Audrey Lehane is a Cork-based jewellery designer and entrepreneur whose initial idea to bring the gems of French design over from Paris more than 20 years ago has blossomed into one of the county’s most established brands – Azure Jewellery.
When she worked in Paris in the early 2000s, Audrey lived above a French jeweller, and thanks to the beauty of his work and her proximity to it, she snapped up a few pieces from his shop. When she would debut them on her visits back home in Ireland, she was inundated with requests to bring some extra home next time for friends and family.
A well-timed opportunity for redundancy came up, and she took it, realising there was a niche in the market at home for unique and elegant jewellery pieces that she could fulfil. At first, she essentially represented the French designer’s jewellery on the Irish market, before securing her own premises and creating her own pieces.
While her time in France may have sparked the idea, her inspirations are closer to home: “My grandmother was huge for accessories when we were kids, she had boxes and boxes of jewellery, not expensive stuff now, but costume stuff. She was fiercely creative, and the night before mass we would sometimes stay with her and if she was going to wear a yellow coat to mass then we would have to paint her clip-on earrings the same yellow to match! Then we could paint them orange the next week or whatever, so I was always really into accessories,” she reflects.
Audrey says that she followed the “conventional route” by going to school and college, and securing a job that led her to live in Paris, where “every second store is a jewellery shop” before developing her craft and opening her store in Cork. The early years of her business were not always easy. She had one of her biggest learning curves the very first Christmas Azure was open, after not preparing enough stock for the busy Christmas rush.
“The very first Christmas I was in retail and I opened the store, I really had no concept of what Christmas was. Now at this point, my friends were helping me here and there, and it was all over the place, and on Christmas Eve that year I literally had about nine pieces of jewellery left in the shop. That’s how badly I planned that! And we had to stay closed for 10 days after Christmas until I restocked the shop. And by God, what a lesson it was and it never happened to me again,” she says.
“I had never planned for Christmas in a store before. And we still laugh about it. It was like, literally about nine pieces – now it was great, because everything sold. But it’s just one of those moments that stands out to me around how wrong we got it then. And there have been many things that have been tough – from 2008 there’s a good few years there where it was really really difficult but we survived. Covid actually ended up just being so good for us because we had a website and Covid gave up the chance to improve it. It made us sit back and look at the website, make it better, and it saved us.”
The website is booming now, as is Azure’s premises on Georges Quay. The ground floor hosts the store, with the bridal suites above it and the design studio above that. The listed building was built in the early 1800s, located just off South Mall, and Audrey put a huge amount of work turning it into the beautiful emporium it is today. When she bought it, it was derelict, and the businesswoman was able to make it purpose-built for her business.
Before it was hers, over the decades it has been a women’s clothing store and a haberdashery, with her local business neighbour Colette Crowley of Callanan’s bar, who sadly passed away in 2023, recalling to Audrey how she used to play in the area as a child.
“She was 98, and she remembered being able to run through those buildings as a child. And when we were taking out the ground floor and the first floor because we had to go back to bare bones, we found doorways, just as she had said. There were fireplaces, but she said when they were kids, they used to be able to run the full length of the towers, the way they were all joined. There’s quite a lot of history.”
History is deeply entrenched in Audrey’s connection to Cork. One of her shops was located in the Huguenot Quarter, to which she discovered she had familial connections: “When we looked into it, we were actually defendants of the Huguenots, which is mad. I ended up in France and then ended up opening my first store in the Huguenot quarter in Cork. I love Cork as a city and I’ve grown up here, the people and the community, it has helped keep me open for 20 years.”
It is the people who are important, and Audrey is deeply connected to every single one of her customer’s stories. Jewellery is something we often use to commemorate a special occasion, and Azure’s pieces have been crafted for every reason, from weddings to anniversaries to “just because.” They work with lots of bridal parties, and that is where some of the most touching requests for bespoke jewellery pieces are made.
“After 20 years a lot of those brides are coming in with their communion girls or their confirmation girls. Or I get a lot of brides who come in with their bridal headpiece and ask me to turn it into something for their daughter for the communion. It’s fabulous, it’s sentimental and very sustainable. It really has been a journey, 20 years is a long time when you think about it in the scale of life, and it’s always fantastic to be involved in something as special as a wedding. We’re always delighted they choose us.”
Because the jewellery pieces are handmade, lots of different requests can be catered for. Often, brides want their mother or grandmother’s pearls incorporated into their jewellery. These decisions are all made during a personal consultation process, where everything from the bride’s dress to her unique personality are taken into consideration.
“We have used granny’s pearls. We have used a mum’s brooch and headpiece. We’ve also used the nuts and bolts of a bride’s father’s motorbike in a headpiece. It is very sentimental for the people involved.”
Audrey has her own pieces she has made for herself that are sentimental. On holidays one year she found a bag of gorgeous beads and picked them up on her travels. To celebrate purchasing and revamping her Georges Quay building, she brought the beads out and made a distinctive five-strand necklace
“It was really difficult, obviously, to restore the building. It was taxing. And when it was finished, the Cork Business Association recognised the effort and the labour that went into it. And we got the Better Building Award, so for the ceremony I made a five-strand beaded pearl necklace for myself. That was 10 years ago and I still wear it at black tie functions. It’s still greatly admired and it’s just one of those pieces, it’ll never be remade, though everyone in my family has borrowed it at some stage! It just reminds me that we finally got there, really. “
Cork is in her heart, and she says that though many people have asked her why she has not gone to Dublin to open a store, Audrey is more than happy to remain in Cork, trying to find that balance between work life and family. “It’s just not where I wanted to go with this,” she says. “Also I am very family-oriented, and you have to make a choice. Things are definitely getting easier with the kids being older, as when they were younger, it was really challenging. You basically just worked every hour God sent. That is literally how it was,” reflects the mum of two.
“There’s a routine, you get up in the morning, do the breakfast, school run, walk the dog, clean the house, get into work, work all day. You have to be organised, and you just do it. I did it, like loads of other women do. It never stops. The phone’s always on, there’s always someone looking for you. But you understand that that’s just the way it is. That’s what it is to be self-employed.”
“And the plus side of it is that I never missed a football match or a parent teacher meeting or a school concert. I was always able to work around them. When you’re self- employed, you have more options. It’s harder in some ways, but I think it facilitates family life a little bit better because you can work when the kids are in bed. And as my kids are getting older, I’ll start to find more time for myself, and that’s okay. I knew it was going to be like that when I did it.”
Audrey’s business has tested her resilience over the years, and she says that if someone told her years ago she would have her own business, she never would have believed it. ” You learn that you’re resilient and you’re tougher than you think you are when you can kind of weather these storms. I had two parents who passed away throughout this journey, and they were quite young. My mum was in her fifties, my dad was 60 So I was pregnant, I was minding my parents who were ill. I was trying to run the store. There’s been times where it’s been absolute chaos. And I always thought, well, if I didn’t lose my mind then, I’m never going to lose it.”
Supporting local businesses like Audrey’s is what keeps communities as vibrant and creative as Cork’s flowing. You can find the store at 23 George’s Quay, Centre, Cork, T12 YX49, and the website is azurejewellery.ie
Discover more from All About Cork
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
