She spends her days scouring the planet for jewels, gold and platinum treasures that may fulfill her very exacting purchasers’ wants. Her costliest discovery was a £150million diamond.

“Issues have been completely different in communist occasions,” recollects Julia, 46. “I travelled to Paris after I gained a contest and stayed there for a month. I keep in mind seeing bananas within the retailer and I used to be so shocked. I had by no means seen something prefer it.

“The place I used to be from, bananas have been so costly, they have been a luxurious.

“My dad and mom have been inventive, my dad drove a cab, they ran a espresso store and had a store promoting lighting fixtures. I feel that’s the place I obtained my entrepreneurial facet,” mentioned Julia who grew up in Radomir, a city outdoors of the capital Sofia.

“I used to be impressed by Danielle Metal novels. Some individuals give attention to the romance in them however I noticed profitable and unbiased girls, and I needed that. My world was completely male-dominated and the one method for a girl to achieve success, that I might see, was to both marry wealthy or have wealthy dad and mom.

“I needed to get out of there and have extra.”

Julia, whose mom was Russian and her father Bulgarian, obtained began within the jewelry enterprise by probability.

Having travelled to the USA with three suitcases, $3,000 and an economics masters diploma, she obtained a job in a jewellers on Madison Avenue in New York and fell in love with an business that provides individuals what they most want. She then constructed a profession throughout retail earlier than beginning her personal enterprise in 2007.

She obtained a diploma from the Gemological Institute of America and her firm grew by means of phrase of mouth.

Now primarily based in London, Julia is a citizen of the world and travels far and large to search out every bit for purchasers from the Far East, North America, Europe, Asia and Center East.

Her most up-to-date gross sales have included a pair of $6million, 20-carat, emerald-cut diamonds that she says would have price $8m-9m in a retailer within the diamond district of cities like New York and London.

Gems are thought-about a steady funding at a time when the world’s monetary ­markets are as soon as once more in turmoil.

“Normally, completely satisfied individuals purchase jewelry,” she says. “And I discovered an setting the place I felt completely satisfied too. Individuals purchase them for particular events, though more and more men and women are shopping for them for ­themselves as an act of self-love.

“I really like the enjoyment on individuals’s faces when I’ve discovered precisely what they have been on the lookout for, and even one thing higher.

“I feel I perceive the love behind it. I’m fulfilling a dream of theirs.”

Julia, who lives in Wimbledon, south-west London, along with her two younger youngsters, explains what drives her: “Coming from someplace the place everyone seems to be struggling, it makes you aspire to extra.

“While you develop up in a communist nation after which immediately you get entry to all this wealth that you simply had by no means seen, it’s mesmerising.

“I immediately had 20 Chanel luggage. This might sound extreme however my story is of a lady who needed to have it and wasn’t allowed to, after which immediately did.

“It meant extra to me than a Chanel bag. It represented freedom, independence, ­success and progress. I might resolve. I might select how I lived my life.”