The Scoop With Completedworks’s Anna Jewsbury: On The Brand’s New London Store

Welcome to The Scoop, a weekly email series in which I ask fashion insiders to give me a piece of news they haven’t shared elsewhere.

This week’s guest is Anna Jewsbury, who founded London design brand Completedworks with her brother Mark in 2013. Grounded in jewelry but covering categories across kitchen and homeware, Completedworks hit the mainstream during the pandemic, when cool-girl celebrities like Adwoa Aboah, Jodie Comer, and Maya Rudolph began appearing in fashion magazine roundups wearing the brand’s scrunchie earrings.

But it was a few years later when Completedworks really broke through the noise: in February 2024, the brand staged a surprise performance by actress Joanna Lumley to present its FW24 collection. On a stage covered in scattered magazines and pieces of burnt toast, Lumley enacted a monologue by novelist Fatima Farheen Mirza about the mundanity of life. It was a brilliant piece of marketing because it went a little beyond marketing — the pieces of jewelry became part of the set, even though they were really the reason we were all there in the first place.

Dianna Agron, Debi Mazar and Jemima Kirke starred in subsequent seasons, making Completedworks one of London Fashion Week’s hottest tickets. My son even asked if we were going to see “the lady who got sad” again this London Fashion Week. So this September, when there was no show… I called Anna to find out why.

Hi Anna, what’s the scoop?

We’re finally putting down some roots and opening our first flagship on Chiltern Street in London’s Marylebone. We are planning to open in early November. Completedworks has been around for over a decade, mainly operating via wholesale and online. A store has been a long time coming, though we only began talking about it in the last six months or so.

Six months is a crazy turnaround. What does it take to open a store so fast?

I don’t even know; it was crazy thinking. I mean, we’re on track to open. But an extraordinary number of decisions go into making this sort of thing happen — things I could have never predicted I would need to think about when we began this project. Obviously, there’s the architecture element, the materials, the lighting, the way that you’re presenting the pieces, the people that will work there... and you want every decision to feel connected to the brand because at the end of the day, a store is a physical manifestation of the brand.

It’s interesting to me that you chose Chiltern Street because even though it’s quite swanky as a location, it has an offbeat quality. It’s not South Kensington, for example...

Totally. Finding where your brand sits in London can be one of the hardest decisions. We looked at different locations, but Chiltern Street felt perfect because it’s got that very distinctive character. And I think of Completedworks the same way — our designs start from quite a classic place, but then there’s always something weird about them.

Chiltern Street is also a place for discovery, with a lot of concept stores, and we want our space to be one of discovery too. We want a customer who comes in for jewelry to discover our different disciplines, like our vases or the chairs. We will also have a workshop on the lower ground, allowing the client to see a bit of the magic behind the scenes. That will also function as an events space.

I want to talk about your shows, because it’s what your brand has become known for in the last couple of years. It’s such an inventive piece of marketing, especially for a jewelry brand. How did you get the idea to turn your presentations into live performances?

It was the nature of jewelry that really forced us to think out of the box, though we do like to be unconventional anyway. Jewelry is such an intimate and small object, and when you’re presenting a collection to a larger audience, you want to create a bigger conversation around it.

We worked with the writer Fatima Farheen Mirza for the first two shows and screenwriter Laura Waldren for the last one. Having someone outside the brand take the ideas behind each collection and put their perspective on it was a really interesting experience. Add to that the personality and perspective of the performer...

You started these with Joanna Lumley performing ‘Confessions of Lilith’ by Mirza during FW24, then you had Dianna Agron, Debi Mazar, Jemima Kirke... all incredible female performers with an edge. How do you cast your shows?

It was such a dream to work with all of them. We always start by having a strong idea for the whole performance. We worked with the writer first, and quite soon after we started thinking about the person who would be best to portray each character. We haven’t worked with casting directors because so far, we have had quite a strong idea about who we wanted to approach, and doing it ourselves has been much easier, especially once we’ve had proof of concept.

You didn’t stage a performance this past season during London Fashion Week — presumably because you were putting a store together. Will you go back to doing shows next season?

Exactly, we held appointments instead. I love doing the shows, but they are quite ambitious productions. We’ve certainly not lost our appetite for them, and as an independent brand, we can be quite flexible. I like that we haven’t committed ourselves to a rigid formula. The format has changed quite a lot over the years, and I think that’s part of what makes it exciting. We’ve done monologues, theatrical performances, and more experimental presentations, and I’m sure there are other things we haven’t thought of yet. It’s not a no, but it’s important for us to evolve the concept. I wouldn’t want to do a show unless we had an idea that genuinely excited us. Otherwise, I think everyone would probably be happier having an extra hour in their day.

Desire and desirability seem to be notions that luxury is grappling with this season. How do you create an object that is desirable?

I always want to make something that you cannot stop thinking about — that you just have to have because it made you look twice. With our designs, we always try to kind of start from a place that is familiar, whether it’s a pearl necklace or a vase, but adding a twist to it. We have these ceramic puffy mugs, for example, that look like they’re made from fabric. It’s the sort of thing you remember.

Who won fashion month for you?

It’s a tricky question, but in London, I just love Pauline Dujancourt. Every season, she goes from strength to strength. There’s something so compelling about the delicacy of her work, and there’s also this quiet tension in it. I love how she uses quite traditional techniques to create something that feels very contemporary. She’s got a distinctive language, which I think is very important and increasingly rare. And goes back to that desirability we were just talking about. So yeah, Pauline wins for me.

Catch up with last week’s Scoop with Guess’s Nicolai Marciano here.