Alexey Sokolov

Do it better than everyone, or don't do it at all.

The workshop with no gold in the ground #

Krasnoye-na-Volge has produced jewelry since the sixteenth century and has never had a gram of gold in its soil. Every gram arrives shipped in from elsewhere; the village’s only real asset is generations of hands that know how to shape it. Alexey grew up on the production floor of the Soviet-era Krasnoselsky jewelry works, where his parents spent their careers, absorbing the craft before the Soviet Union collapsed and took the factory’s guaranteed state orders with it. There was no institution left to inherit — only the skill, and a village that had known no other trade for four hundred years.

In 1993, right after his wedding, Alexey and his wife Elena — an economist by training — opened a home workshop they called Diamant. He designed the first pieces and ran production; she handled finances and the trade-fair circuit that would eventually carry their name beyond Kostroma Oblast. There was no venture capital available in the region in the 1990s, no institutional path to scale a jewelry business from a kitchen table. What they had instead was reinvested margin and Alexey’s own instinct for timing a market that other people were too frightened to read correctly.

That instinct showed itself fully five years later. With the ruble about to lose most of its value in the August 1998 default, Alexey converted his cash into bricks and land at prices that would look absurd within weeks — a factory purchased in the currency of a country about to change its mind, overnight, about what money was worth. It was not a hedge. It was a bet that physical assets bought at panic prices would outlast the panic itself, made by a man with no formal financial training and no fallback if he was wrong.

From workshop to industrial producer #

The gamble paid off as a physical asset. By 2000, the first Diamant factory was operating in Krasnoye-na-Volge, built for roughly ₽30 million of Alexey’s own and borrowed funds — the difference between a family workshop and an industrial producer capable of supplying jewelers nationwide. By 2005 the plant had grown to 10,000 square metres. By 2008, fifteen years after the workshop began with two people and a handful of tools, Diamant’s annual turnover crossed ₽1 billion — a mass-market wholesale operation selling gold jewelry set with cubic zirconia to retailers who put it in their own display cases under their own names. Diamant itself remained invisible to the consumers who eventually wore what it made.

Growth of that kind, in that decade, in that industry, came without a playbook. There was no template in Kostroma Oblast for scaling from a home workshop to a national wholesale supplier — no consultants, no case studies, no venture-backed peers to benchmark against. What Alexey built, he built by watching the margins and reinvesting whatever the business could spare, one production cycle at a time.

The bet nobody else in the trade wanted to make #

The counter-cyclical pattern repeated in 2009, during a different kind of crisis. As the global financial downturn crushed household purchasing power across Russia, Alexey pivoted Diamant into silver jewelry — a category the established Russian trade considered a step down from gold, beneath the attention of a serious jeweler. He read the collapse in consumer demand not as a reason to retreat into what had worked before, but as an opening that nobody with more status to protect in the industry was willing to take. Silver would go on to account for a third of Russia’s jewelry market by value and two-thirds of it by physical volume; his son Artem would later call the timing “a hundred per cent bullseye” — his father, he said, had guessed the trend before anyone else in the trade admitted it was coming.

Two years later, in 2011, Alexey registered the SOKOLOV trademark and opened a representative office in Switzerland — the first move toward a brand identity built for something larger than a regional wholesale supplier. The business he had built from a home workshop now had a name that could travel, and a foothold outside the one country where it had already survived two separate crises by refusing to behave the way each crisis suggested it should.

The decision to let go #

In 2014, at 21, his son Artem asked to take over the Russian operation as Alexey and Elena considered a move abroad. What Alexey did next may be the least documented and most consequential decision of his career: he agreed. “I realized then that if I didn’t let Artem do what he wants, later it would be too late,” he said — relayed through the company’s press service rather than spoken directly to a journalist. No verbatim interview with Alexey Sokolov exists anywhere in the public record, in any outlet, at any point in his career; everything attributed to him, including this line, reaches the reader through his son or the company itself. “He would simply lose motivation, interest in the business,” the relayed account continues. Alexey and his wife relocated to Switzerland. He has not been documented in an operational role in the business since, and no source records what he has done in the years after.

What followed belonged entirely to his son: a tax crisis Alexey never created, a formal bankruptcy Alexey did not navigate, a retail pivot and a tenfold scale-up that took the company to ₽68 billion in gross merchandise value before a full sale in 2025. None of it required Alexey’s continued presence, because by 2014 the foundation was already load-bearing — a factory bought against the market’s own panic, a category bet the trade considered beneath it, and a trademark built to travel beyond one country’s borders. The craftsman who once did everything himself, “right at home,” in his son’s own recollection of the earliest days, had already made the two decisions that mattered before he made the third and final one: recognizing the moment the business had outgrown the man who built it, and stepping back rather than staying to prove otherwise.

Last updated: September 9, 2026

Researched 13 sources in Russian.