Anna Jewsbury. Photo: Courtesy of Completedworks Save Story Save this story Save Story Save this story 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.
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.
Outside the upcoming Completedworks flagship on Chiltern Street in London’s Marylebone.
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 spa…