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Follow your instincts! It’s the main advice from jewellery designer Adriana Chede, founder of the namesake brand, created when she was only 18. In this interview she talks about how her relationship with jewellery is intertwined with her family history, the challenges of starting over in London and why listening to your intuition makes all the difference.
Project M: What motivated you to launch the brand?
Adriana Chede: Everything happened so naturally, I was only 18 when I first launched the brand. It started as a hobby when I was 12 and was always driven by passion. My longest memory of how it got to me was hearing the stories about how my dad used to gift my mom a piece of jewellery for the birth of each child – we are 5! And how jewellery was always something special, full of meanings inside my Lebanese part of the family.
Project M: What are the biggest challenges you have faced so far?
Adriana Chede: I think that changing country – I’m originally from Brazil – and building the brand from the scratch in a place where nobody knows you can be quite challenging. The first 6 months here in London were really about hard work and resilience, but finally things started to kick off. Also, being the designer, producer, seller, marketing, buyer and administrator all in one can be stressful as well. But at some point you just get used to it and learn how to prioritize the most urgent tasks.
Project M: What advice would you share with those thinking about creating a business?
Adriana Chede: Follow your instincts! We have to make several decisions, sometimes, a lot in the same day and it’s really hard to analyse if it’s the best decision to make. But if we learn to listen to our guts and we are organized enough to know which decision can lead us to the direction we want the business to go, then at least we have some pressure-off and can hope for the best!