HOW TO CHANGE YOUR CAREER SUCCESSFULLY

Lito Karakostanoglou didn’t set out to be a jewellery designer – rather, the profession found her. “I wanted to be a photographer, but my parents wouldn’t let me,” she tells me, with a smile. “I said I’d study something else.”

Karakostanoglou left her home country of Greece to head to Boston, where she took up a masters in advertising. “But I felt that I really wanted something creative in my everyday life – creating is like breathing for me, I really needed it. In advertising, there were a lot of rules to follow. I just wanted something that would give me space to express myself.”

A chance visit to a bead shop on Newbury Street in the middle of Boston with a friend led to Karakostanoglou’s next venture: making and selling jewellery. “I was so excited that I’d found what I was looking for, something creative,” she says. “I read an interview with the jeweller Pippa Small, in which she explained that she’s a trained anthropologist. She doesn’t have a professional jewellery background, but she visits tribes, learns from them, and employs their techniques and knowledge in her work. I thought, if she can do it, I can! So I finished my masters, moved back to Greece, and started making jewellery full-time.”

According to research, nearly two thirds of us want to change our career path – a statistic exacerbated by the pandemic, which made around 22 per cent of UK workers realise their current role wasn’t the one for them. Moving lanes may be slightly easier if you’re considering a comparable field. But what happens when you want to pivot to a completely different profession? “For me, everything happened very organically,” explains Karakostanoglou. “Even if you don’t have the knowledge, you need to expose yourself to it – you need to have the thirst to learn.”

For Karakostanoglou, that point came five years after she had begun making jewellery under her eponymous brand name, during which time she had launched her ‘Open Studio’ in Athens: a space where anyone could come in, browse her materials, and order a piece. “Everything was a one-off and I travelled a lot to India, Arizona, anywhere with interesting stones. I never designed collections at first, it was just the materials that guided me. I started with glass beads and feathers, and little by little I moved on to silver and gold.”

She realised that she “needed more knowledge, more training” to progress, and moved to Paris to attend École des Beaux-Arts, where she took courses in life drawing and calligraphy, and also signed up to a private school of jewellery making. “I gave myself the time I needed to educate myself,” she says.

Karakostanoglou ended up staying in Paris for two years, where she worked with top brands and designers from Kenzo to Jean Paul Gaultier, expanding her knowledge and working on her own collections. “It was really interesting, working in their studios, because you get an idea of how the whole house works. If you want to do something like that, don’t think about it too much – just jump. But it has to be something you really, really want to do. You have to have that gut feeling.”

Does Karakostanoglou have any words of advice for those who want to take take the leap? Only to follow their own intuition. “I had an agent who I left eventually, as she was taking me in a totally different direction. Make sure you’re doing things for the right reasons.” Above all, she advises those setting out on a new career trajectory to “focus on what you really want – if you have that gut feeling, you’ll make it.”

2024-04-24T09:58:27Z dg43tfdfdgfd