lived in New York, but his death hit his daughter hard.
When her mother died in the early 1990s Ducas said she threw herself into work, but when her father died, she returned to her roots.
“My mother died a long time ago, when I was 23 or whatever I was, and one is not very interested in the family, or where you come from. I realised when my father gave me these two pieces that I didn’t have any idea about my family’s history and could not tell my children anything about my grandparents. It inspired me to go back to Russia and find out more about where they came from and where and how they lived,” said Ducas.
Ducas’s grandfather escaped from Russia at the end of the civil war in 1922, fleeing first to Berlin, then to Paris, where he met her grandmother, and finally to London. Her grandmother’s escape was more daring, crossing the border in a hay cart.
Ducas tried to look into her family’s history, although she says: “It’s been very hazy, I have found various very, very distant relations who also know nothing about it because they are a similar age.” One great-uncle though, went on to be an icons specialist at Christie’s in New York.
“I’ve always been surrounded by Russian art and objects, father was a big collector of Faberge. Without realising it, I’ve been very influenced by my Russian upbringing,” says Ducas.
The influence shows through in her latest collection. The necklace Ducas is wearing is a combination of her mother’s orthodox cross and Kremlin influenced pendants.
“And quite by chance,” says Ducas. “I wasn’t going there with any idea of designing a collection, I was going there to find out about my family, I found Moscow was so not what I was expecting. I was expecting this very grey city, and what I found was a city where the colours were just extraordinary, all the buildings were painted pale blue, pale green, pale pink and I was just amazed by that.”
Ducas obviously didn’t stay in one of Moscow’s many stark hotels, but if you look at her most recent catalogue, you can see what she means. Grabbing the catalogue and gesticulating for emphasis she says: “I was also struck by the skyline in Moscow. There are 200 churches still left there and every church has five domes leading up to a central one. What it represents is the eternal flame.”
The Annushka collection, says Ducas, is currently Links’s biggest seller.
This is a real sea-change for a company that started out in men’s jewellery, specifically cufflinks. Around 70 per cent of global sales are now of women’s jewellery according to its founder. And it’s not just men buying for women any more.
“More and more women are buying their own jewellery,” says Ducas. “It’s just a question of treating yourself, we don’t need a husband or boyfriend to buy us something. When women do buy, they spend a lot of money.”
Beyond this, Ducas refuses point-blank to talk about Links’s finances.
Here you get the sense that there is another ghost in the room. Ducas’s husband John Ayton, a former lawyer at City blueblood law firm Ashurst, is the company’s chairman. It sounds like quite a traditional partnership where she does the creative and he does the money.
Previously Ayton has talked about floating the company, or raising venture capital in order to fund expansion. There is already a mystery private investor in Links to be factored in. Ducas describes him as “silent, but very supportive”. However, she says that a float is not planned in the medium term.
The company’s last available accounts are for the year ending July 2004. Group sales jumped 37 per cent to £17m, bolstered by a better-than-expected performance from the American stores. Ayton was on record last year as saying sales for this year would be around £25m, but all Ducas will say is that it’s not “the right time of year” to talk money.
Links spent £1.25m on its flagship Sloane Square branch which Ducas says is doing well. The fashion cycle saw charm bracelets come back with a vengeance in late 2003, but Ducas says they are still very much there. The Sloane Square shop has a charm bar and Ducas says: “It is still very much going and growing. The thing about charms is it’s all about memories, and how much that moment meant to you and how to hold onto it. I don’t think it’s ever gone away nor will ever go away.”
The business is already a global enterprise. Twenty-five of its 45 stores are outside Britain, and in an increasingly globalised world, there are still some major cultural differences.
“A bestseller is a bestseller worldwide. But we have real sizing and cultural issues. We sell a lot of gold in the Far East, more than we do here. In Japan clocks are something that you don’t give anyone from a practical point of view, it’s about time and clocks ticking.”
If a float isn’t on the cards, perhaps Ducas can go right back to her roots with a Moscow opening. After all, there’s more to Russia these days than queues.