‘I’M SO GLAD TO BE OUT OF THE RAT RACE’ Stonechat Jewellers owner Ann Chapman on running her won business and claiming back precious family time
Ann Chapman started her own business during the recession, which she says has given her back precious family time
Goldsmith Ann Chapman, 35, stands at her workshop, which is slap bang in the middle of her sleek shop Stonechat Jewellers in Dublin’s Westbury Mall. She is showing me a little plastic bag containing a broken gold wedding ring and a dated-looking gold necklace - items of sentimental value to a customer, that are about to be remodelled into wedding rings.
‘ This lady is getting a plain ring for her husband and a diamond ring for herself. We’ll make the rings using her gold and we’ll supply the diamond to set into it,’ she explains.
Ann has hired a full-time goldsmith, Jemma Crosbie, to work on bespoke pieces and remodelling old jewellery, which is ‘hugely popular. People come in with lots of gold chains or a bag of old pieces from the bottom of their jewellery box that looks like it’s nothing or they’d never wear now because it’s so traditional. They might use the gold to get a set of stacking bangles made or one really heavy gold bangle. To buy a heavy gold bangle would be very expensive but for us to make it from customers’ own gold is obviously much more cost- effective.’
Ann knows all about the importance of being cost effective, having started her business at the tail- end of the recession in 2012. What was that like?
‘A challenge,’ she laughs. ‘No, it was great. People thought I was mad when I told them my plans, especially a jewellers since it is a luxury product. I just went for it, I knew it was going to work. I had such confidence in Irish people buying Irish products and something handcrafted that had a story behind it. Something unique rather than something mass-produced in China. I think that’s what the recession did for Ireland. It cut out the rubbish,’ she muses.
‘Nobody wanted to spend money on throwaway things any more. You wouldn’t spend €20 on something that wasn’t important to you, but you would still spend €200 on something that you saw value in.
‘Obviously it was hard at the start. I was on my own, six days a week. I hired someone after nine months. It was a long time to work on your own, head down, doing everything, but thankfully it grew. The reaction from customers was just amazing and things really took off. Now four of us work in the shop and we are in a larger premises – all in the space of four-and-a-half years.’ Ann did this while raising two young daughters – Eve, 5 and Katie, almost 2 – with her husband Tim Chapman. He recently left his full-time job in retail to become a personal trainer – and later we’ll get to how quitting what Ann calls ‘the rat race’ has improved family life.
From Howth, Co. Dublin, her father George Sevastopulo is a retired Trinity College professor of geology and her mother Rose, from Limerick, ran her own sugar- crafted cake business from home. ‘My mum is very talented. Novelty cakes and beautiful wedding cakes are readily available now in Ireland, but she was doing it 30 years ago when very few others were.
‘My memory of my Mum growing up is her being up until two or three o’clock in the morning icing wedding cakes and still being up at seven o’clock the next morning, making our sandwiches and getting us out to school.’
Her parents first met when George, then a student at Cambridge University, England, was on
a field trip to Kerry, where Rose was on holiday. ‘ They met in a B&B. He carried her bags and she thought he was the porter so she tried to give him a tip,’ she laughs.
Though Ireland is a more multicultural place these days, back then being called Sevastopulo was more memorable.
‘We were one of the few with an unusual surname so you couldn’t get away with anything,’ smiles Ann. ‘Especially in primary school because all of my siblings had gone ahead of me so when I arrived the teachers had already made up their minds about me. They knew exactly who I was and where I had come from. The boys were a bit... could have been brats, which didn’t serve me well!’
Ann credits both parents with instilling a strong work ethic in her – and the creativity comes not just from her mother but from her paternal grandmother and grand-aunt, who were both painters. The youngest of five children, Ann loved to make and do. ‘I don’t know if you remember the Dryad kits? They were these kits you could get – flower-pressing, candle-making, weaving. I got them every Christmas. I was the Dryad girl!’
After school she did European Studies in Trinity, living on campus for two years while her father, who is ‘very meticulous about everything’ was lecturing.
‘I lived in New Square, it’s a beautiful square opposite the museum building which is where the Geology department is. ‘I had to be careful to open my curtains at a decent hour or it might have been noticed!’
As soon as she graduated, Ann knew she wanted to do something completely different. She did a short jewellery course in NCAD to test more creative waters.
Fired with enthusiasm afterwards, she was accepted on to a Fás jewellery making course. From there she did a work placement with contemporary jeweller Steenson’s in the north of Ireland when she was 22.
‘I moved up to Glenarm which is a tiny, tiny village, as small as they come, on the north Antrim coast. I packed up the Polo and off I went. I was the only person in the village that did not come from there.
‘ The family running the jewellers were so welcoming, so accommodating. They gave me the keys to the workshop and let me come and go in the evenings so I could build up my portfolio.’
Her ambition was to build a good enough body of work to be accepted on to the Design and Crafts Council of Ireland’s goldsmithing course in Kilkenny. It is the only one of its kind here.
‘ To get into Kilkenny is very difficult. They accept 12 people every two years and they have to be careful of having a balance of men and women and different abilities in design and abilities technically. Everyone is in a small room together doing very intricate work.
‘It’s intense. Everybody needs to get along. So you really need to set the odds in your favour and do everything you can to get in.’
The Kilkenny training is notoriously painstaking – Ann describes repeatedly having to saw the ‘perfect square’ out of gilding metal. Her teacher, Jane Huston, accepted nothing less than perfect work, which gave the course its great reputation. Happily, fellow student Michael O’Dwyer – whose jewellery is also now stocked in Stonechat – introduced Ann to his rock- climbing buddy Tim during this time.
‘I knew him for about a year before we
My husband is at home so I don’t have to do any jobs around the house any more!
➤ became a couple. He’s from the Lake District in the UK. He had wanted a change of scene and came over to Ireland, drove around thinking that he would stop in the town that he liked the look of. So he stopped in Kilkenny.’
Next stop for the couple was marriage and a move to Monkstown, south Dublin where they bought a home last year. ‘When we collected the keys and walked in, we were greeted with two bottles of wine and a card saying, “We hope you have as many happy experiences in this house as we did.” When you’re first going into a house that you intend to be your family home for the rest of your life, it is just so nice to start on that note.’
Work needs to be done on the house but its vintage style is beginning to grow on her.
‘It needs a lot of – I hate the word, but – modernisation. New windows, plumbing and wiring, but it’s absolutely fine. The funny thing is I like things to be perfect, so I would have loved to do the jobs straight away, but now I love everything about it, even its strange little tiles from the 1970s.’
Last June ‘exercise fanatic’ Tim left his job managing Carphone Warehouse on Henry Street, did a personal training course and launched his bootcamp business TimFit in Blackrock, Monkstown and Sandyford.
‘We did four years with both of us in retail and raising young children – it was a challenge. It was tough. A rat race,’ admits Ann. ‘When you’re in it, you just do it. You get up, you spend time with your kids, you do what you have to do and you work really hard. But once we came out of it, I look back and thin, how did we actually think that we were going to sustain that for another number of years? We really thought when we were doing it that we’d keep doing it.
‘We both worked Saturdays so we had to give the kids to my parents or someone else to look after them. So it was an organisational nightmare. Life has changed greatly as of last September as Tim is a stay-at-home dad. He’s in the process of setting up his own business as well which obviously adds to the madness,’ she says.
‘But he’s very much on his own hours. He can do the school run and look after the kids in the afternoon, which obviously makes my life a lot easier.’
Though the latest research shows working women usually do three times as much housework as their husbands, Tim does the lion’s share chez Chapman.
‘He’s amazing. He would have always been great at that,’ says Ann. ‘It means that when I’m not working I’m 100% with the kids. I get home in the evening and they’ve had their dinner and they’re in their pyjamas and we can sit down and play. Rather than getting in, the house being cold, trying to get them fed, get them washed, get them into bed. Then at 8pm you’ve to turn around and feed yourself. You eat by nine and you’re asleep on the couch by half past nine.’
Their new arrangement has ‘changed all our lives, hugely. It just means I don’t have to do any of the jobs around the house any more. That’s the bottom line!’ she laughs.
She can concentrate instead on creating her beautiful jewellery, like this season’s Balance collection. ‘We wanted to design a range using pearls – which are generally a traditional, much more classic look – but with a contemporary edge to it. So the silver is very contemporary, clean and striking and the pearls soften it,’ she says, describing the range that includes a €320 silver and €890 gold pendant. Stonechat’s signature piece is the cocktail ring, a collection of rings featuring gorgeous coloured stones. Their stacking diamond rings are also proving popular. The store stocks 11 designers, mostly Irish, though there is a German and Swiss line too.
‘ The work has to be contemporary, handcrafted, and of high quality but it needs to be a very different look to something I would design. The ranges complement each other rather than competing with each other,’ says Ann, who likes a clean, pared-back look.
But there is nothing pared back about her plans for the business.
‘I definitely have a longer term plan of some sort of expansion. We won’t stay still.’
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