Bangla Begum, technically, means "lady from Bengal" but it is also a full name. It's the name of the imaginary character my brand is based on.

I was tired of mainstream storytelling, which I think are often flat-out lies, and wanted to embrace fiction as a way to talk about my work. 

The reason I chose the name Bangla Begum is because I started my jewelry career in India, where I worked and lived for almost 10 years. Although I lived in Rajasthan, I learned jewelry with Bengalikarigars, and I wanted to honour that. 

Although my products and my art direction have nothing much Indian or Bengali, I did want one aspect of my brand to reflect the beginning of my career and the people with whom I first learned about jewelry, hence this name.

It was also important for me to choose a name with a Muslim heritage as one of the reasons I ended up leaving India was my sadness and horror at the way the Muslim community, more and more, is being targeted by Hindu nationalists there, and the way Muslim culture is being erased from the official narration of India. 

It may sound very little, but to have Bangla Begum as a brand name, to me, is a small way to make this heritage visible in the global landscape. And let me tell you, it's bad in France too. In fact, a few people tried to dissuade me from choosing a Muslim name for my brand, but I was determined!

Which brings me to another point, or maybe just an answer to remarks I sometimes get about my "profiting" from Bengali culture: I don’t think my brand name is actually helping my business! If I had wanted an efficient brand name I would have chosen a single, short and simple word with maybe one French detail about it like an acute accent. I do think that the name Bangla Begum is making my brand more obscure to my main audience. But I don’t mind. 

Also, I feel like - but I understand if some people feel otherwise - making products and images taken from Indian and/or Bengali culture, *that* would be, to me, appropriation. I instead chose the name Bangla Begum as a reminder, a little sparkling sign of remembrance, not a pool of designs and imagery I use in my work. 

To sum it up, my brand name is a little bit dissociated from my products and is meant to honour the country where my jewelry career started. I don’t think it is helping my brand at all so I don’t think there is any advantage for me there. It’s just my story, and however weird, it still is my story.

My name is Fanny Boucher and I founded Bangla Begum in 2019. I have been designing jewelry for 15 years, first in India where I used to live, then in Paris where I co-founded a fine jewelry startup. A couple of years ago I left my startup and started working full time on Bangla Begum.

My first job ever was being the “eye” of a French jeweller in India. Which sounds way more glamorous than it was: I was basically just sorting and pairing gemstones, managing production with local workshops, and doing export paperwork. After a few years, I started designing my own jewelry, then after a few more years I co-founded a fine jewelry startup for which I moved back to Paris. After five years of startup life, I left to launch Bangla Begum.

I didn't! I studied philosophy, literature, history and languages :-) I did study gemmology too, but much later. I also took technical drawing classes (which I did not like at all) and I even did a coding course (which I loved). Well, the coding course didn't help with jewelry design but it did help me to launch Bangla Begum! 

Both! I’m in an open relationship with jewelry. I like the way costume jewelry allows us to play and experiment, as customers and as designers, but I also like gold, old cut diamonds and weird gemstones.

I have always been frustrated by the segmentation of the jewelry world: it’s either just gold, or just costume, or just bridal. Even workshops operate like this, even though it’s the same techniques.

With Bangla Begum, I didn’t want to price out anyone, but I didn’t want to limit myself either. And I think people appreciate this. They understand that some pieces are spectacular and difficult to make, hence expensive, and that some pieces are more fun and affordable. In fact, I think customers are highly sophisticated, they get it!

I describe my work as poetico-political jewelry. If you need a more palatable word, I am also fine with literary jewelry! A friend of mine says that I make “jewelry with chutzpah" which I like too.

I do try to put thoughts and humour into my pieces and there is definitely a big narrative element in them. Literature, the written word, is very important to me and it shows - at least I hope.

What is sure is that for me, jewelry is not an accessory. It’s a medium, a shield, a talisman, sometimes a weapon and at the very least, a story.

Ethical can mean many different things! Technically, to claim a metal piece as ethical, the whole cast cylinder used to make the piece needs to be filled with ethically sourced metal. Unfortunately for the moment, our production is too small to fill a whole cylinder, and there isn’t enough ethical metal available for our main factory to switch entirely to ethical metal. And trust me, we've been asking them to!

That said, French factories already comply with stringent standards of metal tracability and waste water treatment which is, if you ask me, the truly important issue at stake in jewelry manufacturing (but significantly less glamorous than labelling your metal "fair"). 

For me, producing respectfully, in small quantities and with local ateliers we pay fairly, is an real (and sometimes tough) choice, and definitely an ethical one.