Editor’s note: This article is part of a series of profiles highlighting successful Ukrainian startups and businesses. The series is funded by the regional investment fund Ukraine-Moldova American Enterprise Fund (UMAEF) and created in partnership with Spend With Ukraine, a non-profit organization that launched a platform to showcase businesses with Ukrainian roots and provide one more meaningful way to support Ukraine – by choosing to spend with Ukraine. The series’ sponsors are not involved in the editorial process of the writing of these profiles.
“Gunia wasn’t supposed to be a brand about Ukraine,” says co-founder Maria Gavryliuk in the company’s downtown Kyiv office as she begins to recount the brand’s origin story.
In 2017, Gavryliuk’s co-founder Natalia Kamenska had grown tired of a fashion industry she felt was too focused on mass production and commercial interests, rather than creativity.
Kamenska sold her part of the company where both she and Gavryliuk worked — the Ukrainian fashion brand Kamenskakononova — and began traveling around Ukraine for inspiration. While in the Carpathian mountains, Kamenska encountered a “gunia,” a traditional western Ukrainian shag fur coat that weighs around six kilos (13 pounds).
Her discoveries in the mountains were just the entry point into the vast world of Ukrainian folk traditions, and not just for Kamenska.
“She opened up this new world for herself and came to realize that nobody from our creative sphere knew anything about these traditions,” Gavryliuk says.
For many years, Ukraine’s cultural heritage was largely inaccessible to Ukrainians themselves, the result of centuries of Russian influence and domination over the country. This began to change with the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014 when Ukraine as a whole, including its creative industries, began to look inward and westward and away from Russia. The trend has only gained momentum since the start of the full-scale invasion.
Despite the societal shifts, deeply entrenched stereotypes around Ukrainian-made products — that they were cheap or uninteresting — still persisted in some circles even when Kamenska and Gavryliuk started Gunia in 2017 — first, more as a hobby creating silk scarves with Ukrainian folk-inspired designs.
“It was our idea to break this (perception) and showcase that you can make something cool and trendy with Ukrainian ethnic motifs.”
Gunia, which officially launched as a company in 2019, is far from the only brand to pop up in the last several years that is taking its inspiration from Ukraine’s cultural history. But what sets it apart is its approach — taking Ukrainian historical artifacts, not to simply replicate them in a modern style, but to create entirely new ornamentation on its ceramics, clothing, and jewelry that appeal to both Ukrainians and foreign audiences.
“It’s important for us to create new objects, not to keep things the way they were made years before, but to take something as inspiration and then create something new. So we mix and match, we use different colors,” Gavryliuk says.
Zoya Zvyniatskovskaia, a Ukrainian fashion historian, characterizes Gunia’s approach not as an attempt to exclusively popularize the motifs of traditional Ukrainian clothing, textiles, or ceramics but rather as a search for appealing designs in the work of Ukrainian urban naïve art.
Unlike traditional naïve art that is associated with rural or folk themes, urban naïve artwork incorporates elements of the city and popular culture. Urban naïve, as Zvyniatskovskaia puts it, includes “personalized folk art, when the artists add something of their own rather than copying a traditional ornament like an amusing boy or crooked bird.” One of Gunia’s most recognizable ornaments, and part of its logo, resembles a cherub’s head.
While urban naïve art was less developed in Ukraine, for the European and Western consumer, the reference to the aesthetic — think Pablo Picasso’s primitive art — resonates, says Zvyniatskovskaia. Indeed, with a relatively narrow domestic market, many Ukrainian companies have global ambitions.
Gunia already sells its products in Switzerland, London, Poland, Berlin, Lisbon, Paris, and even Japan.
That doesn’t mean Gunia isn’t popular at home. “Gunia is in great demand among the customers at Kyiv's central department store TSUM”, Kostiantyn Putylenko, marketing director of TSUM Kyiv, tells Kyiv Independent. Last year, Gunia and TSUM Kyiv collaborated on a holiday collection, which, according to the department store, was very successful.
The Valentine’s Day collection last year was inspired largely by mid-20th-century naive embroidered rushnyky — traditional embroidered ritual cloths — from a collection of Kyiv’s Ivan Honchar museum of items made in the Poltava and Cherkasy regions.
TSUM’s private label department and Gunia also partnered to create a separate brand of gifts and home goods, TSUM by Gunia. The idea was create a line of gifts that would “embody national motifs in a modern interpretation,” and that “the choice of Gunia was obvious,” Kateryna Lopachak, director of private label at TSUM Kyiv tells the Kyiv Independent. Some of the items “instantly sold out" after the launch, according to Lopachak.
But before any Gunia creations hit shelves anywhere, the team goes through a painstaking amount of work to go from idea to finished product, Gavryliuk says.
Bringing Gunia’s creations to life
Each seasonal collection — which includes a line of hand-painted ceramic dishware, jewelry, and clothing — is the result of months of travel, research, and a general quest for inspiration around Ukraine, its museums, and the world.
Gavryliuk and Kamenska, along with a team of designers, develop the concept based on myths and folklore, patterns, and designs they see in both Ukrainian traditional wear as well as global fashion trends. The designs that emerge weave together folk, religious, and artistic motifs in modern compositions.
Once the research is complete, a team of designers draws up its sketches, sending them off to various teams of artisans and craftspeople in workshops and ateliers around the country to get to work on bringing new objects to life.
Collections include various modern interpretations of Ukrainian traditional ware, from sorochky, Ukrainian embroidered blouses, and fartukhy, traditional embroidered aprons in its clothing lines, to hlechyky, Ukrainian traditional jugs, in its ceramics department.
In the company’s clothing atelier in downtown Kyiv just across the street from its flagship store on Antonovycha Street, a team is currently working on the clothing line for Gunia’s upcoming Easter collection, this year titled “Naive.”
The series’ items are adorned with embroidered flowers, birds, angels, nature scenes, and rural motifs and takes its inspiration largely from Gunia’s private collection of rushnyky made in the 1950s and 1960s. The Easter clothing drop will include a spring jacket, three women’s shirts, and a men’s shirt — all in off-white with black embroidery, the minimalist color scheme Gunia tends to go for with the occasional splash of color.
One piece of clothing in each line goes through 14 stages before it hits shelves — traveling around the atelier from designers, to craftswomen, machine embroidery specialists, tailors, seamstresses, and quality control specialists, and briefly taken away for fitting. At the end of the process, the items are shown to a wordsmith who will come up with names for each item in the collection.
Then it’s off to production, distribution, and warehouse managers, who will make sure the clothing items get made and sold in stores and online both in Ukraine and abroad. The same goes for ceramics and jewelry.
The most difficult stage in creating the clothing items is the embroidery, according to Iryna Fedorenko, head of Gunia’s clothing atelier, who says it’s a very technically complex process.
“One of the main problems we run into is the right choice of threads and fabric — they have to ‘befriend’ one another,” Fedorenko says as she shows an embroidered shirt created in the studio that she says had to be redone six times before they got the combination of thread and fabric right. If the fabric is too thin, and the thread too thick, it can lead to tears and holes.
While a few clothing items are completely hand-embroidered, most of them are done on a machine. In one room of the atelier, the loud whir of an embroidery machine fills the space as Gunia employees carefully watch the machine transfer a programmed pattern onto a traditional large bell-shaped sleeve of a woman’s embroidered shirt.
Once this particular sleeve has spent four hours under the needles of the machine, the embroiderer will add the finishing touches by hand — in this particular case, using the “Richelieu” technique, or cutwork embroidery that dates back to 16th century Italy and involves a delicate practice of cutting away fabric threads to create a lace-like effect.
For this shirt in the collection, embroidered star-shaped flowers and swans float as if on water around a large bow whose Richelieu cutwork makes it look like ribbon. The dreamy fairytale design lends itself to the maiden-like qualities of these traditional cotton and linen shirts.
Once the embroiderers have done their work, the shirt is sent to the room next door, where a seamstress will cut the sleeves to be sewn onto the body of the shirt.
Then it’s off to the tailors to make sure that no button, hem, no small detail is out of place — and most of all, that the clothing item will be comfortable for the wearer.
“There is attention to detail in every seam,” Fedorenko says in the tailor’s workspace as she shows off the various test runs of the latest collection’s pieces. “We struggle, we suffer, we cry, but everything works out in the end.”
Gunia fuses Ukraine’s rich cultural heritage with modern fashion, crafting pieces that pay tribute to the past while shaping the future. Visit Spend With Ukraine (https://www.spendwithukraine.com/) to discover more visionary brands—your support helps preserve traditions and sparks creative innovation.
Dominic Culverwell
