Chupi: ‘Good design should be hard to find’

Wicklow native Chupi Sweetman-Durney is one of Ireland’s best-regarded jewellery designers. Her brand, Chupi, is known for its fine, delicate pieces inspired by “wild and natural things”, which usually means twigs, and feathers she has picked up along the way.

“Brian [Durney, her husband] says it’s like taking a really excited puppy for a walk. I’m like, ‘I got a stick, look at my stick.’ We were just down in Kerry and I found this amazing driftwood that is going to be part of our wedding band collection,” she says.

The woman known to many as Chup is known for her obsession with gold, sparkly things, as well as being one of the soundest women in the business. Within five minutes of meeting her near her studio in Portobello, Dublin, it feels like we might have known each other forever. She’s relentlessly positive and optimistic and leaves you with a sense that anything is possible, but she also has a very practical, straight-up edge.

She puts it down to her home-schooling, which she is quick to point out was not for crazy or religious reasons. "As a kid, I had a compromised immune system, which was no craic whatsoever. My mam home-schooled us and gave us the belief that we could be anything we wanted to be. Not in, like, an X Factor way. I can't sing and she never told me I could because I genuinely can't – I'm tone-deaf. But she did give us this belief that if we couldn't do it, who could? Why couldn't we?" she says.

A creative career was always on the cards – she had a penchant for crafts as a child – and at 17 she took a space in Temple Bar to sell clothes she designed. At 21, Topshop snapped her up – their youngest ever design recruit – and she spent six years designing and “learning the very brutal reality of working for fast fashion”. Working with three-week targets, she designed more than 40,000 dresses for them. Then she quit, after what she calls a quarter-life crisis.

“I wasn’t excited any more. We didn’t have babies, we didn’t have a mortgage, so I had no reason to stay with a company because it was the sensible thing to do. I thought, If you’re not going to quit now, when are you going to quit?”

When her grandmother died, leaving her a necklace, she realised it was the only precious thing she owned, and that realisation inspired her to create Chupi.

“I had been making jewellery for myself, but I thought, it’s crazy that as a designer, everything I’ve ever created is disposable. With jewellery you get to make pieces that last lifetimes, generations. That’s an incredible thing to be able to do. It’s so exciting. With jewellery, what I want to do is create beautiful things that mark moments,” she says.

The heirloom ideal

She has always designed her jewellery with a view to it being passed on as an heirloom. When she worked in Topshop, seasonal trends led her design, but she scrunches her nose up at the idea of tying her jewellery to what’s ‘in’. “I stay away from trends because, like, a dated ring? How awful would that be?”

Chupi has grown from a team of two to 12, and has 22 stockists in Ireland. It has closed its books to new stockists, and its outlet in Powerscourt Townhouse Centre in Dublin will remain its only shop.

“I think the homogenisation of the high street is such a danger. I don’t want to be everywhere; good design should be hard to find. “We should be in the prettiest, most beautiful stores, so that when you walk in, you get that experience of being part of the story rather than going into any old jewellery shop and saying ‘One of those will do’,” she says.

She will never move production of her jewellery – which uses the complicated, ancient Greek method of lost-wax casting to really get the imperfections of the twigs and leaves she casts from – out of Ireland, she says. As well as being hard to find, good design should be hard to make, she says.

“Why can’t we do it here? It’s so important. If we outsource everything we make, then we lose it. If I could make 1,000 swan feather rings in the morning at the click of a button, where’s the magic in that? That’s the McDonalds-isation of the world.”

She's bursting with excitement to tell me Chupi is now to be stocked in Fenwick, a luxury department store in London, and about the new collection coming this month, based around the WB Yeats poem He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven. Her enthusiasm is infectious, and her passion – not only her own jewellery but also for Irish heritage and design – is obvious.

She is rarely seen without either her own raspberry leaf necklace or swan feather necklace around her neck, along with a fistful of rings, but when we meet, she is also wearing Irish design, from her hat by Amanda Byrne and her Jill De Búrca skirt to her Pauric Sweeney bag.

It’s not just lip service. Recently, along with Kate Nolan of Irish clothing label We Are Islanders, she launched Made, which they hope will be a home for Irish design in Dublin. They took over five shops in the west corridor of the Powerscourt Townhouse and knocked them together to create a concept store, which currently houses both their brands along with Natalie B Coleman, Danielle Romeril, Sorcha O’Raghallaigh and Beatriz Palacios, among others.

“I’d like to see it evolve into a home for young designers, a commercial home. We’ve brought in all these beautiful designers, and we’re starting a mentoring programme and we’re going to try and support young designers through that really early-stage growth where we otherwise might lose them,” she says.

Ireland’s opportunity

The mistake we make with young designers here, she says, is that we tell them they can be either creative or business-minded, but not both. With Made, they hope to show young design graduates that you can straddle both worlds and that there are opportunities to build a career and a life in design here.

“It’s that idea of making Irish design an incredible force. When we show in London or New York as an Irish design company, that should have a magic and a cachet behind it. If you say you’re an Irish food company, that has a huge story behind it. If we can build a design scene here, design can be sustainable,” she says.

Chupi the brand is only four years old, but is already in 64 countries. It has won awards and is growing still. As glamorous as it all sounds, however, she is keen to point out that running a small company means that putting the bins out is still sometimes one of her responsibilities. However, chief among them will always be “chasing magic” in her design.

“All the bigger things in business change and grow, but that’s still why I do it, chasing the sparkle, chasing magic.

“That’s the pleasure – to capture the moment and not just a moment I fall in love with but that someone else can too.

“I’m like an addict. You see it and it’s amazing. It’s so exciting that Ireland is a tiny country that can do it, and why not?”