Anushka Ducas, MBE, fell into jewellery design when helping her mother source gifts for 60 chefs.

Inspired to turn pictures of fish into cufflinks, she went on to cut her teeth, founding

Lynx of London with her husband in 1990, a brand which has become globally recognised as a signature

British humour and eccentric elegance. After selling links in 2006, Anishka now runs her eponymous fine jewellery company.

With fans including Gwyneth Paltrow, Jalo, and the Duchess of Cambridge,

Anishka's designs lift the reverence of traditional fine jewellery

through her creation of playful, wearable pieces.

Jewelry designer, creative director and entrepreneur, Anushka, welcome to your sheer loss success story.

Thank you, Georgie. Lovely to be here. So let's go back to the beginning. It's 1989 and

your mother rings you saying she needs to find presents for 60

chefs. Where are you? So I was living in Hong Kong, working for Hamptons, selling property to

Chinese wanting to buy property in London. So it was a bit out of the blue when she rang me.

It was like, Mum, I have no idea what you can give your chefs. But I'd rung her back and said, actually, I've just been to the Philippines. I'd found a fantastic workshop making silver. So I just rang and just said, actually, why don't I find a picture of the fish in a book? Make them into cufflings and you can give those to your chefs. And why had you found a factory in the Philippines? One of the wonderful things about living in Hong Kong was every weekend you'd go to the Philippines, you'd go to Thailand, or you'd get at Burma. And so there's huge amounts of travel. And I had quite a lot of friends in the Philippines who were making things. And I just happened upon this lady running a very small workshop. And you had a nosy around

and... And I also made some jewelry for myself. Just silver bracelets are just really simple. And that's

kind of how I discovered that they were very able. So you had the fish cufflinks made and what happened

next? She gave them to the chefs. They were presumably very happy.

What drove you to design more? Well, it was cheaper. She wanted 60, but it was much cheaper to make 120. So I had these 60 extra that I hadn't sold my mother. And by which time I'd moved back to London, I was working for Hamptons in London. So I thought, well, I got to get rid of these cuffings. So I rang the buyer at Harvey Nichols, and I'll never forget her name. And she was just lovely called Fiona Duff. And she said, well, I can't take one design, but if you can design a collection of cufflings, of cufflinks, come back and see me. So I thought, okay, well, that's great. I'll do that. A few weeks later,

I went back to her with six or seven things that I thought they kind of appealed to my sense of humor. Pig-haired bum, elephant hair, bum, that kind of thing, golf bag, golf, and that was the beginning. She said, I'll take all of these, and that was the beginning of Links for London, I guess. You were designing cufflinks for men.

When did women come into the mix?

What was the jewelry market like for women?

Back in the... that was beginning of Lynx for London, I guess. You were designing cufflinks for men. When did women come into the mix?

What was the jewellery market like for women back in the early 90s? I was designing cufflinks and kind of gifts, I guess. And I was very reluctant. The jewellery was the last thing to come, because I was reluctant to do it, because I had never trained as a jewellery designer, and I felt that actually there was lots of

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