Closer to home Scotland’s retail tells its own tale of resilience and fragility. Sales crept up by just under 1% at the close of 2024, according to the Scottish Retail Sales Monitor, but footfall continues to slip, with high streets recording a 1.3% decline this summer as highlighted in the BRC–Sensormatic IQ. The numbers echo what we can see with our own eyes – bustling weekends giving way to quiet weekdays, flagship stores thriving while independents fight to hold their ground.
Nowhere embodies both the challenge and the possibility quite like Edinburgh. From the heritage boutiques of Thistle Street to the gleaming St James Quarter and the relentless hum of Fort Kinnaird, this is where Scotland’s retail story is being rewritten. Edinburgh is more than a backdrop – it is a stage where global brands brush shoulders with independent pioneers, and where female entrepreneurs such as jeweller Laura Bond show world-class innovation doesn’t only belong to London or the Golden Triangle. It belongs here in Scotland’s capital.
On Thistle Street, a cobbled stretch built for luxury when the New Town first rose from the ground, Laura Bond has carved out her place. Her shop sits in a Grade B-listed building, once home to another iconic female-founded brand, Jane Davidson. Now it is where customers step through the door not only to buy jewellery but to experience it. I would describe her business as experiential jewellery because the pieces are intimate, personal and designed to be curated and worn for life.
“I felt like we were a boutique brand, and George Street or Princes Street just didn’t fit,” Laura told me. “Thistle Street has history – it was built for luxury shops and when you walk down it you can feel that heritage.”
That heritage now carries a new face: a woman-led business that bridges Edinburgh’s old world elegance and the modern consumer’s demand for authenticity and quality.
Her story began not with a pitch deck or venture capital but a quiet act of rebellion. As a teenager at boarding school she embraced piercings as her own form of expression, a small but defining gesture of independence. Years later, while travelling in New York, she noticed the kind of delicate solid-gold jewellery she had always wanted but found it prohibitively expensive. Back in the UK no one seemed to be filling that gap, so she resolved to create it herself.
(Image: Laura Bond)
With £5,000 scraped together by mortgaging their flat, Laura and her husband Doug launched online in June 2019. On the first day they sold just under £1,000, and within four months she had left her job to focus on the business full time. Then came Covid. While manufacturers faltered and packaging supplies dried up, web traffic soared. By 2021 she had hired her first three staff and opened an office in Edinburgh. Today the business holds stock worth hundreds of thousands and employs a predominantly female team, something in which she takes deep pride. “One of the things I’m most proud of is giving opportunities to young women in Edinburgh. I wish it had existed when I started out.”
However, resilience is hard-earned. Brexit wiped out much of Laura Bond’s EU market almost overnight, reducing European sales from around 15% of turnover to barely 2.5%. Even attempts to absorb customs and duties on behalf of customers have failed to restore confidence. Her answer, though bittersweet, is to look outward: the 2026 roadmap includes a flagship opening in Amsterdam, creating jobs, and paying taxes within the EU – employment that could have been in the UK but is now the only route to rebuilding that market.
And then there’s gold. Since 2019 the price has more than doubled, pushing margins to the limit. “If you’re Cartier, you don’t worry about whether your customer can still spend £10,000 on a watch,” she explained. For a brand like hers, however, the challenge is far sharper – there is only so far prices can be pushed before accessibility is lost. Her response has been to innovate. A new diamond range has attracted customers stepping down from higher-end competitors, and she is already planning exciting new collections that will broaden the brand’s reach while staying true to its quality and values.
What sets Laura apart is not just clever positioning but principle. She was frustrated by the cycle of buying jewellery that tarnished or broke after a single season and resolved to create pieces built to last – solid gold, recyclable and hypoallergenic. Customers are encouraged to return old products for credit towards new ones, with the gold melted and reused. Collections are deliberately limited to three a year, designed to be layered, curated and worn across seasons.
“It’s always meant to be an intentional purchase,” she explained.
Her price points, from £35 charms to £500 diamond earrings, are accessible by luxury standards, but what she is really selling is confidence, individuality and permanence in a world where fast fashion has made disposability the norm.
“Our customers want pieces that feel like them – jewellery they can curate over time, that they know will last.”
In an economy where Brexit, inflation and global uncertainty keep shifting the ground beneath us, Laura Bond is a reminder of what resilience looks like: starting with £5,000 and a dream, weathering shocks from pandemics to politics, and creating a thriving business rooted in authenticity. On Thistle Street, you can feel that story in every detail – the heritage building, the cobbles underfoot, the women-led team inside and the quiet confidence of a founder who has turned rebellion into resilience. Just around the corner, the Scottish Enlightenment once sparked ideas that changed the world. Today, in its own way, Thistle Street continues that tradition, a place where imagination and enterprise meet.
Perhaps that is the real lesson for Edinburgh and for Scotland: that even when markets falter and borders close, this city still has the power to nurture ideas, to build lasting businesses, and to prove small beginnings can spark extraordinary futures.
Dr Antoinette Fionda-Douglas is co-founder of Beira, and assistant professor at Heriot-Watt University