The Industry’s Giants Called Her Too Small to Sit at the Table. I Watched Anita Agrawal Spend Thirty-Five Years Burning That Table Down — and It’s Time Somebody Said It Out Loud.
Love at First Sight — a new personal column in Canadian Jeweller Magazine
This column has been forming inside me for years.
There is a particular kind of figure in our industry whose contribution does not survive the headline filter we usually apply. Their work is in the relationship, the mentorship, the willingness to enter a fight that does not directly benefit them. Their breakthrough is as much a matter of character as it is of craft. Until now there has been no formal place in this magazine to honour those people from my own vantage point, in my own voice, without the framing of a ranking or a sponsorship. Love at First Sight is that place.
The premise is unambiguous. These are the figures I have personally fallen for, professionally and editorially, the moment I understood what they were building. Every column will be transparent about that subjectivity. That is the whole point.
There was never a question who would open it.
The Twelve-Year-Old at the Bench
Best Bargains Jewellery was founded in 1991 by Sheela Agrawal, Anita’s mother, in the heart of Toronto’s jewellery district at 27 Queen Street East. By the time the company had found its footing, Anita was already in the workshop — twelve years old, learning the work, asking the kind of questions twelve-year-olds are not supposed to ask about wholesale margins and cost-of-goods. In 2026 the family business turns thirty-five, and Anita has navigated it through every chapter of that journey: the trade-show decades, the e-commerce transition, the pandemic, and the present tariff environment that is forcing every Canadian exporter to redraw its next ten years.
She is the Chief Executive Officer of a multi-award-winning Canadian manufacturer that ships sterling silver and 10/14 karat gold gemstone jewellery to more than twenty countries, manages over 10,000 SKUs, and services roughly 20,000 B2B clients. In 2012 she founded Jewels 4 Ever, the affordable Canadian-made gemstone line that has become the company’s most recognizable public-facing brand. She also designs the Jewels by Anita mid-range collection. Her 14kt gold natural sapphire and diamond earrings won the 2022 INSTORE Retailer’s Choice Award, and her 2021 collaboration with Anita Bhandari of Aarkish Diamonds returned three international INSTORE Design Award honours, including two Retailer’s Choice wins.
That résumé would constitute a complete career for most operators in this trade. For Anita, it is the foundation.
Toe to Toe with the Giants
Our Canadian Jeweller Grand Master is the most punishing category in the Awards of Excellence. It is not a popularity contest. It is not for the faint of heart. It is a direct, head-to-head comparison against the largest, longest-standing, most heavily resourced names in the country — houses with national distribution, decades of brand equity, and marketing budgets a boutique operation cannot rival. Most operators in this industry will never put their name forward. The majority do not even consider it.
Anita walked in regardless.
She entered without the cushion of a hundred-person sales team or a national advertising spend. She entered with thirty-plus years of design files, a mother-daughter manufacturing operation on Queen Street, and the conviction that a boutique Canadian house belongs on the same stage as the country’s biggest names. She stood across from the behemoths of this trade and argued her case on merit.
That is the moment that decided it for me. Watching her step into that ring and refuse to be sized down is the breakthrough at the heart of this feature. Scale is not the only definition of mastery. Her career is the evidence.
The Life Outside the Showcase
If the narrative ended at the factory door, it would already justify a column. It does not end there.
Anita is a contract professor at the School of Business at Centennial College and at George Brown College, where she teaches the business literacy she had to acquire the hard way to the next generation of Canadian entrepreneurs. She holds a Master of Arts in Social Anthropology from Carleton University, a B.Sc. honours from the University of Toronto, and a post-graduate diploma in e-commerce from Centennial College — the qualification that, in her own account, enabled her to convert Best Bargains into a Canadian online supplier to partners including Walmart.ca and TD Rewards.
In 2024 Centennial College named her its Alumni of Distinction for small business. In 2023 the Women’s Executive Network named her one of Canada’s 100 Most Powerful Women in the Compass Rose Entrepreneurs category, at the annual gala in Toronto. The Organization of Women in International Trade named her Woman Exporter of the Year in 2012, after which she served as President of OWIT-Toronto from 2014 through 2018.
Beyond the formal honours, she has logged more than 200 speaking engagements on small business and women’s economic empowerment, across the Provincial Legislature, the Toronto Region Board of Trade, CBC, BNN, the Toronto Star, and the Globe and Mail. In 2019 she joined the federal government’s committee on Gender and Trade policy. She has lectured from a TEDx stage. She has delivered a keynote at the Bangkok International Gem and Jewellery Fair. She sits on the executive board of CAFTCAD. When a Canadian reporter requires a small-business voice on tariffs, on women-led exports, on ethical employment, her phone is the one that rings — and she answers it.
The Heart Behind the Hustle
What distinguishes this as Love at First Sight, rather than a standard industry profile, is the dimension that does not appear on a résumé.
Anita is generous in a manner the trade-show floor does not reliably reward. She mentors students who will never purchase a single piece from her. She writes references for designers she barely knows. She publicly champions other women in the industry, most visibly through her ongoing creative partnership with Anita Bhandari, the collaboration that produced the award-winning Spring Goddess Earrings and Blue Flame Pendant. She advocates relentlessly for a stronger youth pipeline into Canadian jewellery, not because it serves her balance sheet, but because she remembers being twelve years old and assembling the map alone.
She is also, by her own admission, the kind of leader who cried for an hour when the email confirming her place on Canada’s 100 Most Powerful Women arrived. That detail is the entire story to me. Thirty-five years in, seated at a dinner table with astrophysicists and surgeons, and her instinct is still that of someone who cannot quite believe she has been granted entry to the room.
That is humility refined over decades of work. That is the woman this column was built to acknowledge.
Why This Column, Why Her, Why Now
Love at First Sight is personal. It is not a ranking. It is not a sponsored placement. It is the space in which I, as a writer who has spent years inside this industry, can name the contributions that have changed the shape of what is possible for the rest of us.
Anita Agrawal changed the shape of what is possible for a boutique Canadian manufacturer. She changed it for the women in her classroom. She changed it for the small-business owner who needed a voice on Parliament Hill. She changed it for every retailer who has stood at a Best Bargains booth on the floor of Time & Shine and registered the difference between a transaction and a relationship.
A true force of nature with a huge heart. That is the brief. That is the woman. That is the reason this column exists.
The giants called her too small for the table. I have watched her spend thirty-five years burning that table down.
It is time somebody said it out loud.
Welcome to Love at First Sight.
— Yours truly
Anita Agrawal is the CEO of Best Bargains Jewellery and the founder of Jewels 4 Ever, based at 27 Queen Street East, Toronto. Best Bargains will exhibit at Time & Shine Toronto on April 26 and 27, 2026, at the Crowne Plaza, 900 York Mills Road, Toronto.
Visit bbjw.com or follow @Jewels4everCA.
Love at First Sight is a new personal column in Canadian Jeweller Magazine.
Subscribe for more.
