Annoushka Ducas MBE

Annoushka Ducas is one of the country’s leading fine jewellery designers who since 2009 has founded and run her eponymous jewellery company – Annoushka.

Annoushka embodies and represents Annoushka’s own personal taste and draws on her wealth of experience and expertise in working with the most beautiful stones to create original and unique items that women enjoy and take pride in wearing. She is passionate about how jewellery should be worn – that the same piece can be informal as well as formal - there should be no boundaries in wearing diamonds with jeans and she understands that women look more and more for jewellery to be an expression of personal identity.

Annoushka inhabits a largely untapped market for design-driven, informal approach with a strong point of view – this really bridges the gap between high jewellery and the traditional jeweller. Key to this is a unique curatorial role which Annoushka undertakes; choosing a number of guest designers per year to show their collections under the auspices of Annoushka for a limited period.

Annoushka’s story has a strong Russian heritage; her mother was Russian and her family, the Provatoroffs, fled Moscow after the Russian Revolution, although her grandfather returned regularly after the War. Her strong sentimental attachment to Moscow and the Russian influence on her taste and style, have given her jewellery a very particular flavour, inspired by Russian fable and fairytale, tinged with Russian colours and opulence. When her father died, he left her a rouble and a Russian cross that belonged to her mother and her grandmother before her; these precious objects led her not only on a personal journey into her family history and but also towards her own jewellery collections.

After studying at the Sorbonne in Paris in the 1980s, Annoushka Ducas embarked on the first of many extensive world travels, stopping to spend time in Hong Kong, where she first began to design jewellery. Returning to the UK, she famously created a pair of fish cufflinks, (for her mother’s fish business), a small seed that grew into a ground-breaking idea and a global luxury jewellery brand. In 1990, together with her husband, John Ayton; the former corporate lawyer and luxury entrepreneur, Annoushka founded Links of London, one of the great success stories of the 90s and the new millennium; a pioneering venture that spearheaded the democratisation of luxury and design in jewellery and silver. With their ability for instinctively understanding the needs of the market and dreams and desires of the client, both Annoushka Ducas and John Ayton built a phenomenally successful business that was available across the world when they sold.

Annoushka’s work is widely recognised and has been rewarded with various awards and accolades; notably jewellery designer of the year, Gift Designer of the Year in, Brand of the Year. She was short-listed for the Veuve Clicquot Businesswoman of the Year in 1996. In the 2012 New Year’s Honour’s list Annoushka was awarded an MBE for her services to British jewellery.

Annoushka takes an active role in searching out new and emerging talent, instigating and overseeing a very successful annual jewellery design project with students at Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design.

She and John live in Sussex and London with their four children, Marina, Oliver, Chloe and Oscar.