Three Women, One Startup, Zero Investors
How We Started
I am going to tell you this story plainly, because I think the cleaned-up version that companies tell about their origins is usually less useful than the actual one.
I went to Jaipur with €1,000. This was not a considered strategic allocation. It was what I had. I had left Berlin — where I had been organising the Smart Forum Women, building community, doing the work of someone who understands how networks form and why they matter — and I had followed a thread that led to India and to gems and to the conviction that something different was possible in jewelry.
In Jaipur I found the craftsmen. I found the stones. I found the market, which is vast and opaque and fascinating in the way that any market is fascinating when you understand that what it is really trading in is not goods but information asymmetry. The people who know what things are worth are not always the ones selling them. If you learn, you can find the gap.
I learned.
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Ekaterina
Ekaterina Egorova is the person responsible for the fact that our jewelry looks the way it does on screen.
This is not a small thing. In a business where people buy objects they cannot touch based on photographs, the quality of the image is inseparable from the quality of the product. You can make something extraordinary and sell it as ordinary if your photography is wrong. You can also do the reverse — which is why the industry is full of jewelry that photographs beautifully and disappoints in person.
Katya is, in my biased view, one of the most gifted visual thinkers I have encountered. She shoots in a way that makes the stone the subject — not the setting, not the model, not the mood board aesthetic that everyone in the industry was reaching for at the same moment. The stone. Its surface, its light, what it is doing.
She is also the kind of designer who will tell you when something is wrong. Not to be difficult. Because she cares about it being right. Working with someone like this is not always comfortable. It is always valuable.
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What We Each Brought
I think the reason our collaboration worked — and continues to work — is that we were not trying to do the same thing.
I brought market knowledge. I understood the stones and the suppliers and the pricing and the logistics. I understood how to talk to buyers in different countries, how to present the brand in ways that landed differently for a German customer and an Italian one, how to navigate the administrative reality of running a business across jurisdictions.
Katya brought the visual language. The way the brand looks — restrained, precise, focused on the material rather than the story around the material — comes from her.
The third dimension of what we built together is harder to categorise. It is the part that has to do with stubbornness. With the shared refusal to accept that the answer to "this is difficult" is "therefore stop." I do not know how to attribute that quality to one person. It belongs to all three of us and it is, I think, what made the difference between a project and a business.
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The Pandemic Question
People ask if the pandemic was what made us. I find this question interesting because it implies the opposite — that if things had been easier, we would not have made it.
I think that is probably true. Not because adversity builds character in the inspirational-poster sense. But because the pandemic, concretely and practically, removed our competition.
The European buyers who had been sourcing from Jaipur for years went home. The market emptied. The craftsmen who had spread their attention across dozens of clients now had one consistent buyer who had not left. The relationships we built in that period were formed under conditions where everyone involved was taking the arrangement seriously, because there was no other arrangement available.
What you build in those conditions is different from what you build in abundance. It is built on real trust, formed in real pressure, tested before it was ever claimed.
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On the Question of Money
I want to say something direct about building a business without investors, because I think the startup culture conversation around this is often distorted.
Not having investors is not a virtue. It is a circumstance. There are businesses that genuinely need external capital to function — where the upfront investment required to create the product is so large that no other path exists. We were not building one of those businesses. We were building something where the core asset was knowledge, relationship, and skill — all of which compound over time without diluting.
What not having investors meant in practice was that every decision was ours. There was no board meeting to convince. There was no funding round to manage perceptions for. There was no exit timeline to orient our choices around. We could make the ring we wanted to make, sell it at the price we thought was right, and reinvest in the things we believed in.
This is a significant freedom. It is also a significant responsibility. There is no safety net. There is no one to blame. Every outcome belongs to you completely.
I would not trade it.
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What I Would Tell Someone Starting Now
Do it with less than you think you need. Not because scarcity is romantic — it is not — but because having less money forces you to learn what actually matters sooner. You cannot buy your way past the hard questions. You have to answer them.
Find the people whose judgment you trust completely and whose skills are genuinely different from yours. Not complementary in the elevator-pitch sense. Genuinely different, in the way that means the other person sees things you cannot see and will tell you so even when it is inconvenient.
Know what you are building before you need to explain it to someone else. Not the pitch version — the real version. What are you actually trying to do? Who is it for? Why does it need to exist? If you can answer those questions honestly, the rest is mostly logistics.
The logistics are not nothing. But they are solvable. The questions are not always.
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What Adelina World Is, Finally
Three women. Different cities, different skills, shared stubbornness. No investors. Stones from Jaipur. Customers in Berlin and Milan and Dubai and places I would not have predicted.
A business that started as a thread pulled and became something real.
We are still pulling it.
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Adelina World was founded by Adelina Amlinskaya. Each piece is designed and made in Jaipur with natural stones individually sourced from the gem markets.