Award-winning designer Sam Ubhi is famous for creating unique and eye-catching accessories that elevate jewellery to modern art status & sets her work apart, giving her a global following. Her designs are sort after amongst the fashion elite, retailers, stylists, journalists & celebrities around the world.
Unlike the popular notion of award-winning artists, Sam Ubhi broke stereotypes right from the beginning. Satpal Kaur Ubh aka Sam Ubhi is not a trained designer, rather - a self-taught person. Sam combined her creativity with science and married the two to create her jewellery brand. Textile was her medium and by using leftover beads and pieces of jewellery, she started creating her own products.
The first sale Sam ever received was from Barneys of New York for £3000. Speaking to Asian Voice, Sam said, “That was a lot of money in those days. It was 1986. This is what prompted me to start a jewellery business.”
When she made her first set of jewellery sitting with her mother by the kitchen sink. Little did she know that the client would come back and ask to repeat another order. “I was sitting at home, watching TV and making a whole bunch of jewellery,” she chuckled, while she explained how a simple effort was helping her make money and reputation.
Gradually, Sam learnt about beating metals, sculpting and more jewellery making techniques. With that, Sam’s work is also a reminder of how art is not aloof of science. An artist has to have the acumen to marry art and science to create a product, contrary to the popular belief that artists do not need to apply science. “I taught myself how to fold in much finer detail and polish while working with different kinds of metal,” Sam told us.
She further added, “We did more fashion jewellery, so it wasn't fine jewellery at all. It started off in copper and brass and I worked with recycled material so I would go to a plumbing shop and buy offcuts of copper pipes. And again it was a very male-dominated industry.”
She’d use the material and go back again leaving those men astonished that she was in fact creating interesting pieces of art that were becoming popular.
However, Sam had to fight racism. “There was a lot of laughter and ‘here's this woman that kind of comments’. They said that ‘you're an Indian woman!’”
There were instances when a client in a UK shop would perhaps like her samples, place an order but after noticing she was Asian, they’d not go ahead with it. But that didn’t deter her from pursuing her passion.
Eventually, Sam started doing fashion week shows in London, Paris, New York, and Shanghai. She was the only person of colour that was exhibiting at the time. When anyone asked who made that bunch of jewellery, she’d proudly say, “me!”
Sam gives due credit to her parents saying that they supported her despite the stereotypical belief of Asian communities for their children to pursue careers in medicine and engineering. In fact, while bringing up three children in Kenya, Sam’s mother took up a part-time embroidery course to nurture her passion.
Sam added, “My mother would always come to London Fashion Week. She'd come and often come around because we'd already set up very traditional Punjabi while people looked at me because it was unusual for an Asian woman to be at London Fashion Week. But she loved it.”
