Epic Contemporary Art Jewellery

Two forms of carbon

Carbon exists in two commercially valuable forms: diamond, compressed over billions of years into the hardest natural material on earth, and carbon fiber, engineered in aerospace laboratories to be five times stronger than steel at a fraction of the weight. The jewelry industry had used one for centuries and ignored the other entirely. When MARKIN Jewellery Laboratory launched in Moscow in 2010, its founding proposition was that this mutual exclusion was not technical but imaginative — a failure of vision, not chemistry.

The challenge was genuine. Carbon fiber cannot be poured into molds or bent to shape like precious metals. It requires non-standard equipment, specialized machining, and artisans trained to work a material that the fine jewelry trade had never contemplated. The atelier that Borisenko built on Denezhny Pereulok in central Moscow was, from day one, designed around materials that had no precedent in high jewelry: carbon fiber, titanium, bronze, aluminum, tantalum, and ebony wood alongside conventional gold, platinum, and precious stones.

The resulting price architecture made the innovation commercially legible. A carbon ring begins at $300. A carbon-and-gold ring with diamonds reaches $3,175. Bespoke commissions incorporating 14-carat tourmalines or 69-carat beryls exist in a territory where price is disclosed on request. The spectrum from entry-level aerospace material to museum-grade haute joaillerie gave Epic something most art jewelers lack: a commercially accessible entry point that introduces collectors to a design philosophy before demanding a collector’s budget.

Within two years, the concept had international validation. At London Jewellery Week in 2012, the brand won a Best Design Award — confirmation that carbon fiber in fine jewelry was not a gimmick but a design proposition the global market was prepared to take seriously. A Hong Kong corporate entity, incorporated in December 2011, and physical representation opening in 2014 suggested that the brand’s ambitions extended well beyond the Russian domestic market. In 2016, Gokhran of Russia awarded the ring “Diaphragm” (Диафрагма) — a carbon fiber and gold piece — its First Prize at the national “Russia. XXI Century” competition. The state body responsible for Russia’s precious metals reserves had acknowledged carbon fiber as a legitimate material for fine jewelry. The bet on material innovation had institutional backing.

The name on the door

On December 9, 2016, Lenta.ru reported that designer Vladimir Markin had left the company bearing his name. The announcement, delivered via an official letter from Borisenko, described the departure as Markin’s decision to “concentrate on developing his other projects.” The measured language concealed an existential crisis. The brand was called MARKIN Fine Jewellery Laboratory. Its namesake had been its creative identity, its chief designer, and the face associated with every piece produced since 2010. Losing Markin meant losing all three simultaneously. Six years of brand equity, built around a single designer’s name, became worthless overnight.

The conventional response in independent jewelry — find another star designer and rebrand around them — would have recreated the same structural vulnerability. Borisenko chose a different architecture. Within months, he recruited architect Vasiliy Krivoshein as lead designer, bringing spatial thinking and structural rigor from a discipline where buildings must stand, not merely sparkle. In 2017, gemologist and journalist Anna Minakova joined as Creative Director, combining stone expertise with editorial sensibility and an understanding of how art jewelry communicates to collectors. Head of Atelier Damir Yarulin — who had been with the brand from early production — provided the manufacturing continuity that ensured the design transition did not disrupt the workshop.

The rebrand itself was deliberate. MARKIN became EPIC Contemporary Art Jewellery — a name anchored to an idea rather than a person. “Don’t Wear Jewellery. Wear Art,” the manifesto adopted in 2014, transferred intact. The new name demanded that every subsequent piece justify the adjective. More fundamentally, the structural shift from single-designer atelier to multi-disciplinary commissioning platform eliminated the single point of failure that had nearly destroyed the company.

The brand that emerged from the crisis was architecturally different from the one that entered it. MARKIN had been a jewelry house with a star designer. EPIC was a platform for commissioning art through the medium of jewelry — a distinction that proved commercially and creatively generative in ways the original model never achieved.

The platform proves itself

The evidence arrived in the form of an unreproducible encounter. In 2021, Elizaveta Likhacheva, director of the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture (MUAR), noticed an Epic pendant around the neck of Irina Stepanova, then head of Sotheby’s Russia. The pendant depicted the architectural plan of Chartres Cathedral. Likhacheva wanted to know who made “such intellectual puzzle-jewelry.” The answer led to “Epic Jewellery: From Bridges to the Architecture of Space” — the museum’s first-ever jewelry exhibition.

No marketing budget could have engineered that introduction. It was the product itself — architecture rendered in metal and carbon — that created the connection between a museum director and an art jewelry house. The solo show became the first of three MUAR collaborations: a capsule collection for the “Falconnier: Architecture of Light” exhibition in 2022, and a “Lvov” collection for the Nikolai Lvov exhibition in 2023. By the third project, Epic had become MUAR’s de facto jewelry partner.

The platform model extended beyond museums. Theater scenographer Nana Abdrashitova, multimedia artist Protey Temen, architect Sergey Pokrovsky, illustrator Varya Alyai, French artist Jean-Christophe Couet — who contributed titanium paintings incorporating Braille — and artist Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov each brought their discipline to Epic’s material vocabulary. The result was a pipeline of creative input that a single designer could never sustain alone, and a catalogue of collaborative pieces that positioned Epic not as a luxury brand but as a cultural institution that happened to produce wearable objects.

The GemGeneve debut in 2019 confirmed the positioning. GemGeneve is not a trade fair that accepts exhibitors based on booth fees. Founded by dealers Thomas Faerber and Ronny Totah, it curates its exhibitor list on merit. Borisenko applied late. The organizers made an exception. “There are no random participants here; you can’t just offer a huge sum for a booth,” Borisenko told Kommersant. “What matters here is who you are and what you do.” The shared stand with Alexander Laut — a jeweler carried by Neiman Marcus and recognized by Sotheby’s — placed EPIC among the global art jewelry elite on terms that could not have been purchased.

When the map changed

In 2019, Borisenko told interviewers that the USA and Switzerland were “in our immediate plans” for expansion. Three years later, Western sanctions on Russia rendered both markets untenable. The planned Western growth strategy — articulated publicly, prepared operationally — had to be abandoned entirely.

The second crisis differed fundamentally from the first. The Markin departure was internal: a creative rupture that Borisenko could address through recruitment and restructuring. The sanctions crisis was external and permanent: a geopolitical shift that closed entire market geographies regardless of product quality or brand reputation. The brand’s reliance on carbon fiber and titanium — materials not directly targeted by diamond and gold sanctions — provided partial insulation from supply-chain disruption. But market access, payment processing, and the reputational barriers that Western luxury markets imposed on Russian-origin brands were not problems that material innovation could solve.

What could solve them was infrastructure built eight years before anyone anticipated the need. The Hong Kong entity, incorporated in December 2011, had been operational since 2014 — processing transactions, building trade relationships, exhibiting at the Hong Kong Jewellery and Gem Fair and the Asia Contemporary Art Show, and maintaining a listing on HKTDC’s sourcing platform. When the Eastern pivot became necessary in 2022, Epic did not need to build Asian market knowledge from scratch. The foundation already existed.

Borisenko relocated to Bangkok, positioning the brand at the center of Southeast Asian gemstone sourcing routes and within reach of Gulf luxury markets. Showrooms and representations opened in Dubai and Bahrain. A German production facility — confirmed by GemGeneve’s exhibitor profile and multiple trade sources — provided a non-Russian manufacturing base for markets where origin sensitivity mattered. By 2025, Epic operated across five markets: Moscow, Hong Kong, Bangkok, the UAE, and Bahrain, with e-commerce processing in both USD and rubles.

The carbon moat

Epic’s competitive position rests on a convergence that no competitor has replicated. Russia’s jewelry market — worth an estimated ₽459 billion in 2024 — is dominated by mass-market gold chains and classical designs. The handful of global art jewelers who work with unconventional materials — Wallace Chan in Hong Kong, Cindy Chao in Taiwan, Suzanne Syz in Geneva — operate at price points and creative registers that make them peers rather than competitors. Among Russian jewelers, Epic has no carbon-fiber rival. Globally, the number of art jewelry houses combining aerospace-grade carbon fiber with precious metals remains fewer than a dozen.

The material expertise itself functions as a moat that deepens with every year of production. Carbon fiber machining requires equipment and skills that conventional jewelry ateliers do not possess and cannot readily acquire. The transformer rings — pieces with separable gold and carbon components — and kinetic mechanisms with moving parts demand engineering precision alongside artisanal craft. Each year of production deepens institutional knowledge that cannot be acquired through recruitment alone. The Skillbox online course and Technograd educational projects disseminate the brand’s design philosophy, but the manufacturing capability remains concentrated in Epic’s own ateliers.

Three institutional partnerships — with MUAR, GemGeneve, and corporate clients including Leica and IQOS — provide credibility that functions independently of any single market geography. The museum collaborations validate Epic as a cultural actor. The GemGeneve participation validates it as a peer among the global art jewelry elite. The corporate commissions validate it as a commercially viable partner for international brands. Together, they construct a reputation architecture that transcends the geopolitical constraints of any one market.

The brand that began as MARKIN Fine Jewellery Laboratory in 2010, lost its name and its creative identity in 2016, rebuilt as a platform under a new name in 2017, and pivoted its entire geography eastward in 2022 now operates from a position that neither crisis left possible to predict. Two forms of carbon — one ancient, one engineered — meet in pieces that range from $300 to prices disclosed only on request. The innovation at the heart of the enterprise is not decorative. It is structural — in the engineering sense, in the business-model sense, and in every other sense the word allows.

Last updated: April 5, 2026