In this episode of Stake & Soul, Barry speaks with Harriet Kelsall, award-winning designer, author, and founder of Harriet Kelsall Bespoke Jewellery, one of the UK’s leading bespoke jewellery companies. Harriet started the business on her kitchen table in 1998, while working as an engineering manager in the film-editing side of Tektronix UK, and has grown it over nearly three decades into a 42-strong team across four studios in North Hertfordshire, Cambridge, Primrose Hill and St Albans. In 2025 she transitioned the business into an Employee Ownership Trust, and sat down with Barry roughly twelve months into that transition.
Harriet’s is a creative-business EO story, a world where the founder’s name is literally above the door, every piece of work is bespoke, and most of the team identify as creative rather than commercial. That makes almost every bit of succession planning governance, delegation, financial transparency, ownership mindset – a slightly different question. This episode is her honest walk through how she answered it: the slow build of a leadership team years before anyone mentioned EOT, the day she drove round all four studios with her advisers to tell the whole business at once, and the trust board that turned out to be the biggest positive surprise of the whole transition.
What’s covered in this episode:
- The kitchen-table origins of Harriet Kelsall Bespoke Jewellery in 1998 and realising that the thing she was doing on the side (one-off commissions, designed from a blank sheet) was actually the business, not a distraction from it.
- Being one of the first jewellers on the internet, an early customer base of doctors, teachers and IT people, and the last-minute Leeds tiara that convinced her this web thing was going to catch on.
- Hiring her first employee Deb from Abbey National, and celebrating her 25 years with the business.
- Why Harriet opened physical studios after Google’s algorithm changes sent engagement-ring searches from page 1 to page 68 almost overnight.
- How a conversation with industry friend Gary, whose Birmingham jewellery manufacturer had sold into an EOT, planted the seed and how a chance webinar by Emily at Baxendale and former accountant Ali Price turned it into a plan.
- Communication, communication, communication: starting the succession conversation years before anyone named it EO, briefing the senior team first, then driving round all four studios in one day to tell everyone at once.
- The one unexpected surprise – how ambivalent some of the most junior team members were about EO, because Freedom Day is still nine years away and feels unreal.
- The before-and-after governance structure: a four-person leadership team evolving into a proper company board, a new managing director (Rebecca), and a trust board of two employee trustees plus one external.
- How the trust board has reshaped everything from an underperforming wellbeing group to the plain-English wording of the company’s values, “a second pair of eyes” Harriet didn’t know she needed.
- The gradual, carefully designed handover to Rebecca, written job descriptions on both sides, no toe-treading, and the “I think this, and I think that, but it’s your decision” style of mentoring that followed.
- Why Harriet’s advice to any founder is the same, whether EO is on the table or not: start thinking about succession today, build a board (even if you don’t call it that), and stop being the person who makes every decision.
Quickfire highlights
- Employee ownership is: responsible for the business’s long-term sustainability, for the founder’s own wellbeing, for the team, and for the communities the business touches.
- Biggest EO surprise: the value of the trust board, how seriously the two employee trustees take the role, how much they’ve grown through it, and how genuinely useful their challenges to the company board have been.
- Book recommendation: Gerry Robinson’s I’ll Show Them Who’s Boss a family-business book that cuts through the complexity (plus Harriet’s own book, The Creative’s Guide to Starting a Business for anyone starting or growing a creative business).
- Confessional: a secret struggle: the reality of being a founder-mother. Harriet didn’t take the legally required two weeks of maternity leave because the business was too young to spare her, and makes the case for a bank of volunteer non-execs who could step in for new founder-mums even for a week at a time.
Barry and Harriet also discuss why creative businesses rarely consider EO and why they absolutely should and the importance of keeping employment local to the communities the business has grown up in rather than letting a buyer uproot the team.
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