Nino Shamatava

We decided to make a fashion house.

That quality is not decoration in the USHATÁVA story. It is load-bearing.

The beginning before the beginning #

Shamatava arrived in Russia as a child, her family having fled the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict of 1992. Displacement becomes ordinary when it happens early enough — she grew up in Russia, was shaped by it, built her adult life there. But the biographical fact matters for understanding a founder who would go on to treat continuation as a deliberate choice rather than a default.

Still in her twenties, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. The diagnosis arrived roughly between 2010 and 2014 — the approximate window sits at the center of the years before USHATÁVA existed. She recovered. But the experience of facing the possibility of not recovering, and then choosing to act as if the future were still open, became something she carried forward.

The brand she would build was not a cancer recovery story. It is a fashion label. But the character that built it — the willingness to continue when the evidence was unclear, to make a bet on conviction rather than certainty — was formed before she ever met her co-founder.

Meeting Alisa Ushakova #

In 2012, Shamatava met Alisa Ushakova. Neither came from fashion. What drew them together was something harder to name than shared taste — a creative frequency that was also a shared restlessness. Both would later describe walking out of fashion courses in 2014, leaving programs where teachers stifled development rather than enabling it. The decision to learn cutting and sewing independently, outside any institutional framework, was the first of a pattern that would repeat.

The lesson from the courses was not that institutions are bad. It was that Shamatava and Ushakova already knew what they wanted to make, and the institution was getting in the way of making it. This is a specific kind of confidence — not arrogance, which believes it knows better, but clarity, which knows what it is trying to do. That distinction would show up again, in larger decisions, throughout the decade.

The ₽200,000 starting capital came from a friend in food delivery. The workspace was a sublet in a beauty studio in a city neither of them had deep networks in. The plan, if it could be called that, was to make things they wanted to exist and see if anyone else wanted them too. They recouped the stake before the end of 2015. The speed of that recoupment was not a vindication of the plan so much as a sign that the clarity was real — that the things they wanted to make were also things other people wanted to find.

What USHATÁVA became #

Shamatava’s role as creative director shaped the aesthetic identity of a brand that would grow to ₽504M in annual revenue within its first decade. The Ushatáva x Moms knitwear line — built with her mother Olga Tolstosheeva, who has led the atelier since 2018 — encoded a family dimension directly into the product line. A mother literally making the garments is not a branding device; it is how the brand works.

That directness — the absence of mediation between the personal and the commercial — is a consistent feature of how Shamatava has built USHATÁVA. The brand’s aesthetic is recognizable partly because it reflects genuine conviction rather than market research. Forbes Russia noticed: when they named Alisa Ushakova to their 30 Under 30 list in 2020, the recognition arrived at the last possible moment before COVID ended the offline retail model that had sustained their early growth.

The pandemic forced a structural reckoning for every Russian fashion brand that had grown through physical retail. Shamatava and Ushakova adapted — not by pivoting wholesale but by accelerating what they had already been building: a direct relationship with customers who knew the brand’s aesthetic and sought it out specifically. The years immediately after 2020 were not easy, but USHATÁVA emerged with its identity intact, which was the harder thing to preserve than the revenue.

By 2023, annual revenue had crossed ₽504M. In 2024, the appointment of a former LIMÉ executive to lead network expansion brought professional management infrastructure to a brand that had spent nearly a decade running on founder energy and creative instinct. This kind of transition — from founder-run to professionally managed while retaining creative direction — is one of the harder moves in founder-led retail. Shamatava’s continued role as creative director preserved the element that had made the brand worth managing at scale.

The question Dachi’s death raised #

On 15 August 2021, Dachi Zukhbaia died of COVID-19. He was 33. He had been USHATÁVA’s art director — but he had also been a friend, someone whose creative presence was woven into what the brand had become over six years. His absence raised a question that was not purely operational.

It was not: how do we replace a creative director? It was: is this brand still ours to continue?

The distinction matters for understanding what came next. A business decision — find a replacement, restructure the creative department — would have produced a different outcome. What Shamatava and Ushakova chose instead was to sit with the question, which meant accepting that the answer would cost something. For Shamatava specifically, the weight of the question carried a personal register. She had already learned, earlier in her life, what it means to face the possibility that something you love might end — and to choose continuation anyway, knowing it would not be the same.

The gap between August 2021 and September 2022 was the year that question was being worked out. During that time, the brand was not paralyzed — it continued operating — but the deeper question of what it should become without Zukhbaia’s visual sensibility remained open. The answer arrived in the form of the memorial show.

The show that answered the question #

The Dachi memorial show on 1 September 2022 was how Shamatava answered the question she had been sitting with. It was not a tribute show that preserved what Zukhbaia had built and then moved on. It was a statement that the brand would carry the loss forward — that grief was not a detour but part of the material.

The 36% revenue drop that followed was the price of that decision. Shamatava knew the price before making it. A founder who had already survived cancer understood the arithmetic of continuing at cost. She did not treat the revenue drop as evidence of error. She treated it as evidence that the decision had been the real thing — that it had mattered enough to carry a consequence.

This is the quality that is easiest to describe as resilience and hardest to understand correctly. Resilience is usually framed as the ability to bounce back — to recover losses, restore previous conditions, return to baseline. What Shamatava demonstrated in 2022 was something different. Not a return to what existed before Dachi died, but a deliberate departure from it. The brand that emerged from the memorial show was different from the brand that had preceded it. The loss was incorporated rather than overcome.

Revenue recovered. By 2023, USHATÁVA was generating ₽504M annually. The trajectory validated not the decision to suffer a 36% drop — that was never the point — but the refusal to resolve grief through replacement rather than transformation.

The closing arc #

At USHATÁVA’s tenth year, in 2025, Shamatava joined the board of trustees of Oncologica — a cancer charity whose meaning to her was personal. The Garage Museum anniversary show and the Oncologica trusteeship arrived in the same year, as if the two were coordinates of the same moment: the brand reaching ten years, and its co-founder formally encoding the beginning of the arc that had made it possible.

The Oncologica trusteeship is not a coda. It is a closing. The arc that began with illness in her youth — the conviction formed in recovery, carried through the founding, tested by grief, maintained through commercial uncertainty — arrived at a form of service in the same field where it had been forged. The trusteeship is not symbolic; it carries work. In early 2026, that work produced its first visible public result: a charity auction that raised ₽9.72M.

For someone who had spent a decade building something from a conviction she acquired before the building began, the trusteeship completes a shape that was always there — not adding something new but making visible what had been load-bearing all along.

The willingness to invest in cancer charity at year ten is also, in a quieter register, a signal about what the brand considers its obligations. USHATÁVA is not a wellness brand or a cause-aligned brand; it is a fashion label. The Oncologica trusteeship exists not because it serves the brand’s positioning but because it serves something Shamatava considers worth serving. That distinction — between actions taken because they fit the brand and actions taken because the person believes in them — is one of the harder things to fake over a decade.

What the decade proved #

Shamatava is not the public face of USHATÁVA in the way a solo founder would be. Ushakova carries the business architecture; the Forbes recognition was hers. The brand itself is the face. But Shamatava’s creative directorship shaped what the brand is — the aesthetic conviction that made it recognizable, the personal temperature that made it trusted.

The decade between 2015 and 2025 included a global pandemic, the death of a founding collaborator, and a deliberate decision to accept significant revenue loss rather than compromise on how to honor that loss. Most fashion brands do not survive one of those events. USHATÁVA survived all three.

The structure of that survival matters. It was not the result of financial cushion, institutional backing, or favorable market conditions. USHATÁVA had none of those advantages at its critical moments. It survived because its founders — and specifically because Shamatava, in her role as the person who held the creative identity — treated continuation as something that required active choice rather than mere persistence. Each hard decision was made with knowledge of its cost. None of them was made to avoid looking like the kind of person who would stop.

The character that drove those decisions was formed before the brand existed. That is what the Oncologica trusteeship at year ten makes visible: not that Shamatava used her cancer survivorship to build a brand — she did not; it is a fashion label, and she built it as a fashion label — but that the conviction she developed in recovering from illness proved adequate to everything the brand would require of her over the following decade.

The bet in 2015 was ₽200,000 and a borrowed studio. The actual wager was larger than that. It was a bet that what she had learned about continuing in difficult conditions would be enough. A decade of evidence suggests it was.

Last updated: June 15, 2026