I turn 41 next week. When I started Aya, I was turning 31. It seems a good moment to look back, partly because Aya has changed enormously in those ten years, but also because I have.

Back then, I had trained and worked as a lawyer at Allen & Overy, but knew fairly quickly that wasn’t where my heart was. I loved travelling, I loved Africa, and I wanted to create something that somehow brought the two together.

So I went travelling around Africa to figure out what that might be: Malawi, Mozambique, Madagascar and anywhere else I could get to.

It was in Madagascar that my fascination with gemstones began. The fact that natural gemstones form beneath the earth through a very particular combination of heat, pressure, chemistry and geological circumstances, over periods of time that are almost impossible to comprehend, still seems slightly mad to me.

And so Aya was born: fine jewellery centred around the gemstones of Africa, the continent where I grew up and have always considered home.

Looking back, I’m not entirely sure I appreciated what starting a business meant. I just did it.

Perhaps that’s because, back then, commitment wasn’t exactly my strong suit. If I’m completely honest, the only thing I was committed to was having fun.

I wanted the next trip, the next adventure, the next group of people I hadn’t met yet. I lived in Istanbul. I travelled around South America. I went to Bali, the Amazon, Moscow. I wasn’t remotely interested in staying in one place, following a conventional career path or committing to anything that might interfere with whatever sounded most exciting.

I was fiercely protective of my freedom. I didn’t expect anybody to change their plans for me, and I certainly didn’t want anybody expecting me to change mine for them. I much preferred arriving at a party alone. Even a wingman involved a level of logistical commitment I preferred to avoid.

Aya, rather conveniently, fitted into that life perfectly.

I loved the business. I was passionate about the jewellery and completely fascinated by the stones. But building a business, which I now understand requires enormous discipline, focus and consistency, was not the overriding priority of my life.

The adventure was.

And in those early years, Aya gave me plenty of it. There were valuable pieces with extraordinary stones, and people understandably wanted to see, touch and try them on before buying. So I took them to people. I travelled all over the world doing trunk shows and trade shows and meeting bespoke customers, from the US to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong and Prague. Aya took me to places I might never otherwise have gone and introduced me to people I might never otherwise have met.

It was a business model perfectly suited to the person I was, which is not quite the same thing as a good business model.

Aya fitted around my life rather than the other way round.

Then life changed.

Covid happened. Travel stopped. The adventures stopped. And somewhere in amongst all of that, I met Sam.

Marriage and motherhood had never been particularly high on my to-do list. Both seemed to represent exactly the things I had spent my adult life avoiding: permanence, responsibility, roots and having to take somebody else’s plans into account.

It wasn’t that I suddenly developed some great romantic vision of settling down. It was much more instinctive than that. I met Sam and, for the first time, I knew I wanted a family, specifically with him.

I was also 35 by then, so I can’t give Sam all the credit. Timing, and possibly biology, may have played their part.

I had never organised my life around having children, and by the time I realised I wanted them, I was very lucky that it was still possible. There is a version of my life in which it didn’t happen, simply because it was never on my radar, and I’m very grateful that it did.

I had Leo at 36 and Chloe at 37, and I stepped away from Aya to focus on them.

A lot is written about the loss of identity that can come with motherhood. Your freedom disappears, your priorities change overnight and suddenly somebody else’s needs dictate almost every part of your day.

Oddly, that wasn’t the part I found hard. The relentlessness was. The sheer amount you can love these little people, and the constant worry that comes with it. Are they safe? Are they happy? Am I doing this properly? The endless low-level anxiety that something might happen to them. That was the bit I wasn’t prepared for.

The identity part, though, I was ready for. In fact, although I didn’t know it at the time, I probably needed it to change. By the time I met Sam, I had travelled endlessly, lived abroad, met extraordinary people, stayed out far too late far too many times and lived life to the full… and then some.

I sometimes say my children saved me from myself. Not because I think I was a terrible person before them. I wasn’t. And I certainly don’t look back at my twenties and early thirties with regret. Quite the opposite. I had an extraordinary amount of fun. But realistically, there was probably a limit to how long I could have continued on that trajectory.

My children have restricted my freedom in almost every possible sense. They ruin plans, interrupt phone calls, make spontaneity almost impossible and are an absolutely astonishing financial drain on my existence.

And I am completely and utterly obsessed with them.

Leo turns five in January. In nearly five years, I have spent a total of nine nights away from him, and five of those were because I was in hospital with his baby brother, who got meningitis at two weeks old.

I know I will have to get better at leaving them. There will be things I need to do that involve getting on a plane without three children attached to me, and at some point I will have to accept that a night away from them is not a major event.

At the moment, the thought of it fills me with dread. Which my friends find fairly entertaining. It has been quite a transformation.

I’ve gone from one form of chaos to another. This one just happens to involve considerably more laundry.

Chloe had just turned one when I relaunched Aya in September 2024.

When I returned to the business, simply restarting the old Aya wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t spend my life travelling around the world selling jewellery anymore. I had small children at home, I definitely didn’t want to take them travelling with me (goodness, no!), and I didn’t want to leave them behind either.

Starting Aya at 31, I didn’t think twice. I had no children, nobody depending on me and not much to lose. Restarting it when I was about to turn 39, with two small children and a much clearer idea of everything that could go wrong, was a far bigger decision. The first time I was fearless mostly because I had no idea what I was doing. The second time I knew exactly what I was getting into, which was considerably more frightening.

I needed to work out how Aya could fit into the life I had now. But that didn’t mean leaving the old Aya behind.

Bespoke was a huge part of what we did then, and it remains a big part of what we do now. It’s probably still my favourite part. It often involves sourcing unusual and beautiful stones, which, ten years later, still gives me exactly the same excitement it did in the beginning.

So relaunching Aya was never about replacing bespoke. It was about building something new alongside it.

That is where lab-grown stones came in. By 2024, the technology, quality and availability had evolved enormously, and I found myself fascinated for almost the opposite reason. With natural stones, it was about what nature had managed to create over millions of years; with lab-grown stones, it was about what science had managed to recreate in a fraction of the time. I find both equally extraordinary, and I don’t think loving one requires dismissing the other.

Aya now sits in both worlds: the extraordinary things the earth creates, and the extraordinary things we have learned to create ourselves.

Alongside the lab-grown stones came a more accessible collection that could become part of someone’s everyday jewellery. It was a completely different world, one I knew nothing about and had to learn as I went.

In many ways, I was starting again. I had entered a new arena of jewellery, with new products, new price points, a different way of selling and, in many respects, a new customer. A business that had relied heavily on seeing clients in person now had to really work online.

About a year into the relaunch, just as I felt I’d finally found a rhythm that worked, I was about to turn 40 and discovered I was pregnant with Finn. He was not part of the plan, and certainly not part of the business plan, but he was the best surprise and I embraced the chaos all over again.

Which brings me to the slightly ridiculous reality of running Aya with three small children.

I’m writing this with my six month old on my lap, which probably tells you quite a lot about how I work these days.

There is no neat separation between work and family. Calls get interrupted. Someone is sick. I’m looking at CADs while dealing with a call from the kids’ school. Plans change constantly. Someone always needs something.

And I love the juggle.

Of course there are days when it drives me completely insane. I don’t want to pretend that bouncing a baby while trying to concentrate is some beautiful expression of modern motherhood. Sometimes it is just extremely inconvenient.

But I have far fewer hours now, and somehow I get far more done in them. Not always well, but done. Three small people impose a structure on my day that I never managed to impose on myself, and it turns out structure is quite useful when you’re trying to run a business. There simply aren’t enough hours anymore to waste them doing something I don’t care about.

And I really do love Aya.

The people who make running a business considerably more difficult are also the people who have made me much better equipped to run one.

And then we moved to Mauritius.

In some ways, Mauritius has brought the Aya story full circle. Africa was where it began, and being back in this part of the world has brought me closer to that original feeling. Our Pearl Collection was photographed on the beach where I live, and the colours and pace of island life are slowly finding their way into the brand. There is something quite nice about that.

Do I sometimes miss my old life? Absolutely. There are moments, usually when I’m changing a nappy, dealing with a tantrum or tripping over toys for the hundredth time, when I miss the freedom, the spontaneity, the ability to just go somewhere because I felt like it.

I loved that life, and I’m very glad I had it. I just wouldn’t swap this one for it.

Perhaps one of the nicest things about reaching ten years is realising how many people have been there for almost all of them. We have clients who bought from Aya in its very first years and are still buying from Aya today. Many have become friends, of mine and of the brand, and have recommended us, introduced us to people, opened doors and championed the business.

For a small business, that kind of loyalty means more than I can really express. There are people who have quietly helped Aya along over the last decade in ways they probably don’t even realise.

Aya at ten isn’t the business I imagined in 2016, but I’m pretty excited about where it’s headed. I’m certainly not who I imagined I’d be either, but I’m fairly obsessed with the life I’ve ended up with, which probably surprises me more than anyone.

Aya is still a very small team. It is still mostly me, a laptop and whoever happens to be sitting on my lap.

But this time, it has my full attention. Most of it, anyway.