Natalia Bryantseva

A person shouldn't be too confident, because doubt is a sign of professionalism.

The neurosis of selling air #

The advertising industry in Yekaterinburg was not glamorous. It was a mid-size Urals city where agencies served regional clients with regional budgets, and the work consisted of generating ideas, packaging them in decks, and sending them into the void. Natalia joined Agency Kosmos in 2010 as commercial and creative director, and for four years she was good at it. Good enough to make a living, good enough to win pitches. Not good enough to feel that the work was real.

“The entire creative class deals in generating ideas, selling ideas by email, and this sometimes drives you into a kind of neurosis,” she would later explain. The neurosis was specific: the absence of anything tangible. At the end of each day, there was no object, no material proof that the hours had produced something with weight and edges. Just another concept sent to a client who might or might not use it.

The workshop was nearby. She did not plan to enter it. She did not have a vision of founding a jewelry brand, building six stores across four countries, or splitting a company across two continents under sanctions pressure. She had an economics degree from Ural State University and a growing conviction that she needed to make something she could hold in her hands. The craftsmen at the bench asked two questions. Can you draw? No. Do you know anything about jewelry? Also no. They told her to come back on Saturday.

She came back every Saturday for eighteen months, paying for lessons like tutoring, fitting metalwork around the advertising day job that still paid the bills. Her husband Anatoly Belikov gifted her a course at Central Saint Martins in London, but a visa error meant she could only visit shops — she never enrolled. The self-taught path was not chosen. It was the only one available.

Saturday lessons #

The Saturday lessons did something the advertising career never had. They gave Natalia a vocabulary of materials instead of concepts: the resistance of silver under a file, the particular weight of a finished ring, the difference between a surface that catches light and one that absorbs it. She was building a craft education backwards — learning techniques before theory, instinct before formal training. The impostor feeling was constant. She was not a fifth-generation jeweler. She had no family business, no atelier inheritance, no degree from a respected design school. She was an economics graduate from Yekaterinburg who had taught herself to solder.

Then, within months of first touching a jeweler’s bench, she won the Swarovski Grand Prix.

The prize did not erase the impostor feeling — nothing ever would — but it gave her permission to take herself seriously. Shortly after, Vogue Russia featured her debut Malevich collection, a series of Constructivist-inspired minimalist silver pieces that referenced the geometric severity of Yekaterinburg’s architecture. “Vogue! Wow! It means I’m doing something serious.” The exclamation, recalled years later, still carried genuine surprise. She had expected to be unmasked, not validated.

In 2014, she quit Kosmos and registered as a sole proprietor. The decision was not bold in the way founder mythologies prefer. It was reluctant. “I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur,” she told an audience at the Yeltsin Center in 2020, six years after the leap. “The hardest thing for me is to accept the entrepreneur in myself, to learn not to block my own growth by being a little afraid of being an entrepreneur and a little thinking of myself as an impostor.” The sentence is awkward because it is honest. She was not performing vulnerability. She was describing the operating system that had governed every decision since the first Saturday lesson.

The name she wouldn’t claim #

By 2016, the brand had its first standalone store in Yekaterinburg and needed a name that was not her own. Natalia’s mother suggested a reference to Boris Pasternak’s poem about August — the month of creation and miracle-working. The brand became AVGVST, rendered in the Latin alphabet like a Roman inscription. “I’m not a fifth-generation jeweler, I don’t have a family business.” The rename was an act of humility masquerading as marketing. She could not bring herself to claim the personal authority that luxury founders are expected to embody.

But if she would not claim authority over tradition, she would claim authority over values. In 2019, AVGVST publicly supported the Yekaterinburg cathedral square protest, standing with residents fighting to preserve public space. Then came the Golunov pendant — a piece released in support of the investigative journalist Ivan Golunov after his arrest on fabricated drug charges. Then a queer collection. Each step was a deliberate escalation. “A purchase today is a political act,” Natalia wrote in a Forbes Russia column. Revenue reached 120 million rubles that year. The activism correlated with commercial growth, not decline. The customers who bought AVGVST were buying identity, not ornament. They wanted to be found by the brand as much as the brand wanted to find them.

“I think all these activities and initiatives are not an attempt to convince anyone,” she said. “It’s an attempt to find your own people and make them visible, to shine a flashlight on them.”

The word that disappeared #

On February 24, 2022, Natalia lost a Paris flagship lease, two global brand collaborations, and her brand’s international future in a single morning. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered comprehensive Western sanctions, and AVGVST — a brand that had spent three years building toward European expansion — watched its infrastructure become radioactive overnight. The Farfetch listing went dark. Italian suppliers of enamel and rhodium stopped answering. International payment processing froze.

The commercial damage was quantifiable. The identity damage was not.

AVGVST ran regular brand perception surveys, asking customers which words they most associated with the brand. Before February 2022, the dominant word was “свободный” — free. After, it vanished from the word cloud entirely, replaced by “stylish” and “fashionable.” The customers had not left. They had stopped associating the brand with its core meaning. For a founder who had built an entire business around values rather than aesthetics, this was the deeper wound. “It’s the first case that we can remember when the whole country got cancelled,” Natalia told Superfuture in her first major English-language interview after the invasion. “Not a lot of people are looking past the headlines.”

The personal cost compounded the professional one. Her uncle and his family lived in Ukraine. She was a Russian brand founder who had spent years publicly opposing the regime, now watching that regime launch missiles at her relatives’ country. The people most damaged by cancellation were not the government-connected businesses — they had domestic markets, state contracts, captive consumers. The people damaged were the independent creative class, the ones who had taken public positions against the state and were now guilty by passport.

For three months, Natalia deliberated. The dormant Berlin corporate shell — a UG registered in February 2020 for European e-commerce — sat unused. Converting it to a full GmbH would mean committing to Berlin as a genuine base, not a tax structure. It would mean finding a landlady willing to rent to a Russian. It would mean rebuilding an entire supply chain from scratch, without a single production facility outside Yekaterinburg. It would mean opening a store in a city where she feared being seen as “a Russian in Berlin while Russian missiles hit Ukrainian cities.”

The impostor voice that had accompanied every career decision since the Saturday lessons was louder than ever. She had never fully accepted herself as an entrepreneur. Now she was supposed to accept herself as an international one, in the most hostile operating environment a Russian founder had faced since the Soviet collapse.

Beauty can’t be cancelled #

The words that carried the moment belonged to her husband. “Послушай, красоту нельзя закенселить,” Anatoly Belikov told her. “Listen, beauty can’t be cancelled.”

It was not a business argument. It was a statement about what survives when institutions fail. Beauty — the act of making something precise and honest and worth holding — outlasts the sanctions regime, the perception survey, the passport that marks you as complicit in someone else’s war. Natalia had spent a decade building a brand around the conviction that objects carry meaning. Her husband was reminding her that the conviction did not expire because a border closed.

The German landlady’s response to a Russian tenant was more pragmatic: “Dear, you have your propaganda, we have ours. Show me your business model.”

In July 2022, Natalia converted the Berlin UG to a full GmbH. The entity was legally and financially independent from the Russian operations — not a subsidiary, not a branch, but a separate company that could survive regardless of what happened to the Yekaterinburg business. Within six months, she had rebuilt the entire European supply chain: production partnerships in Germany, Italy, and Thailand replaced the Yekaterinburg dependency entirely. By June 2023, the Berlin flagship opened on Alte Schoenhauser Strasse — a Crosby Studios design with a tattoo parlor and a secret garden, fifteen months after losing everything international. Revenue across the group grew 40% in 2022, the year of the crisis.

“We don’t have investors or a partner with growth-speed ambitions,” she explained, “so the decision was made this way: we’re ready, we feel the strength, and we want to do it.”

The impostor’s proof #

By 2025, AVGVST was staging pop-up residencies at Le Bon Marche Rive Gauche in Paris — the department store three years earlier she had lost the chance to be near. Six stores operated across four countries. The brand shipped internationally from Berlin via DHL, sold wholesale through SSENSE and Zalando and HBX, and maintained its Yekaterinburg production for the Russian domestic market. All of it bootstrapped, without a single external investor.

Natalia never stopped calling herself an impostor. This is the point.

“A person shouldn’t be too confident,” she told Seasons Project during the worst of the uncertainty, “because doubt is a sign of professionalism.” The sentence is easy to read as modesty. It is not. It is a theory of leadership: that the founders who acknowledge what they do not know are the ones capable of learning fast enough to survive what they cannot predict. Natalia could not have predicted sanctions. She could not have predicted the word “freedom” disappearing from her brand’s identity. She could not have predicted that a dormant corporate shell registered for tax convenience would become the structural foundation of an international business.

What she could do — what the impostor’s operating system demanded — was refuse to assume she already had the answer. The Saturday lessons never ended. They just moved from a Yekaterinburg workshop to a Berlin storefront, from silver on a bench to a GmbH on a balance sheet, from the question “Can you draw?” to the harder one: “Can you rebuild everything you built, in a country that does not want you, while the country you came from destroys the one your family lives in?”

The answer, as it turned out, was the same one she gave the craftsmen in 2013. No. But come back on Saturday.

Last updated: April 5, 2026