A woman's lockdown kitchen table side hustle has netted her £550,000 and a high street collection - with her jewellery creations due to appear at Paris Fashion Week. Dominique Croft, 27, started making jewellery in early 2020 when she spotted a "gap in the market" for affordable real gold and silver.
She founded Elk & Bloom alongside her role as a content strategy manager until she was inundated with orders and it became her full time job in just 18 months. Savvy Dominique says she's selling up to 14,500 items for £40,000 in a single month - and has just hit £550,000 in revenue. Her jewellery is being sold in Debenhams and she is set to make her debut at Paris Fashion Week next month.
Dominique said: "Jewellery has always been a proper passion for me and I have always been creative. As much as I loved my corporate job it wasn't for me.
"I have always been interested in business and I have always been creative and digitally savvy. I also wanted the flexibility and I think Covid-19 made a few people want that.
"The decision to quit the job wasn't a spur-of-the-moment one. I had been running my business for a year-and-a-half, but it was nowhere near what it is like now."
She ramped up production during the lockdowns in the following months and, in the middle of 2021, decided to go full-time.
Speaking about why she launched her business, she said: "I have always felt like the jewellery business was missing a mark. It was either very high end or on the other side of the market - where it was low price and low quality.
"Want I wanted to do with Elk & Bloom was create accessible jewellery. It is not throwaway fashion - it is gold and silver pieces that are affordable. It is mid-market that anyone can purchase and feel special about purchasing, which I believe had made it grow so much."
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After single-handedly running the business from her home for two years, Dominique recently hired her first staff member to help with packing and customer relations.
Dominique said: "I should have celebrated the Debenhams collection more. We shared it on social media and had an internal jump for joy.
"Being a small business, there wasn't a big event. I was here at home with my fiancé and thinking 'oh my God'. To see it on a major retailer it was a huge moment. It was a better feeling than I had anticipated."
Dominique will be at Paris Fashion Week from March 1 to March 5.
"This is my first runway but it being Paris Fashion Week, I feel like I have been thrown in the deep end," Dominique, from Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, said.
"The collection is about strength and power. I have taken a lot of inspiration from mythology and strong women; women like Aphrodite and Venus. When anyone sees the jewellery it inspires them and makes them feel like the best version of themselves."
