Artem Sokolov

In 10 years we grew 10 times.

The boy who volunteered #

The succession was not forced on him. It was his idea.

In 2014, with Diamant generating roughly a billion rubles a year in wholesale revenue and his parents weighing a move abroad, Artem walked into a conversation that most heirs his age would have avoided. “I myself suggested to them: let me run things here, in Russia,” he later told Forbes Russia. “I created and defended the strategy for developing the new brand.” He was not asked. He was not groomed over a decade of boardroom internships. He proposed, prepared a strategy document, and presented it to his parents as a fait accompli.

His father Alexey — a third-generation jeweler who had spent two decades building Diamant from a kitchen-table operation into a regional manufacturer — understood what was at stake. “I realized then that if I didn’t let Artem do what he wants, later it would be too late,” Alexey said through the company’s press service. “He would simply lose motivation, interest in the business.”

So they left. Artem stayed. He inherited a company with several dozen employees, a 10,000-square-metre factory in a settlement of 7,800 people, and a product catalogue built entirely around wholesale distribution of gold jewelry with cubic zirconia. The brand identity did not yet exist in consumer terms. The retail channel did not exist at all. And the business model that had carried Diamant through two decades — sell wholesale to third-party jewelers at volume — was about to collide with an industry in freefall.

Three generations in a village with no gold #

To understand what Artem inherited, you have to understand where it came from.

Krasnoye-na-Volge sits 35 kilometres from Kostroma on the Volga River. It has produced jewelry since the sixteenth century. It has never had a single gram of gold in its soil. The village’s entire industry — accounting for over 60 per cent of all jewelry manufactured in Russia — depends on metal shipped in from elsewhere and transformed by skills passed down across generations of craftsmen.

Artem’s grandparents spent their entire careers at the Soviet-era Krasnoselsky factory, the village’s institutional anchor. They were not entrepreneurs — they were craftspeople embedded in a state system that guaranteed employment, production quotas, and a certain stability that vanished overnight in 1991. His father Alexey grew up on its production floor, absorbing the rhythms of metalwork and gemstone setting before the Soviet Union collapsed and took the factory’s state orders with it. In 1993, with the old certainties gone, Alexey and his wife Elena — an economist by training — started a home workshop called Diamant with nine people. “At first, father did everything himself — right at home,” Artem recalled. “Then they invited a few friends, then they rented a small space.”

The company grew, as Artem would later describe it, “spontaneously and chaotically.” There was no venture capital in Kostroma Oblast in the 1990s, no private equity scouts visiting jewelry villages. Growth came from reinvested margins and contrarian timing. Alexey bought bricks and land at pre-default prices before the 1998 ruble crisis, investing roughly thirty million rubles to build a proper factory while competitors were paralysed. By 2008, Diamant had crossed the billion-ruble mark. Then came the move that Artem would call his father’s single greatest decision. In 2009, during the global financial crisis, Alexey pivoted into silver jewelry — a category that established Russian jewelers considered beneath them. “It was a 100 per cent bullseye,” Artem said. “Father guessed the trend.” Today, silver accounts for one-third of Russia’s jewelry market in monetary terms and two-thirds in physical volume. The contrarian instinct that built Diamant would prove genetic.

The liability he did not create #

Three years into his leadership, the inheritance turned toxic.

In 2017, the Federal Tax Service began auditing Diamant’s parent entities — two companies legally registered under his mother Elena’s name — covering tax periods from 2012 to 2014. The claims did not originate from anything Artem had done. They traced through a supplier chain to Yuveliry Severnoy Stolitsy (Ювелиры Северной столицы), a St Petersburg firm separately under criminal investigation for 759 million rubles in VAT fraud. The tax authorities assessed additional VAT of over 300 million rubles against the Sokolov family’s entities. The claims predated Artem’s tenure entirely. The liability was his regardless.

Consider the weight of the moment. A young man, still in his early twenties, with no completed degree and no legal training, was defending his family’s name in arbitration courts against the Russian Federal Tax Service. The entities under scrutiny bore his mother’s signature. The supplier whose fraud had triggered the investigation was someone else’s problem — but the consequences were landing squarely on the Sokolov family’s balance sheet. The Russian jewelry industry was already in crisis: production had crashed from 110 tonnes in 2014 to 59 tonnes in 2015, and the tax service had initiated bankruptcy proceedings against approximately thirty companies. Adamas carried 2.5 billion rubles in Sberbank debt. TPK Yashma faced roughly ten billion in back-taxes. The Sokolov family’s 300-million-ruble exposure was smaller in absolute terms but no less existential for a company of its size.

The arbitration courts sided with the tax service. In March 2018, formal bankruptcy proceedings were initiated. A bankruptcy trustee was appointed. The financial state at liquidation showed revenue of 570 million rubles, losses of 760 million, and net asset value of negative 1.1 billion.

Artem was 23 when the papers were filed. He had 2,500 production workers whose livelihoods depended on manufacturing lines that could not stop. He had a three-generation heritage that could end in a courtroom. And he had no credentials that any outside observer would consider adequate to the situation.

“We used the lawful bankruptcy procedure to make the process transparent, predictable, manageable,” he told Forbes Russia, with the controlled understatement of someone who had survived something he could not fully describe. “Thanks to this, production did not stop.”

What he did next revealed the quality that would define his entire tenure. He did not panic. He did not sell. He transferred manufacturing operations to a new legal entity called Yuvelit, ensuring production continuity throughout the proceedings. The old Diamant entities moved through the bankruptcy process while the new structure kept the business alive. The factories kept running. The workers kept their jobs. The jewelry kept shipping. It was crisis management by someone who should not, by any reasonable measure, have known how to manage a crisis.

Betting forward at the worst possible moment #

The decision that separated Artem from survival and turned his story into something worth studying came not after the crisis but during it.

In 2018, while the family’s legacy entities were in active bankruptcy proceedings, he opened the first SOKOLOV branded retail store in Moscow. The company had never sold directly to consumers. Its entire history was wholesale — manufacturing jewelry and shipping it to third-party retailers who put it in their own display cases under their own names. Artem bet on a channel the company had never operated, in a city far from its Kostroma base, at the single most vulnerable moment in its thirty-year history.

The timing was either reckless or visionary. It proved to be the latter. On October 7, 2019, the Diamant entity was formally liquidated and all tax claims were resolved. The court ultimately sided with the taxpayer, applying the principle against creating formal conditions for collecting taxes beyond what the law requires. The three-generation heritage survived intact.

With the existential threat resolved, the retail strategy accelerated. By 2021, SOKOLOV had 226 stores and fourteen billion rubles in revenue. During the pandemic, Artem launched a mobile app that reached four million users within its first year, pushing online sales to 30 per cent of revenue. He hired aggressively, bringing in professional managers with backgrounds in consumer retail rather than traditional jewelry. An industry acquaintance told Forbes that Alexey had “left Artem a strong management team, security service, lawyers” — but the retail transformation, the digital pivot, and the brand-building architecture were entirely the younger Sokolov’s design.

The numbers tell the rest. By 2024, SOKOLOV operated roughly 1,000 stores across 260 cities. Revenue reached 60.5 billion rubles under IFRS, with GMV of 68.1 billion. Brand awareness among women aged 18 to 54 hit 96 per cent — the highest of any jewelry brand in Russia. The company his parents had started with nine people now employed 7,000. It had been named Russia’s most loved jewelry brand for five consecutive years. It received the first credit rating ever awarded in the Russian jewelry industry.

A decade after inheriting a billion-ruble wholesale operation, Artem had built it into something ten times larger.

The deliberate goodbye #

On August 14, 2025, Artem sold 100 per cent of SOKOLOV to private investor Anton Pak through Aspring Capital. The price was not disclosed; estimates ranged from 30 to 65 billion rubles, making it one of the largest Russian retail transactions in recent years. Professional CEO Nikolay Polyakov remained in place. The management team stayed. The brand continued.

The farewell was characteristically direct. “In 10 years we grew 10 times,” Artem wrote in a public post. “My parents built the company for more than 15 years tirelessly, creating a powerful foundation and strong team. I’m proud of Mom and Dad.” He acknowledged having “physically lived in the office about six years” and credited his “super top team” with having “created one of the most efficient and profitable jewelry companies in the world.”

He did not frame the sale as a retreat. He framed it as arithmetic. Continued growth outpacing the market, he explained, would require additional investment — capital that would mean dilution or debt. He chose exit over either. He was 32.

In Krasnoye-na-Volge, the Sokolov Family Charitable Foundation — registered in early 2024 — launched its first major initiatives, including a ten-million-ruble children’s clothing drive. The family was investing back into the village that had made their fortune.

What Artem’s story proves is not that succession is safe. It is that succession, when initiated by the successor rather than imposed by the predecessor, can be the most powerful catalyst a family business ever experiences. A 21-year-old with no degree proposed to take over. A father had the wisdom to let him. A crisis arrived that neither of them created. The company that emerged was not the company that existed before — it was something ten times larger, institutionally stronger, and ultimately transferable to a buyer who saw in it what Artem had seen at 21: a foundation worth building on.

Last updated: April 5, 2026