Annoushka on Target to Raise 1 Million Pounds With The Brilliant Breakfast and The Prince’s Trust
LONDON — British jewelry designer Annoushka Ducas, who launched Links of London in 1990 and sold the company in 2006, launched her eponymous label to focus on selling high-end jewelry to her friends and those within her inner circles.
Ducas’ has ties within the creative industry to the British royal family, and a few years back, became a patron of Women Supporting Women, an arm of King Charles’ charity The Prince’s Trust. The program was set up to help young women who face disadvantage and adversity.
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In October 2020, she launched The Brilliant Breakfast initiative with The Prince’s Trust.
“The idea is that everyone has breakfast, so it’s totally inclusive and DIY — people can get together for breakfast after dropping the kids off, or at the meeting table at work,” she said, explaining that the aim is to get everyone to donate what they can on any scale.
Whether it’s 10 pounds for tea and toast or a full-on seated number for 200 pounds. She wanted it to be “completely nonthreatening.”
The program is on target to reach 1 million pounds for this year’s breakfast, which took place between Oct. 11 and Sunday. Ambassadors include Trinny Woodall, Holly Willoughby, Leah Wood, Melissa Hemsley and Carol Vorderman.
“I personally hosted a couple of different breakfasts: a small team breakfast at the office with my team at Annoushka Jewellery, something with my friends at our local pub in Sussex and another with a group of inspirational women at The Ham Yard Hotel,” she said.
Ducas’ first breakfast took place during the pandemic and she resorted to hosting it digitally, where she raised 350,000 pounds.
“Without question, the most rewarding part of fundraising is hearing firsthand from the young women at The Prince’s Trust and how their lives have changed for the better due to the money we have raised,” she said, adding that in two years, they have raised 1.7 million pounds and helped 800 young women.
“It means we now have our new monarch at the helm of The Prince’s Trust. Rather fortuitously I had the pleasure of meeting him just a few weeks before his succession at a Prince’s Trust event and he was absolutely delightful and incredibly inspiring,” said Ducas about what King Charles’s succession means for the charity program.
“The Trust is something clearly very close to his heart and now a huge part of his legacy. To think he started the Trust with just 7,400 pounds, which was his severance pay from the Navy and nearly 50 years on he has helped over 1 million people is phenomenal,” she added.
Last year, Camilla, Queen Consort, then the Duchess of Cornwall, hosted a tea at her residence, Clarence House with four young women who had been helped by The Prince’s Trust — Ducas calls it her favorite memory from The Brilliant Breakfast.
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