Zakhar Borisenko

Once I got into it, it was too late to retreat.

The strategy professor’s credentials #

The trajectory that preceded the bet was, by any measure, conventional in its ambition. Borisenko graduated from MGIMO, Russia’s elite diplomatic university, through its Faculty of International Economic Relations — an institution that produces diplomats, finance ministers, and the upper tier of Russia’s corporate class. He moved through management consulting at PWC and Accenture, then climbed the corporate ladder with purposeful speed: Head of Strategy at Ingosstrakh Insurance, one of Russia’s oldest and largest insurers; CFO of TransContainer, the country’s dominant rail container operator; CEO of Osnova Insurance. Each role was larger than the last, each demanded the kind of strategic thinking he would later teach.

By the time Borisenko took a lectureship at Moscow State University’s MBA programme, he had the credibility that only operational experience confers. He had restructured balance sheets, managed logistics networks spanning eleven time zones, and run an insurance company. His students were not learning strategy from a theorist. They were learning it from someone who had executed it at national scale.

The bet #

The provocation arrived, as Borisenko later told Kommersant, through a conversation with artist friends. They had been discussing how music and visual art reinvent themselves every decade — new movements, new materials, new philosophies. Jewelry, by contrast, had frozen at Art Deco with brief spasms of creativity in the 1960s and 1970s. A century of aesthetic paralysis in a sector that handles some of the most extraordinary materials on earth.

For a strategist, this was not a dinner-party observation. It was a market gap. Borisenko told his MBA students he could build a viable business in the arts — and then, in 2010, founded MARKIN Jewellery Laboratory with designer Vladimir Markin. The name belonged to the designer. The strategy belonged to Borisenko. “Once I got into it,” he said later, “it was too late to retreat.” The sentence reads like a confession. It was also a statement of fact: by 2010, the corporate strategist had staked his reputation on the proposition that jewelry could be reimagined from first principles.

The bet paid its first dividend within two years. At London Jewellery Week in 2012, the laboratory won a Best Design Award — international validation that the hypothesis had merit. The strategy professor’s contention that jewelry had stagnated creatively found agreement from the one audience that mattered: the industry itself.

Stones without a diploma #

There is a particular confidence in the way Borisenko discusses gemstones. “My second passion is gemstones,” he told Kommersant. “I’m the one who primarily selects stones for the company. Although I don’t have gemological education, I think I manage no worse than many professional colleagues.”

The admission is disarming precisely because it carries no apology. Borisenko sources personally from Myanmar, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Brazil — travelling, in his own words, to “the most unexpected places” to evaluate rough stones. He brings to the gemstone markets of Mogok and Peshawar the same analytical framework he once applied to insurance risk tables and container shipping logistics. The stones he selects — spinels, tourmalines, morganites, emeralds — end up in pieces that sell for thousands of dollars and hang in museum exhibitions.

No formal gemological training. No apprenticeship under a master cutter. Instead, the autodidact’s method: study the material, study the market, develop a personal eye, and trust the judgement that corporate due diligence instilled. The professional gemologists whose credentials he lacks have not, to date, challenged the assessment.

When the name walked out #

In December 2016, Vladimir Markin departed to pursue other projects. The crisis was existential in a way that only a brand named after a living person can experience: MARKIN Jewellery Laboratory lost its namesake, its creative director, and its primary artistic identity in a single departure. Six years of brand equity — built on a designer’s personal name — evaporated with a resignation.

For Borisenko, the moment was a real-time examination in the subject he had taught. Crisis management is a staple of any MBA curriculum. The textbook response is to preserve continuity, minimise disruption, and find a like-for-like replacement. Borisenko did none of these things. Instead, he diagnosed the structural flaw that the crisis had exposed: a single point of creative failure. The previous model had concentrated all artistic authority in one person. When that person left, the model collapsed.

His response was architectural. Within months he recruited architect Vasiliy Krivoshein as lead designer and, in 2017, appointed gemologist and journalist Anna Minakova as Creative Director. The rebrand from MARKIN to EPIC signalled a deliberate shift — from a house built around one designer’s name to a platform built around an idea. The strategy professor had applied strategy, and the answer was not to replace one namesake with another but to ensure no single departure could threaten the enterprise again.

The passport that cannot be purchased #

The restructuring’s proof arrived through channels that money cannot influence. In 2019, Borisenko applied late to GemGeneve — the curated Geneva jewelry fair where participation is awarded on merit alone. “There are no random participants here,” he explained. “You can’t just offer a huge sum for a booth. What matters here is who you are and what you do.” The organisers made an exception because they liked the work. The booth Epic received, shared with Alexander Laut, placed the brand among the global art jewelry elite on terms that no marketing budget could have purchased.

Two years later, a more serendipitous validation arrived. Elizaveta Likhacheva, director of Moscow’s Shchusev Architecture Museum, noticed an Epic pendant depicting the architectural plan of Chartres Cathedral on the neck of Sotheby’s Russia head Irina Stepanova. Likhacheva sought out who made “such intellectual puzzle-jewelry.” The result was the museum’s first-ever jewelry exhibition — institutional credibility earned not through application but through a museum director’s curiosity at a dinner.

Today Borisenko operates from Bangkok, positioning himself at the centre of Asian gemstone sourcing routes and Gulf luxury market access. The corporate strategist who incorporated a Hong Kong entity eight years before sanctions made Eastern infrastructure essential now builds the next phase from Southeast Asia. The bet he made in a Moscow lecture hall has not yet been settled. But the strategy professor’s hypothesis — that jewelry had stagnated and that an outsider could do something about it — has accumulated more evidence than most academic papers ever produce.

Last updated: April 5, 2026