Eureka: Vania Leles on changing how African gemstones and diamonds are celebrated  

0:14You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio, brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs, this show all about inspiring people, innovative companies, and fresh ideas in global business. I'm Laura Kramer. Vanya Leles is the founder and creative director of Van Leles, a fine jewelry brand based in London with deep ties to the African continent where many of the world's most precious gemstones and diamonds originate. Born and raised in Guinea-Bissau, Vanya moved to Portugal as a teenager and later studied in Paris, where she developed a passion for fashion. After relocating to London, she was scouted as a model and eventually made her way to New York.

0:57It's there that during a photo shoot, she was exposed to high-end jewelry, which inspired her to research the industry and its lack of African representation. That eureka moment led to her retraining completely. She studied gemology and went on to work for leading names in the industry, including Graf De Beers and Sotheby's. After 11 years in the business, she decided to launch her own brand with a mission to reshape the narrative around Africa's role in luxury. So what does it take to reimagine a centuries-old industry from the inside out? Here's Vanya with more on how the journey began.

1:45I loved modeling. I will always be grateful to the modeling industry because it led me to what I did. My booker convinced me to go to New York because I can see you will do very well there with your features and everything. So I went to New York. We signed up with an agency and it was like my dream come true. This was like early 2003. Did all these amazing jobs. And in one photo shoot, we were shooting beauty and jewelry. We had all this amazing jewelry on the table. I've never seen anything like that coming from a humble family. That was wealth I never knew. And I heard about stories about all these shops.

2:27I never had an interest to going in. It was like, you name it, all the big brands, like the biggest sparkling diamonds jewelry you could possibly see. I was so mesmerized. I remember just going to the table looking at this. And the producer of the shoot was like, how come you seem so surprised seeing this? Probably all of these gemstones came from your home continent. All of a sudden, it linked me back to my childhood. I said, how come back home? There was such a stigma. We associated all of that to destruction, to social issues. But outside the continent, he was creating employment, wealth in skills, wealth in employment, generational wealth.

3:06And then he was creating so much beauty outside. And we were just not part of it. Why? I remember leaving the photo shoot that day. I was so intrigued. Even a photographer kept on telling me, can you relax? And I'm a pretty happy girl. So I was just like, you know, I was thinking, my mind was drifting thinking of my childhood growing up. After I left, I started doing research. You know, I found out like pretty much everyone in Antwerp works in diamond industry. And yet Belgium doesn't produce a ounce of diamonds. How come there is no representation? This was early 2004, right? Like, how come there is no representation?

3:48organization, you know, you have all these brands mining and existing for over 150 years, but yet no one has anyone. Then I was like, okay, these are brands, understandable. Let me go to the Diamond District to see if I will find someone. The shock was even bigger because it's a very generational business. That's why I understood communities work together, family works together, and there was no one who looked like me. I remember telling my mom this and I explained to her what I've been researching, what I find out, it was like, yes, Vanille, what do you want to do? I said, you know, I want to have the first jewelry, high jewelry brand owned by an African that honors the communities where gemstones I use in jewelry comes from.

4:35It is who I am. It's my heritage. It's what formed me. So my collections I inspire through my memories growing up in the continent. We travel a lot around Africa as a child, the west coast of Africa, you know, and Angola, Cabo Verde, Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Mauritania. So those inspire me. For instance, I love the desert. When we used to go to Mali and to Mauritania, it's like a clay country completely. You know, everything is singular color. And for me, it was also important because I wanted to celebrate the beauty of the gemstones coming from these African countries. So my first collection was Legends of Africa, Honoring the Beauty of Zambian Emeralds.

5:20My second one was Out of Africa, Honoring the Beauty of Mozambican Rubies. When I can, I celebrate, you know, I name the provenance of my gemstones because it's important. Mind you, this was before June 2020 when this big movement of supporting minority business. So I was already doing that with a great difficulty because no one was interested. The press was not interested. The clients were not interested. In fact, the first PR company I wanted to hire, they were like, oh, I would turn down New African Heritage a bit because the editors won't come. It would be hard to sell. I was like, you know what?

6:00I don't think you get the essence of who I am. So thank you. I will find someone else because this is the message I want to convey. this is who I am, this is why I entered this business in the first place. Because when no one was thinking about representation or inclusion, I already had that in mind. I didn't have this kind of movement behind it. I just wanted to be part of it, but being who I am.

6:30My clients gave me wings to still be in business. I've got my brand for 10 years. and my clients, you know, it's almost my oxygen, the wings I have, because I survived a pandemic. I survived Europe wars. I survived Brexit when most brands were shutting down, especially fashion, young brands. I've never been stronger than I am now because I have those loyal clients. And I'm also very lucky. The clients who buy from me, they don't need all the aspirational thing that It shows off that this is what I'm wearing. They loved quality. They know the quality. You're not only selling a product. You're selling a dream.

7:13You're selling a beautiful story. And they like to be part of that. I call them the most sophisticated jewelry buyers. When you're small, independent brand, you have to be so resourceful, so smart and so frugal. How you do, you're selling. We don't do wholesale. We used to do. We used to be Sachs, Neiman Marcus. The business was not sustainable because there were terms that was not a small brand cannot. So what I did, you know, it's going to be more hard, but at least because jewelry is a personable experience, one-to-one. So I have a small shop pop-up in Palm Beach and that I sell one-to-one.

7:51And then I do fairs. I do fairs in Doha, Bahrain, Riyadh, Jeddah, Dharam. So I sell B2C. And then I do trunk shows. I do in London three, four times a year. I do New York twice a year. Normally my clients host me or I host with a PR company to bring the press. And it's so personable. I'm in no rush to grow massively. I can't because I don't have the financial resources to just go and open shops. Do I want to raise money to grow more? Yes, but right now I'm focusing on just nurturing my clients and doing what I really like. What's next? We still continue to plan our trunk show events quarterly in those key cities that we do.

8:41We have a beautiful collection with two beautiful collections to launch, the Treasures of Africa, which is based on regal stories, regal symbols of the African continent. Limited, very beautiful. And in the Starlight of Africa, which is an all-white collection using diamonds for one specific country, which we're working on. The stones lead the design process. The stones give me the inspiration. So I will have the stone and then I will sketch a few things until we finalize the design. The collection, I have to find a shape, a meaning somewhere. But the bespoke pieces, the stone leads that creative process.

9:21I want every woman who loves authentic stories and mindful sourcing to be able to wear a piece of my creation.

9:41That was Vanya Leles, the founder and creative director of VanLeles. You can learn more by heading to vanleles.com. And that's it for this episode of Eureka. We'll be back next week and look out for the entrepreneurs available every Wednesday. Eureka was produced by me with audio editing by Jack Jewers. Listen again and find out more at monocle.com. That's where you can join the club and subscribe to Monocle Magazine, or follow us and catch up with the archive via your preferred podcast platform. To contact the team, email me at lrk at monocle.com. Tom Edwards is back next week. I'm Laura Kramer.

10:18Goodbye, and thanks for listening to Eureka.