I started with a market stall on Portobello Road. I was nineteen. I had no money, no contacts, and no plan beyond a feeling that I could make something people wanted to wear.
At twenty-three I got my first £45,000 order. I remember opening the email. I remember not telling anyone for two days because I needed to be sure it was real. I flew to China and India to source materials I could not afford. I learned how to negotiate in rooms where I was the only woman. I made every piece by hand in my bedroom while the first buyer at Reiss put my jewellery into 50,000 pieces a week.
The stockists came after that. Harrods. Selfridges. Liberty. Harvey Nichols. Isetan and Hankyu in Tokyo. Henri Bendel in New York. Each one a door I had walked into not knowing whether it would open.
Then everything I had built came apart at the same time. The marriage. The business as I had run it. The eldest child I lost contact with for reasons that took me years to understand. I moved onto a houseboat on Taggs Island because that was what was available and because something in me knew I needed water near me.
I rebuilt. Not the same business. A different one. The jewellery now is made in the UK because ethics matter to me more than margin. The coaching practice exists because women kept asking me how I had survived what I had survived. The houseboat is still home.
What I am proud of: the children who came back. The work that is honest. The fact that nothing about this trajectory was inevitable, and I kept going anyway.
Twenty-five years. Still here.