Five Years and Scores of New Jewelry Designers Later

Akunna Nwala-Akano, the founder of the Kuku’s Hair salon chain in Lagos, Nigeria, found herself at loose ends in April 2020. Like many people around the world, she was fearful of losing loved ones to Covid-19 and struggling to make sense of life under lockdown.

“I was downright depressed,” Ms. Nwala-Akano, a lawyer by training, said on a görüntü call last month from London, where she and her family were on vacation. “I was trying to promote my hair business. I’d never done TikTok in my life. So I said, ‘OK, I’ll go into my dressing room and I’ll make TikTok videos for hair.’”

Then, inspired by a grandmother’s jewelry collection, she began designing her own pieces and, by 2021, had arranged for them to be made overseas. Her first creations, a diamond necklace and earrings in a fan motif, referenced her family’s roots in eastern Nigeria, where making fans, especially in raffia and leather, is a traditional handicraft. “Designing was a distraction from thinking about losing people,” she said. “And then before I knew it, everybody was like, ‘Have you seen Kuku’s jewelry?’” (“Kuku is the short form of Akunna,” she said, calling it a pet name that family members use for her.)

A piece from Akano. “I’m going to be the Messika, the Graff, the Cartier coming out of Nigeria,” Ms. Nwala-Akano said.Credit…Taiwo Aina for The New York Times

Today Akano, the fine jewelry brand born of Ms. Nwala-Akano’s time in lockdown, employs 14 people and opened its first store in September 2024 on Lagos’s Victoria Island. Ms. Nwala-Akano, who during the call displayed a striking diamond pavé necklace featuring a 74-carat rubellite tourmaline, now has set her sights on international expansion.

“I’m going to be the Messika, the Graff, the Cartier coming out of Nigeria,” said Ms. Nwala-Akano, 43. “I’m going to play catch-up with those old jewelry houses, and I’m going to stand shoulder to shoulder with them.”