A Glimpse of 2025
This has been a year with wonderful moments, collaborations, creativity, and exchanges. It has also been a year where, in so many places where we work, there have been challenges, pain, and injustice.
This year saw trips to Palestine, Afghanistan, and Myanmar, all places where the extraordinary people we work with continue to use creativity as a form of resistance, making beautiful things to get through unimaginable challenges. With compassion, hope and often humour, it was a privilege to spend time with the brilliant people we collaborate with.
In 2025, we launched our first glass collection with Mohammad Twam and Turquoise Mountain Levant. I learnt so much and marvelled at Twam’s remarkable hand-blown glass skills. Together, we created a rainbow of glass beads and pendants, drawing on ancient bead traditions and our gentle, soft, worn shapes in this beautiful new medium.
In Afghanistan, we created a new silver collection. It felt right to play with the pure, clean, cool tones of silver, and to develop organic, handmade shapes that gave it life and warmth.
Zindagi Now saw another group of awe-inspiring women graduate from the course, having transformed their lives with a new skill, a new creativity, and a new supportive community. One woman at a time is changing perceptions of what women can do. It is always humbling to spend time talking and gaining a small insight into the lives of the women on the programme, to understand what this opportunity means at a time like this, and to see the fierce defiance, determination and ambition to create a different life through this new creative power to make things. Supporting their families financially through their own hands and skills is transformative. As always, I came away humbled, hopeful and inspired.
This year, we were fortunate that Zindagi Now teamed up with the German charity Tent Schools, and through the incredible generosity of their founder, we were able to visit and begin to initiate massive changes for camps of returnee refugees outside Kabul. Two camps, Opal and Tourmaline, have had wells and water distribution systems installed, and schools are opening in the spring. While visiting these communities, the men and women were asked whether they would like a primary school and whether they would agree to let little girls attend. The excitement was palpable; it would be the first time anyone in these tent camps would have access to education. But, as one mother said, “We need a well; the children have to be clean to go to school.” Thanks to Tent Schools, the wells were being dug within a week. School will be transformative; the potential to end the cycle of poverty, and the hope this brought to people, was deeply moving. Thank you, Zeltschule.
Spending time with Turquoise Mountain Myanmar was wonderful. Celebrating our 10th anniversary and collaborating with the brilliant artisans was inspiring, and their work continues to astound. Centred around an old wooden house in Yangon, filled with weavers and goldsmiths quietly creating wonders amidst very challenging times in the country, it is an oasis of creativity, beauty and hope. We designed a collection of gold articulated fish, in all shapes and sizes, highly symbolic of fertility and abundance, and rooted in an old tradition from Lake Inle.
I travelled to Japan to sell our new collections, which was a privilege as always, and to India to work with our brilliant partners - Om Prakash, the gem cutter, and his team, Sushil and Amrapali - to create new collections of gems and stories.
I ended the year with a trip to Canada to attend the Global Pluralism Award ceremony on behalf of Zindagi Now, which made me very proud of all that Mohammad Ulla and I have achieved over the last four years.
It’s been a year of heartache and a year of hope. 2026 will bring more creativity, a newcollaboration with Turquoise Mountain in Syria - which I am excited about - and many new partnerships and moments of making.
With thanks to our amazing teams in London and Los Angeles, the artisans all over the world who use their hands to create magic and a better future, and of course, our supportive clientele who make all of this possible.