What we cover in this episode:

• How Central Saint Martins and a scholarship at Cartier in Paris formed the foundations of the brand

• The DIY launch strategy: no budget, borrowed post rooms, and a day spent in Borders writing down editors' names

• Why Hannah's character-led design process is one of the most distinctive in the industry — and why it leaves her completely exposed

• Building a brand that refuses to conform: gender fluidity, the rejection of bridal, and designing jewelry that's just jewelry

• The mistakes that nearly derailed the business — and what she learned from them

• Why consulting work and associate lecturing at Saint Martins has kept the brand alive and the creative work sharp

• What having the right physical space has done for the business

• How long it really takes to build a luxury jewellery brand from scratch

Episode Summary

St Martins, Cartier, and where the brand actually came from

Hannah did not grow up around jewellery. She is from a working class Yorkshire mining family. No jewellery in the house, a local comprehensive school, Camden Market earrings. She got into the Saint Martins foundation course, walked into the jewellery workshop, and that was it. A Cartier scholarship followed in her second year: a stint at the bench in Paris that exposed her to what luxury meant at its highest level, followed by evenings watching French boys play rock and roll in small clubs. The brand came directly from trying to find where those two worlds could meet. Without either experience, she is certain she would not be doing what she does.

The launch and how she got her first press with no money

Hannah turned down the job offer from Cartier and started. Her first real collection was funded by a competitive grant from Nesta's Creative Pioneer Programme, roughly £25,000 that she spent faster than any other recipient, putting it all into jewellery within three weeks. Before that, with nothing, she spent a full day in Borders Bookshop nursing a coffee she could afford while writing down the names and contacts of every magazine editor she wanted to reach. She then used the Saint Martins post room to send out photocopied lookbooks she couldn't afford to post herself. That is how she got her first Sunday Times Style placement. The instinct to get work in front of the right people, and the resourcefulness to do it without resources.

The character-led design process and why it is also the most vulnerable thing she does

Every Hannah Martin collection begins with a character and a world, not with jewellery. She builds a universe through weeks of images, instinct, and creative immersion, deliberately blocking out all external input until the world has enough internal logic to start generating shapes. The jewellery comes last. She describes blocking out three weeks for her latest collection, seeing nobody, consuming nothing from outside. She goes through highs and lows she compares to a rollercoaster of emotions. The vulnerability of putting something so personal into the public sphere is both the most frightening and the most galvanising part of what she does. Nobody has ever asked her that before, she says, and the fact that it is that exposed is precisely why the work lands the way it does.

Gender fluidity, rejecting bridal, and designing jewellery that is just jewellery

Hannah has never made men's jewellery or women's jewellery. She has made jewellery. That positioning, gender-fluid before it was a recognised category in the industry, was never strategic. It was honest. Her bespoke work is roughly 70% engagement and wedding-related, but she refuses to use the word bridal. Her love collection is called Mad Love, for lovers, because for her it is about marking any relationship in any form. She describes ongoing pressure from the commercial side of the business to use the word bridal because that is what people search for. She cannot do it because it would not be authentic and she does not believe in what the institution implies. She will leave the SEO on the table rather than compromise the position.

The space and what it has done for the business

Hannah's current studio and showroom in East London, a former grain warehouse with a Georgian facade, iron gates, concrete floors, clay plaster walls and Corten steel displays, was found by instinct. She walked into the alleyway before seeing the space and already knew. She and her team stripped it back themselves, with family and friends, finding the building's original ceiling and details as they went. The design studio at the top of the building, with views across to St Paul's and the Barbican, came later when she realised after COVID that she had no space to shut the door and go into a creative world. She is clear about what the space has done beyond the creative: it changed what was possible, what she could take on, and how the business is perceived by clients.

The mistakes and what she learned

Hannah is direct. Wrong choices of team and business partners have been, in her words, close to fatal. Her bigger lesson is about avoidance: ignoring cashflow problems, handing over financial oversight to others and telling herself she was just the creative, receiving debt collection letters in the early years and looking the other way. She is clear this was a mistake and that the correction was not about becoming a numbers person. It was about deciding to be aware. Not to hand the business side to someone else and assume that because she trusted them everything was fine. She still does not love it, but she looks at the cashflow and she knows what is happening. That shift was significant.

Consulting, lecturing, and why doing other people's creative work keeps her own sharp

Hannah has always supplemented the brand with consultancy design work and associate lecturing at Saint Martins. During COVID, when sales stopped for the best part of eighteen months, it kept the business alive. Beyond the financial function, she values it for what it does creatively: forcing her to think inside someone else's aesthetic, to look at different references, to work from a brief that is not her own. She is direct about what she would risk without it: starting to repeat herself. The consultancy, whether her name is on the output or not, keeps her moving through different worlds and problems, and means that when she comes back to Hannah Martin work, she is not working in a creative vacuum.

How long it takes to build a luxury jewellery brand

Nearly twenty years. Hannah is clear that the timeline is not a failure of pace. It is the result of building strong foundations rather than chasing fast growth, of not having investors who needed a return on a shorter horizon, and of external events that slowed things down along the way. Her view is that the brand has grown steadily, with control, without becoming a flash in the pan. She cannot tell you how long it should take. She can tell you she is still here, which is the more useful answer.