Elizaveta Borzunova

I'm doing everything with my own money: whatever I earned, that's what I'm investing.

The eight-year gap between ‘crazy’ and ‘huge business’ #

Eight years later, Igor Egorov told a journalist that in 2022, they both understood this was already a huge business — with new opportunities opening up. The gap between those two statements is the arc of a founder who built something real without anyone’s permission. It is also the arc of a business that grew not through investment rounds or strategic pivots, but through the systematic application of personal conviction in the absence of external validation.

Elizaveta Borzunova did not arrive at jewelry the way most jewelers do. She was a math olympiad winner who graduated from a specialized school for gifted students — one of the selective institutions that identified and concentrated Soviet-era mathematical talent — then earned a degree in Taxes and Taxation from the Financial University of the Russian Government. She spent the first years of her career writing business plans for blue-chip Russian companies — Renova, Troika Dialog, A Group. These are not the biographical details one typically finds in the profile of a luxury jewelry founder. They are precisely what makes Borzunova unusual.

The analytical discipline that serves a corporate tax consultant is not so different, it turns out, from what serves a founder in the atelier business: precision, patience, and the ability to understand cost structures that most creatives prefer to ignore. The person who built Liza Borzaya understands to the ruble what it costs to produce a piece and what margin is required to sustain the business. That understanding has informed every decision she has made — including the ones her husband initially called crazy.

From Dushanbe to Baselworld #

The pivot from finance to jewelry came in 2007, when a German colleague proposed that Borzunova become the official Russian representative for a German jewelry company. She accepted. The move introduced her to an industry she would spend the next several years learning from the inside. She attended Baselworld in Switzerland — the world’s largest watch and jewelry fair — as well as Vicenzaoro in Italy and the Hong Kong Jewellery & Gem World Fair. She developed sourcing relationships with factories in Italy, Thailand, Hong Kong, and New York. She learned what quality looked like in different production contexts, what clients were actually asking for, and where the gaps between available product and unmet demand existed.

When the German partnership collapsed in the 2008 financial crisis — her partners withdrew from the Russian market as credit tightened globally — she rebuilt her network rather than returning to corporate tax. The crisis was a setback, not a reason to stop. She continued as an independent intermediary, placing bespoke orders at factories across three continents. By 2010, she had established stable working relationships with craftsmen in Italy, Hong Kong, and New York, a growing Russian client base of high-net-worth individuals, and a clear understanding of what they valued: distinctive design, precise execution, and pieces that didn’t look like anything else available in Moscow.

That year, a friend asked her to make something for a French wedding. Borzunova designed a swallow-motif palm bracelet — a piece that wraps around the hand, with the swallow’s body across the knuckles and its wings extending toward the wrist. The bride loved it. Word spread. Orders arrived from guests who had admired the piece at the ceremony. They arrived from friends of guests, and then from strangers.

Borzunova recognized what was happening. She had spent more than a decade in industries that reward systematic thinking. The jewelry intermediary work had confirmed what she had been observing since Baselworld: Russian clients wanted distinctive pieces, and existing brands — Russian or international — were not offering what she instinctively could. She was not trying to build a brand. She was filling an order for a friend and finding, when she looked up, that she had built something larger.

The moment with no external validation #

December 2014 was the month the ruble fell — from 49 to 72 rubles per dollar, a collapse that compressed years of economic pressure into a matter of weeks. For Borzunova, the immediate practical problem was production: her entire supply chain was priced in dollars and euros, her clients paid in rubles, and the gap had become unbridgeable. The business model she had spent three years building no longer worked. She could not produce pieces at a cost that allowed her to sell them at prices her clients would pay.

What made that moment a personal crisis rather than only a business crisis was the context around it. She was considering investing every ruble she had ever earned. Her husband — Igor Egorov, who would later become General Director of the brand — told her directly that she was crazy. He was not wrong to see the risk. She had no production training. She had no relationships with Russian craftsmen. She had no workshop, no equipment, no employees. She had never managed a manufacturing operation. The conventional reading of the situation was unambiguous: this was not the moment to bet the household savings on an unproven venture in the middle of a currency crisis.

She responded with a logic that was both financial and personal: “I’m doing everything with my own money: whatever I earned, that’s what I’m investing.”

Finding craftsmen required the same approach that had served her at Baselworld and in Hong Kong: direct inquiry, professional persistence, and a refusal to accept no as an answer. She walked jewelry markets asking who the best craftsmen were, specifically who the best enameler in Russia was. Every conversation produced the same name: Evgeny Baranov, a master who had created pieces for the Kremlin collection. His jeweled eggs are displayed at the highest levels of Russian state ceremony. He did not take casual commissions from unknown clients.

She wrote to him on social media: “I’m Liza, I’m in love with hot enamel, I want to meet you so you can make an order for us.” They met and talked for five hours. Baranov agreed to work with her workshop and, over time, to train her jewelers in the painted hot enamel technique — the same tradition that has produced Russia’s most celebrated decorative objects for centuries.

By February 2015, she had a workshop in the Krylatskoe district of western Moscow, five jewelers on payroll, a Buratino logo designed for the occasion, and a hallmark registered with the Russian Assay Office. Лиза Борзая (“Liza Borzaya”) — the brand named for a childhood nickname — was officially a company. Igor watched it develop over the following years. For seven years, he did not regard it as a family business. Only in 2022 did both partners recognise what had been built, and what the following years might demand from them.

The seven years between “you’re crazy” and “this is already a huge business” is the most honest measure of the conviction required to build without permission.

The discipline that makes obsession viable #

The financial background that Borzunova’s career began in shows up directly in how she runs the atelier. The brand has never taken external investment. Every ruble of growth has come from reinvested revenue. The 2024 net margin of ₽639,000 on ₽95 million in revenue — a figure that might alarm investors conditioned to expect profit extraction — reflects a deliberate prioritisation of long-term positioning over short-term returns. The boutique openings at Petrovka 5 and GUM required substantial capital. Production capacity expansion required hiring and training. Both were funded from operations rather than debt or equity.

The bespoke business model is capital-intensive by design: palm bracelets require custom fitting sessions with each client, and complex originals take up to six months and 100 enamel firings to complete. The workshop’s eleven employees each hold specialised skills — casting, hand guillochage engraving, hot enamel painting, stone setting — that took years to develop. The brand’s distinctive technical capabilities are inseparable from the team that produces them, which means growth requires investment in people before it produces returns in revenue.

In 2017, jewelry blogger Katerina Perez published the first international English-language profile of the brand after visiting the Moscow showroom. That coverage generated the visibility that led to an invitation to debut at Couture Show Las Vegas in 2019 — where the Tattoo/Get Inked collection nearly sold out on the first run. American buyers responded to something they hadn’t seen before: Moscow’s irreverent haute joaillerie, precise in execution and playful in concept, technically sophisticated and culturally specific. That same year, the brand participated in The Protagonist, a Vogue Italia curated exhibition at Salon Art + Design in New York.

The 2022 geopolitical disruption that complicated many Russian businesses worked differently for Liza Borzaya. High-net-worth Russian clients maintained luxury spending. The departure of Richemont, LVMH, and other Western maisons from Moscow retail left prime addresses vacant and created demand that existing domestic brands were not positioned to meet at the required quality level. Borzunova moved into the former Roger Dubuis boutique on Petrovka 5 in October 2023. A GUM location followed in December 2025. Revenue nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024.

The math olympiad winner who kept solving problems #

The person who built Liza Borzaya out of personal savings and spousal skepticism is now running an eleven-person workshop with two Moscow boutiques and retail in Dubai. The brand she built has become a case study in what Russian luxury looks like when it develops on its own terms: technically demanding, culturally specific, institutionally independent. Borzunova has identified China as a market with genuine appetite for precisely this: “They love art, understand and pay for it.” The aspiration she has stated publicly is TEFAF — the European Fine Art Foundation fair — a credential that would place her work alongside the most rigorously vetted decorative arts and jewelry in the world.

What Borzunova has demonstrated, methodically, is that the analytical clarity she developed writing business plans for Renova and Troika Dialog is not incompatible with making pieces that take six months and 100 enamel firings. The combination — financial discipline and obsessive craft — is precisely what makes the brand viable as a scaling business rather than just a beautiful atelier. Both skills are necessary. Most founders have one. She built the second from scratch, which required the same systematic approach she applied to everything else: direct inquiry, professional persistence, and a refusal to accept that the conventional reading of any situation is the only one.

The math olympiad winner still solves problems. The nature and scale of those problems have changed considerably.

Last updated: April 30, 2026