Samantha Wills on why she closed down her jewellery business

Jewellery trailblazer Samantha Wills reveals why she turned down an $8 million offer to sell her brand and moved home to Bondi.

Samantha Wills is a jewellery designer no more. Picture: John Appleyard

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Everyone loves a good origin story and Samantha Wills has a great one. She started her very successful jewellery line at her dining room table when she was 21, sold it at the Bondi Markets, showed at Fashion Week and from there it became a roaring success.

Except the mythology that surrounded her bohemian luxe brand glossed over the messy stuff, from falling deep into debt, almost selling a controlling share in her business and the turmoil that surrounded her decision to close it in early 2019.

Her new memoir, Of Gold and Dust, isn’t just a glossy highlights reel, she shows the reader what was going on behind the scenes in her professional and personal life. As she says, it took her 12 years to become an overnight success and she wants to show other entrepreneurs the warts and all struggle behind the gloss.

What started out as a childhood hobby morphed into her career when she accidentally started her business at 21 and because of that, she always suffered from impostor syndrome.

“I think it goes hand-in-hand with anxiety, but you don’t have to be an anxious person to experience impostor syndrome,” Wills says, explaining that she has never felt like a “real designer.”

Samantha Wills struggled with impostor syndrome while designing jewellery. Picture: John Appleyard

“In my mind, you go to university, you get a degree and you go and you do your internship. My approach was a lot more cavalier. To start it by myself on my dining room table has always equal parts felt cowboy in a way, you pave your own path kind of thing. But on the flip side of it, which comes out at events and award shows, or at four o’clock in the morning, when you’re laying in bed, it’s like, did you do you really deserve this? Is it just a fluke that you got to where you are?”

The idea of making money from her hobby felt too good to be true for Wills and that anxious impostor syndrome is something that still “plagues” her to this day. So she’s learnt to live alongside it.

“I kind of say, I hear you, I see you, just give me a moment. And then I get done what I need to get done because if you allow it to be such a truth, it just cripples you. And, you know, it becomes this quicksand, those negative comments kind of shackle us, you can’t move forward,” she says.

“I also try and give it a human persona, because I’m like, if that was a real life human, we would do everything we can to stay away from its company, like we wouldn’t get into conversation. And then I’m like, if that person spoke to my best friend the same way it was speaking to me, I would cut that conversation off in a heartbeat. But why don’t we hold our own self-worth to that standard?”

So while she looked like she had it all sorted from the outset, the reality was very different. Those award shows and red carpet events were something she had to endure from a brand perspective. When you name a brand after yourself, your image becomes intertwined with it.

“I get social anxiety at the best of times, I don’t want to be there a lot of the time but I have to be there from a business perspective and that was something I had to rationalise early on,” she says.

“When you ever so modestly name a brand after yourself, there are public facing commitments that you do have to uphold, and you become the public face whether you intended it to be that way or not.”

Bondi jeweller to the stars turned author Samantha Wills at home. Picture: John Appleyard

So Samantha Wills became the brand and Samantha the person became SW.

For the most part, it worked. But then came creative burnout. She was living between New York and Australia, doing six weeks Stateside and 10 days at home in order to grow the business internationally and stay on top of local logistics. At the airport one day, she flicked through her passport and counted 49 entry stamps into the US, which meant she had done that flight 100 times.

It explained why she never felt grounded and her growing restlessness.

By this time, she’d designed over 12,000 pieces of jewellery, was doing 25 collections of a year and burnout was kicking in. The realities of running a business of that scale was that she had to focus more on the commercial side than the creative and it took its toll.

“After 14 years, that creative fire for me was starting to dim. It took me a long time to realise what was actually happening,” she says.

But it wasn’t a decision taken lightly, with hindsight she could see that she’d been working towards it for two years.

In her memoir, Wills reveals the big coincidence that finally gave her the ah-ha moment she needed so she could confidently close the brand.

Wills’ memoir and conversation is peppered with spirituality. From talk of the jewellery Gods to the stars aligning to the idea of the universe is eavesdropping on your desires, she believes a path is being laid out – you just have to be open to it.

“I think every time you say, ‘Oh, that’s a coincidence’, that is really a guidance unfolding but we’ve given it this logical term,” she says.

“The synchronicities that kind of unfolded around me, I always thought that’s a coincidence, how strange. I quickly learned that I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all. I think it’s this cosmic choreography that if we’re paying attention, it is guiding us but usually we’re too busy with our head down, focusing on what we don’t have to see what’s actually unfolding around us.

“In the moment, we rarely notice it because it requires such a state of surrender to be like that. I can’t just look for the answer I want, I have to accept what’s being presented and move forward from there.”

By closing Samantha Wills, rather than selling it, she walked away from an eight-million-dollar payday.

Samantha’s path in life brought her from New York City back to where her business began. Picture: John Appleyard

“It just was never an option to me. I didn’t want to sell my name. I didn’t want to see the brand in the marketplace with what someone else would do to it,” she says.

“Possibly if it was called anything else other than Samantha Wills I might have been a bit more okay with that but it was like a complete offering of 15 years of myself, I just couldn’t see that handed over.

“And truly, not even once – hand on my heart – have I regretted that decision.”

Finding SW again after Samantha Wills closed was the next hurdle.

“Who am I if we take the jewellery designer label away, which is the only thing I’ve known my entire life? It’s probably still happening to be honest,” she says.

“What I have learned in the whole process though is not to try and cling onto anything too tightly, let’s try this and see, water seeks its own level in a way so it’ll find where it’s meant to land.”

For the moment, it’s landed on a book, the Samantha Wills Foundation which is all about empowering women in business, and Bondi.

“I was in New York for 10 years and I moved back at the end of 2019. Bondi has always has felt like my extended home and coming back in the summertime, I was like where else would you rather be?” she says.

Samantha has released a new book of memoirs. Picture: John Appleyard

“I thought, if I’m moving back to Australia for any amount of time, it has to be near the ocean. And that was my rationalisation with myself. Spending so much time in America, I’m like this place is beautiful. This is actual paradise.”

At 39, Wills’ apartment overlooking the ocean is a physical manifestation of her new stage of life.

It is all soft neutrals, with none of the colourful, bohemian aesthetic that characterised her 20s and early 30s. Even her jewellery is sleeker – delicate gold drop earrings and a few fine silver and gold chains.

“The last 10 years or so has definitely been a much more neutral palette, it hasn’t been conscious, I think it just sort of filtered down,” she says.

“Who you are at 21 is different to 30, there’s a progression across all aesthetic touch points, my home being one of them. I think it was probably a conscious decision in some capacity, but probably a natural progression in maturity as well.”

While she still has a few sentimental Samantha Wills pieces, the bling she now wears is understated rather than making a statement.

“I think it’s like when someone is a plumber and the plumbing of their own house is really shit because they’ve been plumbing all day. I feel like I was just surrounded by jewellery so much that I didn’t wear a lot of it,” she says.

“The first thing I bought myself a few days after we closed was a gold and diamond bracelet from Net-A- Porter as a gift to myself. So I bought a piece of jewellery! That was probably the first non-Samantha Wills piece of jewellery I owned.”

Originally published as Samantha Wills on why she closed down her jewellery business