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Lesyanebo
A hand-beaded brooch line went viral on Instagram in 2014. Five years later, Lesyanebo (Лесянебо) was dressing Gigi Hadid and debuting at Paris Fashion Week. Then 2022 sanctions shut its export channel, fabric supply, and Kyiv creative base in one season — the exodus everyone called an opportunity, founder Olesya Shipovskaya called a tragedy.
A Moscow Label Rerouted Toward the Gulf and Asia
Two crises, one team kept whole through a decade of reinvention
In March 2022, Olesya Shipovskaya watched acquaintances congratulate her on the biggest opportunity of her career. Every Western label Lesyanebo (Лесянебо) had shared runways with was leaving Russia — supposedly a gift. She rejected the framing: “What doors? A huge tragedy happened.” The same rupture had erased her export channel, fabric supply, and Kyiv creative base.
A brooch, a viral moment, and a name that stuck by accident
Lesyanebo’s origin has none of the polish its later Paris Fashion Week appearances suggest. It began in August 2014, registered as a sole proprietorship — ИП Мельникова О.А. — under the working name “Nebo.” Its first product was a line of hand-beaded brooches shaped like cranes and swans, made and sold with no formal design training behind them, and the line went viral on Instagram almost immediately. A survival project turned, within a year, into a functioning creative business: the brand’s first full lookbook followed in 2015, alongside a Moscow showroom — the moment Lesyanebo itself has treated as its true birth year, distinct from the 2014 registration date.
For its first three years, the label ran as a founder-driven operation, growing on instinct and social-media momentum rather than formal process. That changed in 2017, when Anna Sysoeva, an operator with a background at Condé Nast, joined as CEO. Sysoeva’s arrival marked the shift from a niche Instagram project with growing sales into an organized company built for wholesale — buyer relationships, inventory planning, and the kind of operational discipline a single-founder studio rarely develops on its own timeline. It is difficult to separate the professionalization that followed from the international opportunities the brand went on to capture; the two arrived together.
That discipline was tested almost immediately by opportunity rather than crisis. In 2019, the brand was invited to debut at Paris Fashion Week — first through the agency Fan (Find a Name), then through the showroom agency 247 — a genuine breakthrough for a Moscow label with no prior European runway presence. Inside that showroom, Lesyanebo’s racks sat beside Nanushka and Batsheva, established international houses with years of institutional standing the Moscow label had none of. One week before the show, a trademark conflict with a German company forced an emergency rename from Nebo to Lesyanebo, unintentionally fusing the founder’s own name, Olesya, into the label she had built. A legal problem became a permanent identity almost by accident, and one the brand has carried ever since without ever revisiting it. The same year, Gigi Hadid was photographed repeatedly in Lesyanebo tailoring, and wholesale distribution opened through Selfridges, Luisaviaroma, and Neiman Marcus — placing a brand three years removed from a bedroom brooch operation on racks beside the international houses it had once only watched from outside. The speed of that ascent — viral Instagram brooches to a Paris showroom in five years — is unusual even by the compressed timelines fashion sometimes rewards, and it left the business with an international footprint far larger than its headcount or its legal structure would suggest.
The first crisis: a global lockdown, 2020
The international momentum lasted barely a season before the first real test arrived. When COVID-19 lockdowns hit in 2020, wholesale cash flow froze across the industry, and in May the brand’s own retail partner, Neiman Marcus, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection — a direct structural blow to the export relationship Lesyanebo had spent a year building. Rather than project confidence to buyers and followers, the company went the other way: a public video appeal, candid about the brand’s real financial situation, paired with a flash sale designed to generate immediate cash. It was a gamble on honesty over polish, and it worked. The team — thirteen people, according to a 2020 CEO interview, including cutters, tailors, a pattern constructor and a technologist inside the atelier alongside PR, sales, and showroom staff — was retained in full, and turnover reportedly grew more than fourfold between roughly 2017 and 2020, according to CEO Anna Sysoeva’s own public account. No audited ruble figure accompanies that claim; ИП Мельникова О.А., as a sole proprietorship, is exempt from public financial filing under Russian law, and the figure is presented here exactly as the company itself has described it — a qualitative claim of growth, not a verified number.
A second legal entity, OOO LESYANEBO, was registered in September 2021 alongside the founding ИП — a step that added corporate structure without changing who controlled the business. It remains a dormant shell today, sitting beside the primary trading vehicle rather than replacing it. That same year, a Lesyanebo x Zarina capsule collection, shot in Venice, extended the brand’s commercial reach through a collaborative retail partnership, a small but visible sign that the post-lockdown recovery was already underway.
The second crisis: sanctions, export bans, and a lost creative base, 2022
The 2022 sanctions crisis was a different order of threat than COVID-19 had been — not a temporary freeze in demand, but a structural rupture in the mechanics that made the business international at all. Russian Government Decree No. 311, issued 9 March 2022 to implement Presidential Decree No. 100 and in force from 10 March, banned the export of a list of foreign-origin goods that included women’s apparel — a prohibition later extended through the end of 2025. For a brand that had spent three years building relationships with Selfridges and Neiman Marcus, the decree shut the export door outright, mid-relationship. European fabric imports froze at almost the same moment, cutting off material supply the label’s collections depended on. And Lesyanebo’s Kyiv-based creative base — a working part of how the brand designed, not a symbolic one — was lost entirely, a casualty of the war rather than of sanctions policy directly.
The crisis compounded the strangeness of the surrounding moment. As Western brands fled the Russian market by the hundreds — Inditex’s 502 stores, H&M’s phased exit — Lesyanebo’s own reflex was not relief but rupture. It refused to rebrand itself as a domestic beneficiary of an exodus its own founder considered a tragedy, and it refused to distance itself from Russia to chase a more comfortable international narrative, even as doing so might have eased its remaining Western relationships. Instead, the brand turned toward what was still reachable: domestic premium retail, and clientele in the Gulf and Asia that Western sanctions regimes hadn’t touched. It was a narrower field to play on than the one the brand had spent five years building toward — Paris showrooms, Selfridges racks, a Gigi Hadid moment — but it was one the brand could still control.
The pivot: domestic premium, Gulf and Asian buyers, 2023–2025
By 2023, the shape of the recovery was visible. Farfetch sales continued as one of the brand’s few remaining international channels, while new Dubai and Shanghai clienteles began to develop in earnest — replacement geography for the European wholesale relationships the export ban had closed. Domestically, the brand consolidated a premium retail position rather than chasing volume in a market suddenly emptied of Western competition, a strategy industry press began to notice: by 2024, RBC (РБК) was citing the brand’s Dubai and Shanghai growth, and the Fashion Consulting Group listed Lesyanebo among the country’s premium-tier movers — recognition earned in the same domestic market the brand had once treated as secondary to its international ambitions.
By 2025, that premium positioning had a concrete price point attached to it. TSUM’s own retailer listing prices Lesyanebo coats up to ₽120,000 — a figure that comes directly from the department store’s live catalog rather than from press coverage of the brand, and is presented here as the retailer’s own pricing record for its current inventory, not an independently verified revenue figure. That year also brought a Lesyanebo x Glumkimberly collaboration, a standalone leather line alongside the core womenswear, and coverage in Kommersant (Коммерсантъ), Russia’s business paper of record — evidence that the brand’s post-sanctions recalibration had produced something closer to institutional credibility than mere survival. A Moscow atelier and store at ul. Makarenko 1/19 anchors the operation today, offering in-house atelier services alongside the brand’s own e-commerce channel.
What the two crises actually tested
Lesyanebo’s two crises were not the same shape, and treating them as interchangeable misses what each one demanded. COVID-19 threatened cash flow and a single wholesale relationship; the fix was liquidity and public honesty, executed in weeks. The 2022 sanctions regime threatened the entire international architecture of the business at once — export rights, fabric supply, and a creative base — with no negotiating counterparty, no published timeline for resolution, and no guarantee the domestic market would absorb what the export channel had carried. The brand survived both without losing its team in either crisis, and without losing its ownership structure or its founder’s creative control. ИП Мельникова О.А. remains wholly owned by its founder-director; there is no outside investor in the business, and no acquisition has taken place.
What the export ban ultimately forced was not a retreat but a redirection. Lesyanebo’s Western wholesale relationships — reaching France, the UK, Italy, and the United States before 2022 — had taken three years to build and were closed by government decree within days. The domestic market and the Gulf and Asian buyers that replaced them were not a consolation prize so much as a genuinely different business, built on a premium price point (₽120,000 coats at TSUM) rather than the wider international distribution the brand had been assembling before 2022. Distribution today runs through TSUM, the brand’s own e-commerce channel, the Moscow atelier, and the Farfetch listing that survived the export ban — a narrower, more concentrated footprint than the Selfridges-to-Neiman-Marcus spread of 2019, but one built entirely on terms the brand controls.
Nothing about the ownership structure changed across either crisis, which is easy to overlook against the scale of what did change. ИП Мельникова О.А. — ultimately Olesya Shipovskaya’s own registration — remained the sole trading entity through the viral brooch launch, the CEO hire, the Paris rename, two years of pandemic disruption, and three years of sanctions-era reinvention. The dormant OOO LESYANEBO shell sitting alongside it has never displaced that structure. No outside capital entered the business at any point in this decade-long arc, and no acquisition offer is on the public record. The Moscow atelier, the TSUM shelf space, and the Farfetch listing that remain today all trace back to the same founder who beaded her first brooches by hand a decade earlier, working from a name that started as an accident of trademark law. The label’s answer to a closed export channel was never to abandon what it had built. It was to keep making the work, and to find out — in real time, without a playbook — which parts of the market that remained would still find it.
Researched 20 sources in Russian.