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AVGVST
A polisher who once finished sniper-rifle scopes now sets rock crystal into silver at AVGVST's Yekaterinburg factories. When sanctions severed the brand's international infrastructure overnight, the founder split it into two legally independent companies on two continents and rebuilt European supply chains in six months. Revenue grew 40%.
Two Companies, Two Continents
Transformation Arc
On February 24, 2022, Natalia Bryantseva lost a Paris flagship lease, two global brand collaborations, and her company’s international future in a single morning. AVGVST (Август) — a Yekaterinburg-born demi-fine jewelry brand built on hand-cut Ural rock crystal and silver treated with gold-level finishing — had sixteen days earlier opened its fifth store. Six months later, it would be operating as two legally independent companies on two continents. Revenue rose 40%.
The polisher’s hands
The craft tradition that made AVGVST possible predates the brand by centuries. Yekaterinburg sits in Sverdlovsk Oblast, the heart of Russia’s Ural stone-cutting and lapidary heritage — a region where gem polishers and metalworkers have shaped rock crystal, malachite, and silver since the time of the tsars. When Natalia Bryantseva walked into a local jewelry workshop in 2013 with no metalwork training, she was entering an ecosystem, not a vacuum.
That ecosystem proved decisive. AVGVST’s three Yekaterinburg factories employ more than fifty production workers who turn out roughly 3,000 handmade pieces per month. One of the polishers previously spent his career finishing optics for sniper rifle scopes — the same exacting hand that once calibrated precision glass now sets rock crystal and citrine into sterling silver. The production philosophy treats silver with techniques typically reserved for gold: proprietary finishing standards, hand-cut gemstones processed at a dedicated Sverdlovsk Oblast lapidary facility, and quality tolerances that most Russian jewelers apply only to precious metals.
This was the foundation of a deliberate market position. Russian jewelry bifurcated between ultra-luxury artisans like Ilgiz F and mass-market volume players like Sokolov and Sunlight. AVGVST occupied the space between them — what the global industry calls demi-fine — pricing its core range between 90 and 350 euros and anchoring the aesthetic in Constructivist minimalism rather than ornament. The debut Malevich collection, featured in Vogue Russia in 2015, announced the brand’s intention: art-referenced design at accessible price points, made by the same hands that once served the defense industry.
Yellow walls and rising revenue
By 2017, Bryantseva had renamed the brand from her own name to AVGVST — a reference to Boris Pasternak’s poem about August, suggested by her mother — and begun a partnership with Harry Nuriev’s Crosby Studios that would define its visual identity across five retail locations. Nuriev chose the brand’s signature yellow from a notepad Natalia brought to their first meeting. What started as an interior design commission for the first Moscow store in the Patriarshiye Prudy district in 2018 expanded into product collaborations, pop-up installations, and eventually the Berlin flagship concept.
The commercial trajectory matched the creative ambition. Revenue reached 120 million rubles in 2019, a figure Bryantseva disclosed in a Forbes Russia column where she argued that “a purchase today is a political act.” The brand had publicly supported the Yekaterinburg square protest, released a pendant for detained journalist Ivan Golunov, and introduced a queer collection — each act of civic positioning coinciding with growth, not retrenchment. COVID doubled the business in 2020. By early 2022, estimated group-wide revenue approached 500 million to one billion rubles (~$5.5–11M USD), the team had grown to roughly sixty to seventy-five people across three Russian cities, and Natalia had quietly registered a dormant Berlin entity — AVGVST Jewelry UG — in February 2020 as an e-commerce shell for European orders. It was a corporate footnote that would prove existential.
The country that got cancelled
On the morning of February 24, 2022, Western sanctions triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine severed AVGVST’s international infrastructure in its entirety. A signed 44-square-metre Paris flagship lease in Le Marais: gone. Two global brand collaborations: cancelled. Farfetch distribution: frozen. Raw material imports — enamel, rhodium from Italy — became impossible overnight. Simultaneously, Russian Law No. 47-FZ eliminated the simplified tax regime for jewelry businesses effective 2023, a change Bryantseva publicly estimated would kill 1,200 jewelry stores and clear 45% of the domestic market.
“It’s the first case that we can remember when the whole country got cancelled,” Natalia told Superfuture in June 2022. The brand’s second Moscow store had opened on February 8 — sixteen days before the invasion rendered its international ambitions radioactive.
For three months, AVGVST paused European expansion entirely. Then Natalia made the structural decision that would define the brand’s next chapter. In July 2022, she converted the dormant Berlin UG into a full GmbH — AVGVST Jewelry GmbH, registered as HRB 214813 B in the Charlottenburg court — establishing it as a legally and financially independent entity from the Russian operations. The two companies would share a name, a founder, and a design language. They would share nothing else: no capital flows, no production dependencies, no supply chains that sanctions could sever.
Within six months, the Berlin entity had rebuilt its entire production infrastructure across three countries. Manufacturing partnerships in Germany, Italy, and Thailand replaced the Yekaterinburg dependency for every piece sold in European markets. The team redistributed across five cities: Berlin for leadership and retail, Moscow for the creative studio, Yekaterinburg for Russian production, Istanbul and Yerevan for operations coordination through non-sanctioned jurisdictions. It was the most operationally complex sanctions-era pivot in the Russian independent design sector — executed without a single investor dollar.
What the split proved
The Berlin flagship opened in June 2023 at Alte Schönhauser Strasse 27 in Mitte, designed by Crosby Studios as a “dark kitchen” concept integrating a tattoo studio and secret garden. Projected payback was three years — triple the Moscow stores’ timeline, but acceptable for a brand building European credibility from scratch.
What followed was acceleration. The Almaty store opened in February 2024, the brand’s first international retail location outside Russia and Germany. A Crosby Studios-designed pop-up launched simultaneously at Palais-Royal in Paris. By February 2025, AVGVST was staging a residency at Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche with an exclusive OUI/NON ring — the same Parisian luxury retail ecosystem where a signed lease had evaporated three years earlier.
AVGVST now operates six owned stores across four countries, distributes through SSENSE, Zalando, and HBX, and ships internationally from Berlin. Revenue grew 40 to 69% in 2022 depending on the entity measured — the crisis year. The brand remains 100% founder-owned, bootstrapped, and vertically integrated on both sides of the sanctions divide. Its production still begins where it started: in a Ural workshop, where a former sniper-scope polisher sets stones into silver with the patience of a man who once calibrated glass for a different kind of precision.