BoF: I hear you’ve just been made an MBE by the Queen for services to the jewellery industry. What did that mean to you? Astley Clarke is a very British brand.
BAC: Britishness is a core tenet of the brand. The bits of Britishness that we celebrate are London and design and creativity and a very sort of international outlook. We have a very British tone of voice, which celebrates British wit — so, sort of Blackadder meets Monty Python meets luxury jewellery!
We are a young brand. We’re a pretty irreverent brand. And we’re an outsider in the jewellery industry. We’re not really part of the establishment. We have an amazing picture of the Queen wearing dark sunglasses in our office next door. That’s more us. But the recognition feels really lovely. Everyone has worked so hard for the last seven years.
BoF: I’d like to go back to the very beginning. What were you doing before Astley Clarke?
BAC: My career pre-Astley Clarke was in e-commerce, online and a bit of fashion. I left university and worked with a French agency that did all the buying in London, Paris and Milan for Bergdorf’s and Lane Crawford. But I wanted to get into the nuts and bolts of business, so I joined Anderson Consulting and worked on tech projects, which were quite boring, but did give me great grounding. I worked for a number of Internet companies, then ended up at Tesco.com where I was head of online strategy.
BoF: Most fashion-tech founders come from either a fashion background or a technology background. Very few have done both.
BAC: I’ve definitely done both and it was sort of part luck and part design. I knew I wanted to start a business and I knew it had to be in e-commerce, because that’s what it’s really about from a business perspective, and I really managed to learn the bits of the puzzle: a bit of fashion, a bit of tech, a bit of commercial, a bit of operational.