So what prevents so many jewelry makers and other artist types from living their authentic lives? What prevents so many designers from making choices and taking advantage of opportunities which are not limited by anyone — not limited by friend or family or boss or colleague or perceptions of cultural and social norms?
Aloise was sitting there, fidgeting, only half listening to the discussion in my class about jewelry design, when, suddenly, unusually with a forceful voice and expression, she said, No one likes her stuff. No positive feedback in response to seeing any of her necklaces or bracelets or earrings. She loved her designs, she stated plainly, convincingly. But no one else seemed to. Her designs did not resonate with her friends and the people around her. She loved making jewelry. She loved her style. She loved the pieces and materials she was using. But, because of the nil-to-negative feedback, she never felt authentic as an artist.
If you saw her pieces, you would immediately come to the conclusion that there was no reason for the negative feedback, except, perhaps, that her pieces did not reflect the current fashion. Well conceived. Well-made. Clearly a point of view.
My response to her was simple: They are not the judge, you are. The problem for you is not your design skills. The problem is that you need to either to connect with a different audience, or, much more difficult, you need to learn how better to express what makes sense and has value for you in your own jewelry design work to your current audience. It’s like thinking your design process out loud — how you made choices about materials, techniques and composition.
Design Is A Tool For Expressing Authenticity
Authenticity and design are integral to each other. Design is a tool for expressing your authenticity. You will have difficulty feeling and expressing your authentic self in public without reference to good design. And, ultimately, you can’t have good design without an ability to express your authentic self. Cannot have one without the other.
Authenticity means conveying a sense of your being genuine. Real. True to your values. Consistent and coherent in how you relate your inspiration to your aspiration when creating a piece of jewelry. Then, continuing to be consistent and coherent as you implement your aspiration, understandably making changes and tweaks along the way, into your finished jewelry design. This requires a lot of honesty with yourself. A lot of self-reflection and what is called metacognition. Your jewelry becomes a sincere expression of you and you-the-creator’s vision.
That’s authenticity. The sum of all your choices in the design process. Technical. Artistic. Social. Philosophical. Each piece of jewelry you make is evidence to the world about all the choices you have made. Choices about translating vision into a tangible form. Selection of visual elements, product functionality, technology and technique. Accepting or rejecting client desires and hoped for experiences. Steering your business towards particular ideas about branding. Design can enhance. It can amplify. It can set boundaries. It can increase accessibility. Engage. Impact.
Gennifer refused! She refused to listen to me about how important it is to relate the materials you choose to your design goals. She made wrap bracelets, usually two bands around the wrist. She sold them for $300 each. Took her about 2 hours to make each one. The materials she used were cheap. If the price tag you put on your jewelry has no relationship to the effort and materials you put into it, you’re not being authentic.
A wrap bracelet consists of beads ladder-stitched between two pieces of leather. She used Indian leather, which dries out and cracks easily. Does not hold up. She stitched her beads with fishing line. Fishing line in sunlight and heat dries out and cracks. Very quickly. She used glass beads from China. Glass beads from China typically are a clear bead with a color coating. The side of all her beads along the full almost 20” length of the bracelet which touched the skin had lost their color. Originally black, they were now white with peeling black. No reinforcement was placed on either end, so, on either end, again pretty quickly, the stitching would start to break and the two supporting strands of leather would come apart.
Gennifer’s wrap bracelets probably had $10–12 of materials in them plus two hours of labor. Her $300 price tag was not representative of appropriate design. She should have upped the quality of her materials: Greek leather, Czech glass or gemstone beads, micro bead cord for the stitching. She should have reinforced both ends, such as using a silk wrap technique. Then her pieces would be durable and justify the price tag, and be much more authentic to herself as a designer. Or, she should charge what her pieces are really worth: perhaps $75–100. I’ve yet to meet one of her customers who has gotten more than six months of use out of her pieces. To me, if Gennifer thinks she is being authentic, I’d tell her it’s contrived.
About Authenticity
Authenticity is multiplex. It functions on several planes.
You have material authenticity. Given the value you want to assign to your piece, your choice of materials, and how you leverage them, should be the highest, appropriate quality in durability, sustainability and craftsmanship.
You have technical and technological authenticity. Your choice of techniques and technologies, and how you leverage them, should bring your design to that optimum (sometimes called parsimonious) point of efficiency and effectiveness. That is, that perfect point where you can maintain both shape and suppleness.
There is emotional authenticity. Good jewelry should resonate with the customer. It should evoke genuine emotions in line with your audience’s intended desire(s).
There is cultural authenticity. Good jewelry shows respect and acknowledges any cultural influences and inspirations, when design elements are borrowed or otherwise represented.
There is contemporary design authenticity. In contemporary design, the designer substitutes personal values and understandings for those of traditional socio-cultural norms and values which influence more traditional design. You must always show respect for tradition while concurrently using your own authentic self as the measure and rationale for successful design choices within any designing process. You must overcome pressures to conform and present a curated version of yourself.
Another type is personal authenticity. As a jewelry designer, you always have something to say. It can be simple such as what you think might be beautiful or wearable or appropriate for a certain situation. It might be more complex where you make a series of interrelated choices relating your values and desires to those of your client.
Dilemmas For The Designer
For me, I grew up with both parents and teachers discouraging me from pursuing my creative self through the arts. Doctor or lawyer. Basically, those were the two allowed choices, as I was steered and tracked and encouraged (or discouraged) over all my young and teenage years. [Parents, if your child tells you who they are, support them!]
Finally, in my early 20’s, having achieved some separation from my overbearing career police, I made an attempt for a few years to paint. Pretty. Ok technique. No reflection of who I was as a person except perhaps, in the choice of subject matter. I tried to convey emotions and meanings, but, primarily ended up with pretty paintings to decorate my apartment. Friends and family loved them. Sold a few. But none of this was coming together as a reflection of my authentic self. I was in my 20’s but hadn’t found anything authentic about me.
Twenty years later, when I began to make jewelry, I felt a strong connection. With jewelry, I had to create something meaningful for both myself and my client. Both our understandings. Both our values. Both our desires. Jewelry by its nature requires this kind of dialogue. That challenge stirred me. It forced me to come to grips by reflecting on what I wanted the object I created to be, and how that compared to what someone else wanted. Add on top of this was the fact the design had to account for the fact that the wearer moves around and never wants to look clownish. Jewelry design, under these circumstances, becomes very complex. And, as a result of all this thinking and concerning and anticipating and interacting, my sense of authenticity began to grow and clarify and grow and clarify some more.
From my experiences, and those of my students and colleagues, I can identify several dilemmas and challenges for the designer who wants to find their authentic self and successfully express it through the designing of jewelry.
The originality dilemma. You don’t design in a vacuum. And most certainly, many of the design choices you make have been influenced by other designers around you. Finding a balance between originality and the influence of others can be daunting. But think about it this way. Define ‘originality’ as differentiation. Your authenticity will emerge and shine by the way you differentiate yourself from other designers and influencers.
The art market dilemma. For many of us, we want some level of commercial success. Often this means compromising our integrity as we bow to things like fashion, market trends, client expectations, commercial requirements and limitations. Sometimes, when commercializing what we do, we use the label “authentic” to commodify our jewelry, when we are really stretching the imagination and legitimacy here. The challenge is to find balance between making a living and maintaining true authenticity.
The shared understanding dilemma. Successful design emerges from the insights and applications of the values and desires of the artist in coordination and conjunction with the assumptions, values and desires of the client. That might mean some compromising. Some give and take. Some less authenticity. The designer must decide to what degree personal integrity will be compromised in the design process.
The vulnerability dilemma. Since jewelry must be introduced publicly — for someone to wear, to be exhibited, to be sold, to be collected — the designer, of necessity, must open themselves up. Be exposed. Be given critique and criticism. There is doubt and self-doubt. There is a questioning of whether you are truly genuine. The designer is faced with determining how to overcome feelings of vulnerability and how much ego-self-protection they want to build into what they do.
The evolution dilemma. You grow, you learn, you change over time. What you thought was your authentic self (and all that that meant) earlier in your career may be different than what it is now and how you want to express it now. In a similar way, your authentic self may vary a bit from one context to another. This might result in a tension between the consistency and coherency of your body of work as these relate to your authentic self as you see / feel / sense it in the moment. The designer, in this case, must grapple with whether to change or not, or if so, how much to change. If you are already an established business with a strong brand identity, this becomes especially difficult to deal with. Changing your brand identity is especially hard. You don’t want to be rejected by or confuse your audience.
During my jewelry designing career, all these challenges confronted me. I can honestly say that there is a give and take, from piece to piece that I have designed, between achieving that authentic self, and having to make some compromises. Often, when I find I have had to compromise too much — usually to conform to my client’s wishes — I concurrently design a piece in the abstract, one I can create which majorly resonates with many aspects of my personal authenticity as an artist.
One last point. Look around at all the jewelry available for sale and that people wear. There is a lot of sameness. Standardization. Very machine-made looking. In some sense, lacking in personality and individuality. Infusing your jewelry design with your authentic self helps you differentiate yourself from mass-produced or superficial alternatives.
How someone actually goes about finding and expressing their authentic self varies from person to person. This isn’t a straightforward process. You the designer must be guided by your own self-reflection, empathy and commitment to your core values, beliefs and desires. You must strive to align your choices about design with your inner convictions.
And remember: Rogue Elephants are always authentic. They can be no other way.
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Keep From Letting ‘Doubt’ Paralyze You As A Jewelry Designer
For the novice, all that excitement at the beginning, when thinking about making jewelry and making some pieces, sometimes collides with a wall of developing self-doubt.
It’s not easy to quiet a doubt.
As a jewelry artist, you organize your life around an inspiration. There is some fuzziness here. That inspiration has some elements of ideas, but not necessarily crystal clear ones. That inspiration has some elements of emotions — it makes you feel something — but not necessarily something you can put into words or images or fully explain. You then need to translate this fuzzy inspiration into materials, into techniques, into color, into arrangements, into a coherent whole.
You start to make something, but realize you don’t know how to do it. But you want to do it, and do it now. However, to pick up the needed skills, you realize you can’t learn things all at once. You can’t do everything you want to do all at once. That initial excitement often hits a wall. Things take time to learn. There are a lot of trial and error moments, with a lot of errors. Pieces break. Combining colors and other design elements feels very awkward. Picking the right clasps and rings and connectors and stringing materials is fraught with implications. Silhouettes are confusing. You might get the right shape for your piece, but it is difficult to get the right movement, drape and flow, without compromising that shape.
To add to this stress and strain, you need to show your jewelry off. You might want someone to like it. To want it. To need it. To desire it. To buy it. To wear it. To wear it more than once. To wear it often. To exhibit it. To collect it. To show and talk about it with others. And how will all these other people recognize your creative spark, and your abilities to translate that spark into a wonderful, beautiful, functional piece of jewelry, appropriate for the wearer and appropriate for the situation?
Frequently, because of all this, the artist experiences some sense of doubt and self-doubt. Some paralysis. Can’t get started. Can’t finish something. Avoiding showing your pieces to others. Wondering why you became a jewelry designer in the first place.
Doubt holds you back from seizing your opportunities.
It makes getting started or finishing things harder than they need to be.
It adds uncertainty.
It makes you question yourself.
It blocks your excitement, perhaps diminishing it.
Doubt and Self-Doubt should be useful in forcing you to think about and question your choices. However, for many jewelry designers, it mostly holds them back.
Having doubt and self-doubt is common among all artistic types. After all, for much of what you do and how you spend your time, you’re mostly alone with your thoughts.
What becomes important is how you manage and overcome it. You do not want your doubts to get in the way of your creative process and disciplinary development. You want your doubts, rather, to inform them.
8 Major Ways Doubts Can Force You Into That Abyss
There are 8 major ways in which jewelry designers get caught beginning to fall into that abyss we call self-doubt:
1) What If I’m Not Creative Enough or Original Enough or Cannot Learn or Master or Don’t Know a Particular Technique?
2) What If No One Likes What I Make?
3) What If No One Takes Me Seriously As An Artist And Designer?
4) I Overthink Things and Am A Bit of a Perfectionist.
5) How Can I Stay Inspired?
6) Won’t People Steal My Work?
7) Being Over Confident or Under Confident
8) Role Confusion
1. What If I’m Not Creative Enough or Original Enough or Cannot Learn or Master or Don’t Know a Particular Technique?
Everyone has some creativity baked into their being. It is a matter of developing your way of thinking and doing so that you can apply it. This takes time.
So does originality. The word originality can be very off-putting, but it does not have to be.
At first, when you are getting started making jewelry, originality will mean that you will try different ways of personalizing projects. There are always things you can do to bring some aspects of originality to your pieces. This might be the choice of colors, or using a special clasp, or rearranging some elements in your composition.
Again, as with creativity, the ability to be more and more original will evolve over time. It is helpful to think of originality, not necessarily as coming up with something completely new, but rather as differentiation — how you differentiate yourself from other jewelry designers.
For almost everyone, you don’t begin your design career at the height of your levels of creativity and originality. Yes, if you look around you, other people are more creative and original than you or have more skills than you. Don’t let these observations be a barrier to your own development as a jewelry designer. You get there through persistence and hard work. You handle your inner critic. You may not be there, yet — the key word here is yet. But you will be.
2. What If No One Likes What I Make?
We all have fears about how our creativity and originality are going to be evaluated and judged. We project our self-doubts to the doubts we think we see and feel from others. What if no one wants to wear my pieces, or buy my works?
We can’t let these outsider reactions dictate our lives and creative selves. A key part of successful jewelry design is learning how to introduce what we do publicly. At the least, it is the core nature of the things we create that they are to be worn on the body. Jewelry is a very public thing.
Turn negative comments into positive ideas, motivators, insights, explorations. Allow yourself some give and take, some needs to step back awhile, some needs to tweak. Jewelry design and jewelry making are iterative processes. They in no way are linear. Your outcomes and their success are more evolutionary, than guaranteed.
Distressing about what others may think of your work can be very damaging to your self-esteem. It can amplify your worries. Don’t go there.
Don’t become your worst critic.
3. What If No One Takes Me Seriously As An Artist And Designer?
Jewelry design is an occupation in search of a profession. You will find that a lot of people won’t recognize your passion and commitment. They may think anyone can design jewelry. They may think of jewelry making as a craft or some subset of art, not as something unique and important in and of itself. They may wonder how you can make a living at this.
The bottom line: if you don’t take yourself seriously as a jewelry designer, no one else will.
People will take you seriously as they see all the steps you are taking to master your craft and develop yourself as a professional.
4. I Over Think Things And Am A Bit Of A Perfectionist
Some designers let a sense that their work is not as good as imagined get in the way. They never finish anything. They let doubt eat away at them.
Perfectionism is the enemy of the good. It’s great to be meticulous, but emotionally, we get wrecked when anything goes astray, or any little thing is missing, or you don’t have that exact color or part you originally wanted.
Go ahead and plan. Planning is good. It’s insightful. It can be strategic. But also be sure to be adaptable and realistic. Each piece is a stepping stone to something that will come next.
The better jewelry designer develops a Designer’s Toolbox — a collection of fix-it strategies to deal with the unfamiliar or the problematic.
Overthinking can be very detrimental. You can’t keep changing your mind, trying out every option, thinking that somewhere, someplace there exists a better option. Make a choice and get on with it. You can tweak things later.
Yes, attention to detail is important. But so is the value of your time. You do not want to waste too much time on trivial details.
Be aware when you begin over-analyzing things. Stop, take a breath, make a decision, and move on.
5. How Can I Stay Inspired?
Designing a piece of jewelry takes time, sometimes a long time. That initial inspirational spark might feel like it’s a dying ember.
Don’t let that happen.
Translate that inspiration into images, colors, words, sample designs, and surround your work space with these.
Talk about your inspiration in detail with family and friends.
6. Won’t People Steal My Work?
Many jewelry designers fear that if they show their work publicly, people will steal their ideas. So they stop designing.
Yet jewelry design is a very communicative process which requires introducing your work publicly. If you are not doing this, then you are creating simple sculptures, not jewelry.
Yes, other people may copy your work. See this source of doubt as an excuse. It is a self-imposed, but unnecessary, barrier we might impose to prevent us from experiencing that excitement as a jewelry designer. Other people will never be able to copy your design prowess — how you translate inspiration into a finished piece. That is unique and special to you. It is why the general public responds positively to you and your work.
7. Over Confidence can blind you to the things you need to be doing and learning, and Under Confidence can hinder your development as a designer.
Too often, we allow under confidence to deter us from the jewelry design and making tasks at hand. We always question our lack of ability and technical prowess for accomplishing the necessary tasks at hand. It is important, however, to believe in yourself. To believe that you can work things out when confronted with unfamiliar or problematic situations. It is important to develop your skills for thinking like a designer. Fluency. Flexibility. Originality. There is a vocabulary to learn. Techniques to learn. Strategies to learn. These develop over time with practice and experience. You need to believe in your abilities to develop as a designer over time.
With over confidence comes a naivete. You close off the wisdom to listen to what others have to say or offer. You stunt your development as an artist. You overlook important factors about materials and techniques to the detriment of your final designs and products. You close yourself off to doubt and self-doubt, which is unfortunate. Doubt and self-doubt are tools for asking questions and questioning things. These help you grow and develop as an artist and designer. These influence your ability to make good, professional choices in your career.
8. Role Confusion
Jewelry artists play many roles and wear different hats. Each has its own set of opportunities, requirements, and pressures that the artist must cope with. It’s a balancing act extraordinaire.
First, people who make jewelry wear different hats: Artist and Designer, Manufacturer, Distributor, Retailer, and Exhibitor.
Second, people who make jewelry have different needs: Artistic Excellence, Recognition, Monetary Gain, or Financial Stability.
Third, the artist needs to please and satisfy themselves, as well as other various clients.
Fourth, the artist constructs pieces which need to function in different settings: Situational, Cultural, Sociological, Psychological.
Last, the artist must negotiate a betwixt and between situation — a rite of passage — as they relinquish control over the piece and its underlying inspirations to the wearer and the viewer, who have their own needs, desires and expectations.
This gets confusing. It affects how you pick materials and supplies. Which techniques you use. What marketing strategies you employ. How you value and price things. Anticipating who your audience is. And the list goes on.
It is important to be aware (metacognitive) of what role(s) you play when, and why. Given the role, it is important to understand the types of choices you need to make, when constructing a piece of jewelry. It is critical to understand the tradeoffs you will invariably end up making, and their consequences for the aesthetic, emotional and functional success of your pieces.
Some Advice
While doubt and self-doubt can hinder our development as jewelry designers, some degree of these may be helpful, as well.
To develop yourself as a jewelry designer, and to continue to grow and expand in your profession, you must have a balanced amount of both doubt and self-doubt. Uncertainty leads to questioning. A search for knowledge. Some acceptance of trial and error and experimentation. A yearning for more reliable information and feedback.
Jewelry design uses a great deal of emotion as a Way of Knowing. Emotions cloud or distort how we perceive things. They may lead to more doubt and worry and lack of confidence. But they also enhance our excitement when translating inspirations into designs.
· Don’t let your inner doubts spin out of control. Be aware and suppress them.
· Be real with yourself and your abilities.
· Keep a journal. Detail what your doubts are and the things you are doing to overcome them.
· Create a developmental plan for yourself. Identify the knowledge, skills and understandings you want to develop and grow into.
· Remember what happened in the past the last time doubt got in your way. Remember what you did to overcome this doubt. Remember that probably nothing negative actually happened.
· Talk to people. These can be friends, relatives and colleagues. Don’t keep doubts unto yourself.
· Don’t compare yourself to others. This is a trap. Self-reflect and self-evaluate you on your own terms.
· Worrying about what others think? The truth is that people don’t really care that much about what you do or not do.
· Don’t beat yourself up.
· Get re-inspired. This might mean surrounding yourself with images and photos of things. It might mean a walk in nature. It might me letting someone else’s excitement flow over to you.
It’s important to learn in an organized, developmental way. You want to be always asking how things are interrelated. What depends on what? You want to pose what-if questions so that you can train yourself to anticipate the implications and consequences of making one choice over another. What happens If? What happens When? What enhances? What impedes? What synergizes? What can be leveraged, and toward what objective? You want to reflect on your outcomes.
Some places for learning:
Local craft or bead store Community college University (art, fiber arts, metalsmithing, fashion) Jewelry design program Fashion schools Bead and Jewelry Making Magazines Social media groups Self-taught, crafting at home On-the-job training Certifications Art institutes Art grants How-to books Video tutorials Networking with other craft artists
Types of Beading and Jewelry Making
There is so much to know, and so many types of choices to make. Which clasp? Which stringing material? Which technique? Which beads? Which strategy of construction? What aesthetic you want to achieve? How you want to achieve it? Drape, movement, context, durability.
Sample of Techniques:
Stringing Assembling Bead Weaving Bead Working Wire Working Wire Wrapping Wire Weaving Silversmithing, Metal Work Cold Connections Fabrication Casting Fiber Arts, Knitting, Crochet Micro-Macrame Bead Embroidery Kumihimo, Knotting, Braiding CAD (Computer Aided Design) Enameling Lampworking and Glass Blowing Stamping Engraving Polymer Clay, Precious Metal Clay, Sculpting Lapidary Woodwork, Carving
Types of Tasks Jewelry Makers and Beaders Do
Adjust, reshape, resize, create and attach clasp assemblies Cutting stones, setting stones, determining value and authenticity of stones CAD (Computer Aided Design), 3-D Printing Fabrication, stamping, engraving, casting, soldering, cold connections, shaping metal wire and sheet, annealing Model and mold building, sculpting Manage thread tension, create self-supporting shapes, manage movement, drape and flow String, weave, netting, embellish, embroider, knit, crochet, braid, knot, wrap, assemble Understand jewelry-making as a process, from beginning to end Select color, proportion, volume, shape, forms, size, silhouettes, themes Place and Arrange design elements and components Read patterns, figures, graphs Select materials and techniques Determine measurements Assess stress, strain, strength, suppleness, stability and synergy Understand and access the creative marketplace, introduce their pieces publicly
Learning Objectives
A. Technical Mechanics
1. Managing tension, whether using thread, cord, string or wire
2. Holding your piece to work it
3. Reading simple patterns, figures, graphs
4. Selecting appropriate materials
5. Identifying areas of potential weakness, and strategies for dealing with these
6. Determining measurements, including width and length of a piece, especially in relationship to bead and other component sizes
7. Extending your piece, such as adding thread or wire
8. Finishing off your piece and adding the clasp assembly
B. Understanding Craft Basis of Technique or Stitch
Starting the technique or stitch
Implementing the basic technique or stitch
3. Finishing off the basic technique or stitch
4. Learning variations on the technique or stitch
5. Embellishing the Stitch, including fringe, edge, bail, strap, connectors
C. Understanding Art & Design Basis of Technique or Stitch
1. Learning implications when choosing different sizes/shapes of beads or other components, or using different stringing materials
2. Understanding relationship of the technique or stitch in comparison to other techniques or stitches
3. Understanding how bead asserts its need for color
4. Creating your own design with this technique or stitch, in reference to design elements and jewelry design principles of composition
5. Creating shapes, components and forms with this technique or stitch, and establishing themes
6. Building in structural supports, and other support elements, into the design
D. Becoming a Bead Weaving or Jewelry Making Designer
1. Developing a personal style
2. Valuing or pricing your work
3. Teaching others the technique or stitch
4. Promoting yourself and your work
5. Advocating for jewelry as “Art” and as “Design”
Types of Tools Needed To Get Started
Scissors Chain nose pliers (inside of jaws smooth) Flat Nose Pliers Side Cutters Flush Cutters Tweezers and Awl Assorted sizes of hard wire, cable wire, bead cord and bead, thread, elastic string Ruler Crimping pliers Hammers and mallets Steel block plate Doming block, anvil Sizing cones Hand held torch and fire-proof work surface Bead stoppers / clamps Color wheel Work Surface or Pad Bead board Round nose pliers Ring, Jump Ring, and bracelet mandrels Needles, wax Jeweler’s saw and blades Good lighting Comfortable seating
Finding jobs and pathways utilizing your skills as a jewelry designer…
There are actually many career pathways for people who have backgrounds in jewelry making and bead working. Besides the obvious pathways of making jewelry to sell, or teaching jewelry making, there are still many job and career opportunities for you.
Jewelry maker Illustrator Fashion designer Stylist Metalsmith Teacher Lapidary Gemologist Jewelry repair Wood worker Fiber artist Lampworking and glass blowing Physical and Occupational Therapist Counseling Custom designer Engraver Sales Merchandising Website design Data analyst Grants writer/reviewer Program director Video instructor or host Jewelry assessor Display and Packaging Influencer Writer Business Developer
I am writing an article about how jewelry designers began their careers/hobbies/avocations.
I would be interested in you sharing your stories.
Some of the questions I want to explore in my article:
1) How did you get started making jewelry? motivations, intentions, whether the start was very dramatic or mundane, whether you thought it was fate, destiny, luck, personal choice. Was there a particular point in time, or some kind of evolution?
2) What was your first moment of validation like? Not when you started making jewelry per se, but when you started telling people and feeling like an ‘artist’ or ‘designer’. It might have been a quiet admission, coming out to yourself as an artist. It might have been something public, like selling a piece, exhibiting it, some reaction from a client. It might have been some kind of break-through or finding newness or inspiration. It might have been a feeling of originality. A lot of people make jewelry, and can be very talented at it, but do not consider themselves as ‘artists’ or ‘designers’.
3) To what extent did beginning as a jewelry artist/designer feel like a response to society or family or local culture? Art doesn’t exist only because of feelings and emotions. There is a complex infrastructure within which the jewelry designer needs in order to survive. How would you describe this infrastructure within which you work and because of it you can survive. To what extent does it help you to enhance your work and vocation? To what extent does it impede you?
4) Were there special circumstances that were critical in your beginning and development as a jewelry artist/designer? Were there specific excitements, anxieties, challenges you faced?
5) For you, was there a beginning, and then a beginning again? Describe how difficult it was to begin again. How did it feel/seem to question or know whether you could create again?
6) What kinds of things have enabled you to keep going as a jewelry artist/designer? What contributed to your ability to survive your creative life?
I may or may not reference what you share in my final article. Unless you specifically tell me it’s OK, I will not use anyone’s real name in my article.
I appreciate you taking the time to share. I know a lot of jewelry designers and would-be jewelry designers can learn a lot from your experiences.
That’s it for now! There is a lot of creative expression all around the world right now. Hope you get to experience a lot of it, either first hand, or through social media online.
I could see through the panes in the door this tall man heading towards me. I waited anxiously, obviously her father, to greet me and let me in to wait for his daughter and our date. Excited. Nervous. Eager to see her and lead her to our transportation, some dinner, a movie, perhaps something else. I had prepared for this moment. Though one can never fully prepare. And I heard him turn the knob and begin to open the door.
He opened the door violently. Violently. As if it were very heavy. Or difficult to open, you know, when you add that extra pull or push. His face was stern. Angry. Full of frustration. He was winding up. Something I wasn’t prepared for, and hoped would never happen.
“Get out of here!” “Stay away from my daughter!”
And the door slammed in my face.
This had happened too many times before with other planned-for dates that never materialized. In junior high. In high school.
Arlene, that was her name, had accepted my invitation for a date, I thought, because she wanted to go out with me. I liked her. I thought she liked me. We shared high school classes. We talked often. I felt an attraction. But Arlene, like Anne, and Sue, and Mary, and Ginny before her, had one objective. To get back at her parents by bringing a Jewish boy into their lives.
That Jewish boy. Walking up the front walkway. Up the 3 stairs. Ringing the doorbell. Unsuspecting — the parents that is, not caring whether the boy suspected or not.
Slap. Bang. Slam.
The outcome was always the same.
I crawled back to my car. My mother the driver prepared to take us wherever we wanted to go. She sat there speechless. Quiet. Blinders on. “Let’s go back home,” I said quietly with rejection.
My parents never reacted. They never confronted. Never stood up for me in a very public way. “We live in a Christian society, and have to accept that fact.” That was the rule they lived by. That was the rule they wanted me to live by.
The rule was cruel. I rued it. I resented my parents for it. Yes, they loved me, but never enough to protect me.
Arlene, over the next three years, never spoke to me at school again.
We would all bury this encounter deep within our memories. Hoping it would be forgotten.
Outward Or Inward
Someone once told me, that at the point we are ready to enter the world of life and things, we have to make a choice. A choice between heading outward or inward. We might head for a job in the corporate world. Or do something very singular and private. We might surround ourselves with networks of friends. Or find ourself to be our best, perhaps only friend. We might organize group activities likes sports or shopping or travel with many friends, eager to make new friends and acquaintances, and feeling very comfortable at it. Or we might explore the world on our own, hike the Appalachian Trail, set up a small business, exercise at home, a bit uncomfortable, even fearful, should we have to interact with any human encountered.
In the summer after my 18th birthday, I turned very inward. Inward was an escape. An escape from a world that told me over and over again that, as a Jew, I was ugly. Less than. Dangerous. To be kept at a distance. Not worthy of reward. Not worthy of attention. Uncomfortable to be around. I was tired of trying to fit in. Exhausted competing and defending myself. Wary of getting hurt. Punished for something to which I did not know how to relate.
Left alone, leaving myself alone, I thought about becoming an artist, or at least to explore that side of me. In my freshman year in high school, I took an art class. I needed to see whether what I felt inside of me could actually be channeled into some creative expression. I was sure I had talent, but I never tested this. I knew my parents would disapprove. Because they disapproved.
I remember when one adult — Risa — whom I met through a community program in the next town befriended me. She saw a lot of talent in me. She asked to meet with my parents. She had many connections in the creative community in New York City. She asked their permission to take me to New York and introduce me. My parents said, “No.” That ended that.
Over the next several months, my parents would ask me over and over again, to reaffirm that I believed their decision was right. I succumbed. They told me I couldn’t make a living at art, and I shouldn’t try. I was insecure. I felt unsupported in every other aspect of life, and this would be another one. Art was not to be given a chance. I would not give it a chance. Not then.
Inward. More inward. Ever inward. There had to be something in me that I would discover by turning inward. I was a kid. A young adult. This was too tall a task at the time. To go inward. All that was there were a bunch of emotions. Not well managed. Fear. Anger. Doubt. Disappointment. Rejection. Uselessness. But, as I saw it, turning inward, I had no other choice.
That art class in high school, well, that didn’t help. My art teacher was obsessed with noses — Jewish noses, to be exact. Every figure I drew and every figure I sculpted was never acceptable to him. While I was creating these works of art, he kept asking me why my figures did not have Jewish noses. On the finished works of art, he down-graded me because my figures did not have Jewish noses.
I had a Jewish nose, at least at the time before I thought rhinoplasty would solve all my problems. By the way, it did not. I remember the doctor probing to make sure that the nose job was for cosmetic reasons, not deeply concerning psychological ones. I never let on. Nose job done. I was still Jewish. Same problems. It wasn’t the nose.
In any event, I did not want to draw or sculpt figures with Jewish noses. My Jewish nose was a testament to all my Jewish problems of fitting in, being accepted, getting along with others, finding respect, getting any kind of positive attention. I did not want any of these things reflected in the figures I drew or sculpted.
High school was like that. I suffered what we call micro-aggressions, again and again, from most of my teachers. My guidance counselor. The principal of the school. Other students. Their families. Businesses in town. School was not a safe space. Nor was the town I lived in. Neither was my family.
I never took another art class again. Even in college, I would try to visualize taking some studio art classes, but was always too intimidated, too fretful, too fearful, too angry to register for them.
Inward. I could never find a direction where I felt safe. With meaning. With purpose.
I thought Archaeology would be a good profession. I pictured myself working alone. Spending hours carefully brushing away dirt and sand, hoping to uncover that special object. Out somewhere in a location not close to any other. Inward meant alone. Control. Not in the public eye or sphere. An easy specifiable task with a beginning, middle and rewarding end which no one could refute.
My parents supported Archaeology, but I never really knew why. I guess it sounded important to them. It had to have been, because their plan was doctor or lawyer, perhaps pharmacist. And there was no resistance to Archaeology. But secretly, I wanted Architecture. But I feared it. It seemed so public and outward. It smacked of Art, and I couldn’t bring myself, I had no internal energy, to confront every thing that I imagined I would have to confront if I ever brought my very being close to Art. I couldn’t do it. A choice I’ve always regretted.
I made it through college. Took an Archaeology class, and hated it, and said Goodbye to Archaeology. A good choice, one I have never regretted.
Out into the real world and my own apartment. I was in my early 20’s. I wanted to decorate my apartment. This was the right time, a safer time, less threatening, I thought, to see if I had any artistic talent at all. I wanted to try doing some paintings. Would they have that special appeal, and sufficient appeal, that I would take the risk of hanging them up. Exposing my apartment to something I created. Where other people might see what I created. And react to them. Then react to me. Relate the artworks to me. Relate me to the artworks.
I didn’t think, I just did. I purchased some acrylic paints, some brushes, an easel, some sketch paper and a set of colored pencils and a soft drawing pencil. I set the easel up in front of my couch, to where I could still see the TV.
The inspiration for my very first painting was a deteriorating black power poster that had been stapled to a telephone pole. I sketched what I saw directly onto the canvas with a soft pencil. I painted within the lines. Some areas white, others black. An exact replica. But lacking. There was no anger in the painting. Or a sense of defeat, because I felt their cause was defeated. I was angry. My cause was defeated. Intellectually I was set on making the connection, but it wasn’t coming across.
I propped the painting up against the wall, next to the TV. I pondered. I fretted. I started letting some self-doubt rise within my core. This wasn’t working for me. Failure. I was a Jew and I couldn’t paint. Yes, I could draw. I could illustrate. I could copy. But not enough. Not enough to want to hang this on the wall. To let others see it. They’d reject the painting. They’d reject me. Because I was a Jew, talentless, ugly, awful, unacceptable. It was no good. I was no good.
There it sat. Propped up. For months. I had to see it every time I sat down on my couch. My uncomfortable couch.
I brought the painting back up to my easel. I brushed in, with thickly applied, yet narrow, thin strokes, up and down the sides of the areas which were black. In dark red. Mustard. Black. More texture. More dimension. More randomness. More power. I had added something suggestive of blood and vomit and sweat. My painting was saying something to the world. There was no longer a sense that movement, that effort to sway society toward something else, was defeated. It was a work in progress, and with a sensibility of blood, and vomit and sweat, and with dimension, texture and, yes, direction and purpose, there was a chance. A chance that things could change. For what that poster stood for. For what I wanted for myself.
Inward. But a different inward. Nothing I could articulate about or draw boundaries around it. But a different inward, nonetheless.
I painted the tension between country and city folks because I had to find my way both within the country and within the city. I painted my Aunt Gert, a frenetic, conniving individual, sitting serenely on a city park bench. I painted an abstract rendering of chaos behind two skew lines representing measurement. I painted a furious Greek god against the ravages of AIDS. A pregnant woman within a environment marred by human revenge. A woman’s gloved hand grasping binoculars, staring out in the distance at some romantic encounter, thinking about the fun they would have.
I had lots of paintings with which to decorate the walls of my apartment. Expressive. Appealing. Meaningful. Of which I was happy to share publicly.
And many years later, however, through a confluence of seemingly fateful events, I began making jewelry. Not yet designing, but making. Making jewelry had a special fascination for me, moreso than painting. More real, authentic, touchable, something residing on the body, connected to my inner soul. More expressive and meaningful — what I wanted those drawn and sculpted figures I had created in that high school class to have been. I found myself on a pathway towards finding my Rogue Elephant, inwards or outwards, not sure, and beading him.
CONQUERING THE CREATIVE MARKETPLACE: Between the Fickleness of Business and the Pursuit of Design
How dreams are made between the fickleness of business and the pursuit of jewelry design
This guidebook is a must-have for anyone serious about making money selling jewelry. I focus on straightforward, workable strategies for integrating business practices with the creative design process. These strategies make balancing your creative self with your productive self easier and more fluid.
Based both on the creation and development of my own jewelry design business, as well as teaching countless students over the past 35+ years about business and craft, I address what should be some of your key concerns and uncertainties. I help you plan your road map.
Whether you are a hobbyist or a self-supporting business, success as a jewelry designer involves many things to think about, know and do. I share with you the kinds of things it takes to start your own jewelry business, run it, anticipate risks and rewards, and lead it to a level of success you feel is right for you, including
· Marketing, Promoting, Branding: competitor analysis, developing message, establishing emotional connections to your products, social media marketing
· Selling: linking product to buyer among many venues, such as store, department store, online, trunk show, home show, trade show, sales reps and showrooms, catalogs, TV shopping, galleries, advertising, cold calling, making the pitch
· Resiliency: building business, professional and psychological resiliency
· Professional Responsibilities: preparing artist statement, portfolio, look book, resume, biographical sketch, profile, FAQ, self-care
SO YOU WANT TO BE A JEWELRY DESIGNER Merging Your Voice With Form
So You Want To Be A Jewelry Designer reinterprets how to apply techniques and modify art theories from the Jewelry Designer’s perspective. To go beyond craft, the jewelry designer needs to become literate in this discipline called Jewelry Design. Literacy means understanding how to answer the question: Why do some pieces of jewelry draw your attention, and others do not? How to develop the authentic, creative self, someone who is fluent, flexible and original. How to gain the necessary design skills and be able to apply them, whether the situation is familiar or not.
The Jewelry Journey Podcast “Building Jewelry That Works: Why Jewelry Design Is Like Architecture” Podcast, Part 1 Podcast, Part 2
PEARL KNOTTING…Warren’s Way Easy. Simple. No tools. Anyone Can Do!
I developed a nontraditional technique which does not use tools because I found tools get in the way of tying good and well-positioned knots. I decided to bring two cords through the bead to minimize any negative effects resulting from the pearl rotating around the cord. I only have you glue one knot in the piece. I use a simple overhand knot which is easily centered. I developed a rule for choosing the thickness of your bead cord. I lay out different steps for starting and ending a piece, based on how you want to attach the piece to your clasp assembly.
SO YOU WANT TO DO CRAFT SHOWS:16 Lessons I Learned Doing Craft Shows
In this book, I discuss 16 lessons I learned, Including How To (1) Find, Evaluate and Select Craft Shows Right for You, (2) Determine a Set of Realistic Goals, (3) Compute a Simple Break-Even Analysis, (4) Develop Your Applications and Apply in the Smartest Ways, (5) Understand How Much Inventory to Bring, (6) Set Up and Present Both Yourself and Your Wares, (7) Best Promote and Operate Your Craft Show Business before, during and after the show.
CONQUERING THE CREATIVE MARKETPLACE: Between the Fickleness of Business and the Pursuit of Design
How dreams are made between the fickleness of business and the pursuit of jewelry design
This guidebook is a must-have for anyone serious about making money selling jewelry. I focus on straightforward, workable strategies for integrating business practices with the creative design process. These strategies make balancing your creative self with your productive self easier and more fluid.
Based both on the creation and development of my own jewelry design business, as well as teaching countless students over the past 35+ years about business and craft, I address what should be some of your key concerns and uncertainties. I help you plan your road map.
Whether you are a hobbyist or a self-supporting business, success as a jewelry designer involves many things to think about, know and do. I share with you the kinds of things it takes to start your own jewelry business, run it, anticipate risks and rewards, and lead it to a level of success you feel is right for you, including
Marketing, Promoting, Branding: competitor analysis, developing message, establishing emotional connections to your products, social media marketing
Selling: linking product to buyer among many venues, such as store, department store, online, trunk show, home show, trade show, sales reps and showrooms, catalogs, TV shopping, galleries, advertising, cold calling, making the pitch
Resiliency: building business, professional and psychological resiliency
Professional Responsibilities: preparing artist statement, portfolio, look book, resume, biographical sketch, profile, FAQ, self-care
SO YOU WANT TO BE A JEWELRY DESIGNER Merging Your Voice With Form
So You Want To Be A Jewelry Designer reinterprets how to apply techniques and modify art theories from the Jewelry Designer’s perspective. To go beyond craft, the jewelry designer needs to become literate in this discipline called Jewelry Design. Literacy means understanding how to answer the question: Why do some pieces of jewelry draw your attention, and others do not? How to develop the authentic, creative self, someone who is fluent, flexible and original. How to gain the necessary design skills and be able to apply them, whether the situation is familiar or not.
The Jewelry Journey Podcast “Building Jewelry That Works: Why Jewelry Design Is Like Architecture” Podcast, Part 1 Podcast, Part 2
PEARL KNOTTING…Warren’s Way Easy. Simple. No tools. Anyone Can Do!
I developed a nontraditional technique which does not use tools because I found tools get in the way of tying good and well-positioned knots. I decided to bring two cords through the bead to minimize any negative effects resulting from the pearl rotating around the cord. I only have you glue one knot in the piece. I use a simple overhand knot which is easily centered. I developed a rule for choosing the thickness of your bead cord. I lay out different steps for starting and ending a piece, based on how you want to attach the piece to your clasp assembly.
SO YOU WANT TO DO CRAFT SHOWS:16 Lessons I Learned Doing Craft Shows
In this book, I discuss 16 lessons I learned, Including How To (1) Find, Evaluate and Select Craft Shows Right for You, (2) Determine a Set of Realistic Goals, (3) Compute a Simple Break-Even Analysis, (4) Develop Your Applications and Apply in the Smartest Ways, (5) Understand How Much Inventory to Bring, (6) Set Up and Present Both Yourself and Your Wares, (7) Best Promote and Operate Your Craft Show Business before, during and after the show.
Your Portfolio will most likely be the first impression a gallery, store, or collection gets of your work. You want to make it a positive and lasting one.
As with the Artist Statement, you do not want to follow anyone’s template when designing your Portfolio. This won’t serve you well. In reality, too many Portfolios look the same.
You will most likely want several versions, say 3 or 4, of your Portfolio in anticipate of different audiences and different ways you might use this. Specifically, you might want versions differentiated by one or more of these characteristics:
· Document without dates for jewelry pieces
· Document with dates for jewelry pieces
· Organized by theme
· Organized by audience
· Only those pieces representative of the brand you are trying to sell to a particular venue
· All your pieces
· Digital, including an online copy, an online copy with some graphical animations, an ebook, or a video online
NOTE: Your digital versions should be responsive. That means they are created in such a way that no matter what browser or what device (computer, tablet, phone, TV) they are viewed on, they will look good.
NOTE: I suggest sharing your digital copy with a URL link to where it would be posted online, say on your website. I suggest not sending a digital copy on a CD, disc or flash drive. I think the potential viewer might get annoyed having to set up their computer to ready it to read the digital copy off these formats.
· Print, including something you print yourself off an office printer, or something available from a bookseller as a print-on-demand.
· Presentation folder: basically a binder with plastic sheet holders, into which you can place sheets of printed images of your work and related text.
· PowerPoint slide show. Can easily be shared on a Tablet or Computer or Notebook Computer.
· With or without prices
Your Portfolio will include images, short text descriptions of each piece, its materials, techniques, and inspirations. You might include your Artist Statement, Testimonials, resume, copy of a significant press article about you. Of course, you would have all you contact information present.
A Look Book is a more focused portfolio. It includes a limited number of your best pieces and pieces representative of your brand. The images are the stars. There is limited text, most often in the form of captioning or a short relevant quote. The Look Book should feel cohesive and feel like it targets a very specific audience.
Look Book by Laura McCabe, coverLook Book by Laura McCabe, inside pages
In Print: These days it is easy and very inexpensive to develop a print-on-demand book for your Portfolio. You have many size options. It can be printed in high quality color. You can have a hard cover and/or a soft cover. You can go with a high quality paper if you want. A printed Portfolio is something that you can give away or sell. This format ups your legitimacy and credibility significantly. You only have to print one copy at a time. It is not difficult to keep the book updated.
· Front cover art, back cover art, and side binding art
· Back cover text
· Bar code
· ISBN number
· Library of Congress number
· Your content with images
Designing Your Portfolio
STEP 1:Decide who this is for.
Research and delineate who their audiences are and to which they have to be responsive. For example, a gallery and its collector patrons. Or a store and its core customer base.
Given who it is for, what format and content would they prefer? How do you want them to respond after they view your Portfolio; what action (of course in your interest) do you want them to take?
STEP 2:Select your content.
Ask yourself:
· How consistent and coherent is my content? Have I described each project from inspiration to aspiration to designed outcome to production and distribution? If it is important to present yourself as a brand, how well does your selected content support your brand image?
· Does my content clearly show and demonstrate how I think and problem solve when designing jewelry? Have I identified the design challenges for each project, and how I solved them? Some design challenges might be time constraints, selecting materials, selecting techniques, availability of technologies and tools, consistency with fashion and style expectations.
· Does my text support my images, and vice versa?
· You do not want to settle for a laundry list of projects. You want a set of projects and their related content with which you can create a story.
STEP 3:Organize your content.
Does your organization reaffirm your communication and presentation skills? Have you made clear your style, process and design philosophy? Do the substance, look and feel support an image of you as a professional jewelry designer? Does your organization tell a story, with a beginning, middle, and end, and some takeaways or learnings? Does it have a good narrative flow?
You might organize by theme or color or technique or silhouette. You might organize by price point. You might organize by the context in or types of outfits with which the jewelry might be worn.
NOTE: Cognitively, it is much easier for the reader to digest 3 or 4 pieces of information at a time. So, you might group projects into collections of 3 or 4 pieces. For each piece, you might present 3 or 4 critical pieces of information. And so forth.
STEP 4:Design the cover.
This can be all image, all text, or a mix of image and text. How well does the cover coordinate with your jewelry and brand image?
STEP 5: Evaluation.
Does anything seem too vague or incomplete? Are the words you use strong, active, sufficiently descriptive and powerful? Does the narrative flow make sense, or can it be improved?
Ask yourself and some of your designer friends whether your Portfolio, given your audience and how you want them to act in response, prove that you are the right fit.
Given your audience, what questions can you anticipate that you think they might ask you? Example, what was difficult? What might you do differently if doing the piece again? Why would someone want to buy this piece? What kinds of related designs have you considered?
Some Advice
· Layout doesn’t matter nearly as much as the content and how you present your work
· Include some photos which demonstrate the scale of your work and the wearability of your work
· For a gallery, retail venue, or agency, show the retail prices you believe your work should sell for. Don’t include dates. A buyer might wonder, given an earlier date, why the piece hadn’t sold. For other audiences, you can decide whether or not to include either prices and/or dates. You might want to show your evolution and history as a jewelry designer.
· Keep images separated from text. Don’t interrupt a series of images about a particular piece with text. The viewer will have a visual journey that is a very different experience than a reading journey.
· Keep only 1–2 images per page.
· Make it easy for the viewer to know what you are showing them: detail name of piece, materials, size, technique, price.
· You might include several SOLD pieces, clearly marked as sold.
· Back up all your digital files!
· Unless asked to, I would suggest not sending images on 35mm slides.
· A vertical (portrait), rather than a horizontal (landscape), format will work best. If one of your pieces looks best presented horizontally, take that horizontal image and embed it on a vertical formatted page.
· Include a TITLE PAGE after your COVER. Acts as a visual transition to the images of your pieces. The Title Page should have the artist’s name and some kind of tag line or catchy informative heading.
· 8 ½ x 11” is always a good size, but you do not have to limit yourself to these dimensions.
· A white background will work well, but you do not have to limit yourself to white. Be sure your font colors will easily be seen when printed on a color other than white.
· Where using text, always have a HEADING LINE, which usually is a larger font, than the text you use in paragraphs.
· Start each piece on its own page. Usually, consistency in page/text/image formats from piece to piece will be more pleasing to the reader.
· Ideally, showing 20–30 pieces is a good goal. Depending on how you intend to use the Portfolio and who your audience is, you might present more pieces, but not less than 20.
· Create a BACK PAGE or BACK COVER. This might include a photo of yourself, some biographical information, and contact information.
CONQUERING THE CREATIVE MARKETPLACE: Between the Fickleness of Business and the Pursuit of Design
This guidebook is a must-have for anyone serious about making money selling jewelry. I share with you the kinds of things it takes to start your own jewelry business, run it, anticipate risks and rewards, and lead it to a level of success you feel is right for you, including Getting Started, Financial Management, Product Development,Marketing, Selling, Resiliency, Professional Responsibilities.
SO YOU WANT TO BE A JEWELRY DESIGNER Merging Your Voice With Form
So You Want To Be A Jewelry Designer reinterprets how to apply techniques and modify art theories from the Jewelry Designer’s perspective. To go beyond craft, the jewelry designer needs to become literate in this discipline called Jewelry Design. Literacy means understanding how to answer the question: Why do some pieces of jewelry draw your attention, and others do not? How to develop the authentic, creative self, someone who is fluent, flexible and original. How to gain the necessary design skills and be able to apply them, whether the situation is familiar or not.
The Jewelry Journey Podcast “Building Jewelry That Works: Why Jewelry Design Is Like Architecture” Podcast, Part 1 Podcast, Part 2
PEARL KNOTTING…Warren’s Way Easy. Simple. No tools. Anyone Can Do!
I developed a nontraditional technique which does not use tools because I found tools get in the way of tying good and well-positioned knots. I decided to bring two cords through the bead to minimize any negative effects resulting from the pearl rotating around the cord. I only have you glue one knot in the piece. I use a simple overhand knot which is easily centered. I developed a rule for choosing the thickness of your bead cord. I lay out different steps for starting and ending a piece, based on how you want to attach the piece to your clasp assembly.
In this book, I discuss 16 lessons I learned, Including How To (1) Find, Evaluate and Select Craft Shows Right for You, (2) Determine a Set of Realistic Goals, (3) Compute a Simple Break-Even Analysis, (4) Develop Your Applications and Apply in the Smartest Ways, (5) Understand How Much Inventory to Bring, (6) Set Up and Present Both Yourself and Your Wares, (7) Best Promote and Operate Your Craft Show Business before, during and after the show.
Advertising includes all the means of communication for getting your product or service’s marketing message across to potential customers in your target market in order to attract attention, recognition, legitimacy and sales.
There are many types of advertisements. The most obvious are messages you see in print in newspapers and magazines. You also see ads on TV or on computer monitors, or hear them on the radio or streaming web broadcast. You pass by billboards, murals, banners, flags, and people twirling signs along the roadway. You may be reading articles written with subtle but intentional slants about a particular brand.
You may hear a jingle, perhaps staying in your mind as an ear-worm. Or read a slogan, perhaps repeating to yourself because it has some rhythm or metaphor that resonates with you.
Ads may involve some recognition of sponsorship for an event or program. They may be found on signs posted in stores, on lawns, on telephone poles, just about everywhere.
You might come across a social media post or pop-up or review or comment. Or several. Maybe hundreds.
You may have seen product placements in TV programs, movies or on YouTube.
The average person is exposed to over 5,000 advertisements every single day.
Ads communicate.
They influence and persuade.
They remind, reassure, explain, guide.
They focus on customer needs, benefits, problems solved or to be solved.
They may be generally targeted, narrowly targeted, or specially targeted at one individual.
Someone has to have paid for them in some say.
There is no-one-size-fits-all advertisement. In fact, you will probably be using several different kinds of advertising channels to get your message across. Go slow, however. Be deliberate.
Advertising can be expensive. So, similar to all the other business and promotion activities you do, you always want to build in an evaluative component. Given the cost of a particular ad, are you getting a sufficient return on investment? What is the unit cost of an ad — that is, what is the cost per person reached? Per person who responds to the ad? Per person, in response to the ad, actually purchases something?
If you have in any way begun to establish your business as a brand, all advertising becomes much easier and more effective.
Conversion Tunnel
In any of your campaigns, you most likely will want to plan for a series of ads. Collectively, the ads in the series build upon one another. They serve to gradually tighten up the message and narrow the target audience.
The first in the series will be very general, and the last in the series will be a very specific call to action.
Basically, you can’t hit your customer over the head with too much information, and you cannot expect your customer to respond to your ad the first time they see it. Hence, you develop a strategic series.
· Awareness: Your first ad: Gain customer awareness of you and your product.
· Interest: Second ad: Guide the customer into recognizing how you and your product meets one of their major needs.
· Desire: Third ad: Entice the customer to want to buy your product.
· Action: Fourth ad: Turn your potential customer into an actual customer.
Writing Promotional Copy
Your promotional copy should be simple, obvious and direct. It should focus on the benefits to the customer, not the features of your product or service per se. It should validate how your customer thinks about their needs, desires, problems, and potential solutions. Don’t give the customer a laundry list of things. Be sure to anticipate the customer’s level of awareness.
Jewelry purchase needs include,
· Fill out a wardrobe
· Match a dress
· Something for a special occasion
· Feel good about themselves
· Make a power statement
· Compete with someone
· Signal that you are a bona fide member of a group or culture
· A memento
· A reward for a job well done
· Make yourself more attractive
· Connect with a mate
· Wants an heirloom
· Remember a special event, moment, date, occasion
Visualize, as you are creating your promotional copy, that you are talking to a specific customer. Tell them what they need the most, and how you are the right person, business, event to fulfill that need. In your ad, validate their thinking / feelings / understandings / desires.
Next, reinforce what you just wrote. There is an important need. Yes, the customer is thinking about this need. Yes, the possible solution is an idea shared by both you and the customer. Yes, you are there to meet this need when, where, and how the customer needs you to meet this need. Again, you want highlights, not an exhaustive listing.
Print vs. Online Advertising
Online Advertising Channels
SEO Optimization
Content Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Affiliate Marketing
Radio and Web Streaming
Influencer Marketing
Email Marketing
Your own website
SEO Optimization
SEO stands for search engine optimization. All the search engines, like Google and Bing, send out robots constantly to search the internet for information that can be categorized — identified, ranked and rated. Your online presence may extend to Facebook, Instagram, a personal website, Etsy, a blog post, a comment on a post, and just about everywhere in cyberspace. But you are nothing — not known, not seen, not heard, not acknowledged — if you don’t get indexed by the various search engines.
You want to be well-indexed. This means you need things wherever you are present online which are indexable. These include things like,
· Keywords and keyword phrases
· Captions for images
· Comments on posts
· When you/your business is tagged or hash-tagged
· Links back to your website
· Listings of your business in directories
· Reviews of your business and your products
This increases the chances that when someone searches for products like you carry or businesses like your own, you are more likely to be found.
71% of online jewelry sales begin with a Google search!
Selecting Keywords and Keyword Phrases. Do some research here. You can plug in a keyword into a search engine search bar. Typically, a drop down menu will appear that shows other words that come up when people look for that keyword. These become keyword phrases. Keyword phrases (2–3 words) will have better visibility outcomes for you than single keywords. That is because as you add words to a phrase, you begin to narrow down the relevant possible sites that might get flagged and presented.
Check the key words your competitor is using. Look at their websites and what words/phrases them emphasize. Plug their name into the search engine search bar, and see what comes up.
Content Marketing
Here you write an article or review or response to an online post, or create images and videos, and place these somewhere online. This might be a social media site, a site specializing in hosting articles, your own website, or a blog. You include somewhere (top, within, or at the end) links back to you and your website or your products listed online.
With this content, you are trying to educate the reader in some way. Your content in some way is providing a solution or answer to a problem or question the reader might have.
The better connection between you and the reader, the more likely the reader is to create a link to your content. More links to your content means greater SEO optimization.
Another type of content is when you are presenting one of your products or a type of jewelry product, and you do a soft-sell. You explain how to wear it, how it was made, interesting facts about it, how it fits with current fashions, or other interesting characteristic about it. Don’t list a price. List a link to where the reader can find more information about it.
As with most things, this is not a one-shot, one-time approach. You want to post content on a regular basis, probably daily.
Social Media Marketing
You can leverage the power of various social media sites, like Facebook, Tik Tok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram.
These sites have
· Pages you can set up a profile on (for your personal page as well as separately for your business page)
· Postings you can place.
· Postings you can respond to.
· Events you can participate in or create.
· Groups you can join or set up.
· Targeted Ad programs you can take advantage of (You might be able to target your audience by location, language, education, work, age, gender, birthday, relationship status, likes and interest).
In some cases, you can tack on a short commercial message or signature to the end of your posts. In other cases, commercial messages may be forbidden, but you can create a signature that generates enough interest and curiosity so that someone might link back to your site.
Some social media sites limit how many places or times you can use the same ad-copy-post. That limit might be 3 places or times. If you want to do more than that, you will have to modify your ad-copy-posts.
A lot of the advertising tactics you use here are free. It just takes a lot of time.
Other tactics will cost you. Targeted ad programs let you send a message to some demographically limited group which you define. You set a budget. You either pay for the number of click-throughs (someone has clicked a link in your ad), or the number of impressions (someone has visited the page where your ad appears). Some jargon: PPC for pay for click or PPI for pay for impression. You may also want to measure the click-through rate (5% is great, below 2% is not great).
You can use both your personal page as well as your business page to tell your story and get your products seen. Soft-pedalling the message will work better than any hard sell. For example, creating seven consecutive posts following you as you create a piece from inspiration to finish — of course with images — will get you better responses than creating what looks like a magazine ad for a specific piece of jewelry. A friend posted an image of her wearing a piece of jewelry she just made with her hair all messed up. She gave the image a simple caption: Bad Hair Day — What Do You Think? And sold 43 pieces in response. People feel more connected when they feel you are sharing your life with them.
Images are important. Short videos are the best.
If someone responds to any of your posts. Thank them. Always repeat their first name in your response.
You can use your personal and business profile pages to have conversations with your customers.
Think about reposting your customers’ pictures wearing your jewelry.
Or, create a branded hashtag (or two or three) and always list this at the bottom of all your posts. Think of something like: #warrensgems, or, #jewelrybywarren, or, #warrendesigns.
You want to post at least one thing every day. Most likely this is physically impossible time-wise to do this for every social media site. So, create a presence on as many social media sites as possible. Then concentrate on two of them with your daily posts.
Keep your ads short, and the messages well targeted to your intended audience.
If paying for ads, the social media site should also have some statistical information you can access to gauge how well your ads are doing.
Affiliate Marketing
Here you invite another party — referred to as third party — to drive sales for your business. This might be an influencer, a thought leader, a celebrity, another shop which sells accessories or clothing. You rely partly on the reputation and networking of some other business to advertise and advocate for your jewelry.
You might work out a co-marketing arrangement and split costs. You might pay them a commission or a percent of the sale.
Radio and Web Broadcast Streaming
Radio has always been an effective channel for advertising jewelry. It is a lot less expensive than TV, and has a loyal audience. It is very targeted at a local audience. Today, however, you might use the internet to place ads similar to the ones you might have used for radio.
Webcasts offer you an on-demand and more targeted connection to your intended audience. They allow you to reach a broader and more internet-savvy audience.
Influencer Marketing
Rely on one of the many influencers in fashion and jewelry to promote your stuff. Most established influencers have media kits to share with you so you can get an idea of the kinds of things they promote and who their target audience is.
Or, make yourself into an influencer. Create an online audience on one or more social media sites which follows you and pays attention to your recommendations. The key to becoming an influencer is to establish a clear brand identify for yourself. Create a branded hashtag. Encourage your customers to use your hashtag when sharing images, videos and advice from your own feed.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing methods in existence. It keeps your business in front of your customers on a regular basis.
The key is to grow your email list. So you need to make your emails special in some way. Your emails might include what is called gated content. They might include special discounts. They might present advanced notice for sales or other special events. They might include content that your customers may want to save, such as explanations about what certain gemstones mean or how to clean sterling silver jewelry. You might give first access to a new product.
Be sure you have secured permissions from each contact on your email list. You can create simple forms that can be posted online on your website or blog, and simple print forms to hand out to people.
Emails are effective, but you do not want to overdo them. People get annoyed if they get too many emails in their box.
I suggest using an email service like MAILCHIMP. Not only do they make creating and sending emails easier, they offer some tracking and analytic services, as well.
Your Own Website
Build a site that supports your business. Be sure it is optimized for search engine indexing. Decide whether your website serves primarily as a billboard — a place to find you. Or decide whether you want to include a shopping cart system and make your website an ecommerce site for your jewelry.
You can have your own domain name, or be part of a larger web-hosting company which may or may not allow you to use your own domain name.
Having your own website gives you credibility. It allows people to more easily find you and contact you. It gives you another channel for selling your jewelry.
Be sure to add an analytics package to your site. Some will be available for free. You always want to build in evaluative components with whatever you do.
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FOOTNOTES
Arias, Aaron. Six Ways to Advertise Your Online Boutique. 12/7/21.
Designers need to get the approval of and payment from their clients. That means the client has to recognize and share the choices the designer made when creating the piece of jewelry. It all comes down to two aspects of marketing: persuasion and influence. Marketing is about creating persuasive arguments which can influence a person’s beliefs, attitudes, motivations, intentions and behaviors. Influence comes with knowing what the best outcome that the marketer should seek. Persuasion includes the tools you use to get there. Persuasion can take many forms. The marketer’s success depends on a handful of persuasive factors. Marketing strategies follow one or more of eight universal principles of persuasion. Information within any successful persuasive argument is best presented in a certain order.
Influence and Persuasion
Marketing is about creating persuasive arguments which can influence a person’s beliefs, attitudes, motivations, intentions and behaviors. The marketer wants to be able to persuade the client to focus their attention on the jewelry product line, to approach it, touch it, try it on, buy it, exhibit it, share it with others, then, moreover, to further persuade these others (thus making the marketing message contagious) to want to buy it. Influence comes with knowing what the best outcome that the marketer should seek. Persuasion includes the tools you use to get there.
When we are trying to persuade someone, we might be trying to get them to change their mind about something. We might want them to change the weight, ranking or priority they give one thing over another. We might want them to see the interrelationship among two or more otherwise unrelated things. We might want them to re-evaluate the cost and reward calculus they use when deciding to make a purchase.
When trust is present, influence increases and persuasion ends in more positive outcomes.
Persuasion can take many forms. It can be…
· Coercive, done aggressively through direct commands, threats, fear mongering, shaming.
· Informational, spread as biased in some way towards a particular position or idea.
· Leveraging a belief by appeals to logic and reasoning.
· Leveraging a belief by appeals to feelings and emotions.
· Establishing a high level of credibility or character.
A marketer or jewelry designer is not born as persuasive. It is something to be learned, practiced, applied and applied again. The strength of the marketer’s influence centers on a handful of persuasive factors, such as:
1. Commonalities: People like people like themselves.
2. Logic and Rationality: When you see data, it tells a recognizable story.
3. The Target Audience’s Needs, Wants, Values and Desires: It is important to pay attention and hone in on these.
4. Attractiveness: Attractive people are more persuasive.
5. Confidence / Charisma: Confident /Charismatic people are more persuasive.
6. Preparation: Learning, Practicing and Preparing are how you place yourself in a powerful, persuasive position.
Persuasion and Marketing
Persuasion in marketing involves the ability not just to influence people’s actions, but their attitude as well.
Persuasion is a matter of establishing mutual trust or shared understandings. You develop that sense of trust in your client. That means, they believe that you will deliver on any and all your promises, and that your product will solve their problems, needs and/or desires. The marketer presents some type of evidence which the client must interpret as relevant and valid for themselves, whatever that might mean.
Marketing campaigns are various strategies attempting to influence, direct or change client behaviors by eliciting reactions. Marketing campaigns rely on imagery and word associations tied to emotional responses.
To be persuasive, the marketing message must have value and relevance for your target client. She or he might see a reward or a minimization of costs and agree to change their behavior. She or he might be trying to shield themselves from anything which refutes their sense of self and self-esteem. She or he might derive pleasure when they can align their self-concept with that of the emotional message associated with the product. She or he might find that they can meet their needs for understanding and control by finding out more information about your product.
In response to any marketing campaign, the client can do one of three things:
1. Accept
2. Non-commit or remain indifferent
3. Reject
And it is important to think of persuasion as a continual process. You might be able to persuade someone to purchase your product once, but will they purchase your product again?
The Designer As Marketer Should Have A Detailed Familiarity With Everything Involved With Consumer Behavior
What causes clients to purchase certain products and brands, and reject others? It is important to begin to document client shopping behaviors, motivations and their psychological and sociological underpinnings.
The marketer will want to get a handle on the target audience in terms of
· Psychological Factors: How assumptions, perceptions, understandings, values and desires affect responses to the marketing message.
· Personal Factors: How demographic characteristics, such as age, culture, profession, gender play roles in forming responses to the marketing message.
· Social Factors: How socio-cultural groups, such as income, geographic residence, education level, affect shopping behaviors and responses to the marketing message.
How Can Marketing Affect Client Shopping Behaviors? The Eight Universal Principles of Persuasion
Persuasion works when the client feels that, by purchasing your product, you and your product have made a positive contribution to their life. There are different ways or principles marketers follow for establishing that sense of positivity.
There are eight universal principles of persuasion the marketer can resort to in order to influence client shopping behaviors. These are,
1.Reciprocity
2.Commitment
3.Consensus
4.Authority
5.Affinity
6.Scarcity
7.Visibility of Consequences
8.Information Exposure
Reciprocity
If you do this for me, I’ll do this for you.
People tend to feel the need to return the favor. You offer or remove incentives and play with client’s natural tendency to be grateful and want to do something for you in return. You might offer them discounts or a free sample. You might put them in a frequent shopper rewards program. You might do a special customization. You might offer them a gift. You might offer something special to first time buyers or to clients who register for your email list.
Commitment
I am a loyal customer.
Once someone is engaged with something, they are more likely to stick to it and commit. They become loyal to the designer, the designer’s business and the designer’s brand. The marketer would do those things which enhance customer loyalty. You might have a special showing or trunk show. You might include them on your email list. You might make them aware a way ahead of time of some deals or opportunities.
Consensus
If it’s OK with them, it’s OK with me.
Sometimes this is referred to as the herd response. If the client sees others doing it, they are more likely to do it as well. The marketer here would demonstrate the popularity of their products with other clients and client groups.
Authority
If such-and-such expert tells me it’s OK, I’ll think it’s OK.
Clients are more likely to listen to an expert they trust, than anyone else. The marketer would have the marketing message put forth by trusted experts who could be seen as authority figures. These authority figures are seen as having already established proof of their knowledges and beliefs. Authority might be actual or implied. Thus, their advice is recognized as trustworthy. You might seek endorsements from well-known figures. You might create an ad where the expert is delivering the message. You might rely on influencers online to spread your marketing message.
Affinity
She bought it, and she’s a lot like me, so I’ll buy it as well.
The client is more willing to follow through on the marketing message and goal if she or he knows someone who is similar to themselves who bought the product. Similarly might be by gender or age or economic class. Similarly might be people who belong to the same church or shop at the same store or attend the same events. The marketer would emphasize shared interests. The marketer would present reasons why conformity is the best choice here.
Scarcity
I better get it right away, if I’m to get it at all.
People tend to want what they think they might not be able to have. When something is scarce, clients tend to assign it more value. Defining the context becomes very important for this principle of persuasion. It might be something that is exclusive. It might be in limited supply. It might have some sense of rarity. It might be subtle clues provided in how the products are displayed to make it seem like you are running out of stock (such as, a very large container with a few items left in the bottom). The product might not be available from any other competitor. The product might be temporarily on sale or only available for a limited amount of time. The marketer might emphasize that this product does what no other product can do. The marketer might emphasize that if the client doesn’t act quickly, the likelihood that they could ever purchase the product will be very low.
Visibility of Consequences
I know what will happen when I purchase and use this product.
The client is more likely to purchase a product if they can anticipate the consequences of their choice. Every purchase is a risk. Will it work? Will it hold up? Will it be appropriate? Will I get the reactions I want? Here the marketer would highlight evidence which makes the consequences obvious, and then more evidence which minimizes the likelihood that any risk and uncertainty might occur. The marketer might emphasize the positive results, and minimize any negative ones. They might point to past successes of this or similar products. They might present the pros and cons and comparative imaging of future outcomes. They might present the pros and cons by comparing antecedents. They might explain that the client will have emotion regrets of they don’t make the purchase.
Information Exposure
I was told it was important now to act.
Clients often have to make choices when they have more limited information upon which to rely. How and when the client is exposed to certain information, prompts, triggers and cues may affect their choice whether to buy a product or not. The client might be distracted. There might be time / timing / seasonal considerations where they pay more attention, say to holiday merchandise during Christmas season, than at other times of the year. Some information may have increased salience, depending on the context. For example, what the jeweler says when standing behind the jewelry counter may have more salience than what that same person says about the same product when randomly meeting that person on the street.
The marketer might present or withhold information based on timing considerations. The message might be different presented during the day from presented during the evening. It might be different in the Spring from the Fall. The marketer might try to connect positive emotional information the client already holds to the product the marketer is trying to sell. This could be a positive memory such as a song or image or experience. The marketer might stress how even with this limited information the client can still anticipate a level of success. The marketer might emphasize negative information about a competitor or competitor’s products. The marketer might use popular phrases and words that have a particular emotional or cognitive association with the target audience.
The Persuasive Argument
Whatever principle of persuasion the designer follows, the presentation of information in their persuasive argument follows a pattern. That is, informational content, when presented in a certain order, makes for a more persuasive argument. This order is presented in the table below.
A Few Cautions
When marketing your products, you have a professional responsibility not to cross the line between influence and manipulation. You might be successful in manipulation in the short term, but this will probably spell disaster for you mid- and long-term. People are willing to be influenced and persuaded, but resent getting manipulated. And if manipulated, they usually find out.
Don’t present yourself falsely in any way. Don’t claim to be an expert when you are not, for example.
Last, don’t over emphasis economic factors — price, discounts, and the like — in your marketing messages. Rely more on one or more of the universal principles of persuasion where you play towards emotions, perceptions and desires.
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FOOTNOTES
Abelson, Herbert I. Persuasion: How Opinions and Attitudes are Changed. Spring Publishing, 1965.
Clements, Jon. The Power Of Influence and Persuasion in Business.
Your competitive advantage (one or more) is what influences someone to buy something from you rather than one of your competitors. Do you make something of higher quality? Or less cost? Or especially noteworthy. Or use rare materials? What is it that sets you apart, or as Heather Bunker puts it, what is your secret sauce?
Competitive advantage is your ability to outperform your competition. It is you way to design, create, produce, distribute, market and/or sell products and services better than anyone else. It is something that cannot be easily replicated, or, if it is at some point, you can build back better.
There are all types of competitive advantages. Businesses might emphasize one, or several. Some examples of competitive advantages that jewelry design businesses might claim:
1. Authenticity and honesty
2. Rarity
3. Individuality, tailor-made, custom
4. Material quality
5. Technical prowess
6. Access, Location, Visibility
7. Timeliness
8. Special occasions (ready for those …weddings, etc.)
9. Financing, payment plans
10. Innovation
11. Extensive knowledge about materials and techniques
12. Environmentally friendly, sustainable
13. Socio-culturally friendly, sensitive
14. Prominence / reputation of designer
15. Mass quantity production
16. Service Orientation: repairs, custom work, style consultation
17. Pricing, discounts
18. Concurrently maintaining both quality and prices
19. Use of technology
20. Unusual designs
21. Brand loyalty
22. Ownership of copyright
23. Where differences from your competitors, such as different product mix or material use or better craftsmanship, might make you appear superior to them
Why Is Having A Competitive Advantage Important To You?
Competitive advantage is what makes your products and services more desirable to customers than any of your rivals. When you customers recognize these competitive advantages, you are more likely to make sales and more likely to be profitable. You are more likely to grow your business and enjoy greater customer loyalty.
The jewelry design business is very saturated worldwide. On Etsy on any day, there are over 6,000,000 (that’s 6 million) pieces of jewelry for sale. Don’t see this as a defeat. See this as a challenge. Your competitive advantage will help get you that edge, and make you more memorable.
Your competitive advantage is something that you can repeat or allude to in your business name, how you name your jewelry and jewelry lines, your tag line, your elevator pitch, your domain name, your marketing and branding strategies. It might influence how you design your products, distribute them, and put boundaries around your target market.
What Are The Components Underlying Any Competitive Advantage?
You use your competitive advantage as a means of communication. As such, to establish any competitive advantage, you must know 3 things:
1.VALUE PROPOSITION
2.TARGET MARKET
3.COMPETITION
1. Value Proposition
You must clearly identify what attributes of your products or services make them desirable to your customers. What is the value to them? Why does this value motivate them sufficiently to touch, wear, buy and/or collect your jewelry? What things might further get them to show off and talk about your jewelry to their friends, acquaintances and relatives?
2. Target Market
Your advantages will not be seen and understood equally by all people. And you don’t really care about all people. You care specifically about your more narrow market audience or market niche focus. What does your advantage look like to them? Why will it motivate them? What evidence are you using to know this?
You might take the time to ask some of your customers why they buy from you and not your competition?
3. Competition
Your competitive advantage is always in reference to some other business or designer. It is comparative. It differentiates you. It influences a choice of you over others. You competition might be traditional. It might be non-traditional. It might be emerging.
How does your competition look like from your customer’s viewpoint?
How Do You Determine Your Competitive Advantage(s)?
First, think about your strengths.
Second, think about the strengths and weaknesses of your major competitors. These competitors might be in your same geographic location, or they may be online.
Search on Google and Etsy for jewelry makers. How do they present themselves? What qualities do they emphasize? What competitive advantages do they claim? Based on what evidence? How do they link their idea of competitive advantage to their assessments of customer needs, wants and desires?
Last, list what things you are better at than your competitors.
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FOOTNOTES
Bunker, Heather. What Is Your Handmade Business’s Secret Sauce — Or Differentiator? 5/6/2020.
MARKETING / PROMOTION / POSITIONING: Social Media Marketing For The Jewelry Designer
Social Media Marketing For Very Small Businesses … That Works!
Today’s successful jewelry-designers and other very small business entrepreneurs maintain a very visible presence on the internet. You must have an online way for people to find you and your products. There are many options. These options vary in terms of who controls the site, the costs to be there and update as necessary, and what limitations are imposed on the site or because of how the site operates.
They may have a website that functions simply as a billboard or business card. They may list merchandise on their site, with prices, and information about how to order it. They may present their jewelry on Ebay or other auction houses, or on sites like Etsy or Supadupa. They may let someone else promote their jewelry on-line in exchange for a commission or royalty. They may post images or videos on sites like Instagram and TikTok. They may have a business page on Facebook, Google or Bing. Or they may have a fully functioning shopping cart system on their own dot.com.
Whatever their level of involvement online, they must put into place active and deliberate marketing strategies for creating visibility for their site and their products, and for maintaining and enhancing that visibility over time. It’s all about recruiting and retaining eyeballs, whatever it takes. Take advantage of social medias’ powers for networking.
Digital marketing is not one thing; it is a set of different strategies and pathways for connecting with and influencing people. While initially a lot of what you do will be hit or miss and trial and error, you eventually want to get very organized, developing internet marketing goals, objectives and encapsulating them into a coherent plan. You want to be represented broadly across many platforms, but concentrate your energies narrowly on perhaps 2 platforms only.
You want your website and any web presence to be:
· Optimized for search engines and directories
· Attractive
· Navigate-able and User friendly
· Enticing to first time visitors as well as repeat customers
· As broadly visible and findable as possible
· Broadly bookmarked and linked to
Successful marketing of any kind means:
· Getting Seen
· Getting Known
· Getting Your Competitive Advantage Recognized
· Making the Sale
Make them stop. Make them stay.
To achieve these marketing goals online requires putting into effect various internet marketing strategies, some technical, others not.
Towards this end, I provide insights about the following:
1. Conducting an initial marketing audit of your online presence
2. Optimizing your front door and landing pages
3. Choosing and placing key words and hashtags
4. Optimizing your social profiles
5. Site usability and navigation concerns
6. Intensive site placement and linkages
7. Inexpensive things you can do to get noticed
8. Social media posts marketing
9. On-line advertising
10.Generating an email list and conducting email campaigns
11.Creating visual images and video content
12.Garner online reviews
13.Getting customer feedback
14.Competitor surveillance
15.Establishing baseline site-activity indicators
16.Have a FAQ page which summarizes all your policies and procedures
17.Have a testimonials page
18.Create relationships with online influencers to market your jewelry
You want to choose the right tools and use them in the right way. If the wrong tools, you can waste a lot of time and money and find yourself serving the wrong customers.
1. Conducting An Initial Marketing Audit of Your Online Presence
1. Assessing current marketing materials, brochures, business cards, stationery, listings, keywords, descriptions, click through ad campaigns, email lists, efforts and activities,
2. Assessing current web-site strengths and weaknesses, from a marketing standpoint, that is, how you are in sync with target customer needs, wants, desires and shopping behaviors, and
3. Setting reasonable and attainable online marketing goals and objectives.
Do all your printed materials reference your website and/or your email address?
Is this information prominent and readily accessible, or is it buried?
Does it convey a sense of pride in your online efforts, or shame and embarrassment?
Do you routinely mention your website to your customers or clients?
Do all your emails end with a business signature, that includes your business name, address, phone, fax, and email?
Does your website clearly and concisely express what your business is all about, and how to contact you — particularly in terms of the information on the front page, any other landing pages, near the top, that would appear in the first screen that your customer would see?
Is your navigation bar/system/strategy easy to manipulate by any customer?
Is each link labeled clearly and strategically?
Does the set of all your links clearly and easily get your customer to each section of your website?
Have you minimized the number of links it takes to get to any one of your product pages?
Is your front page indexable by search engine robots?
Is there sufficient information on this page to index?
Is the organization of keywords on your front page presented to your advantage, or disadvantage, given search engine indexing schemes?
Does your front page load relatively quickly?
Have you kept your graphics on your front page to a reasonable amount so they don’t slow down page loading or obscure any keyword information?
Does your website have the kinds of things that will encourage customers to remain on your site more than a few seconds?
Is it relatively easy to keep your website up-to-date, such as changing information, uploading new images, creating new layouts?
Is your website responsive — that is, will load and be easily readable on any browser and any device, no matter screen size or preset layout parameters?
Now, GOOGLE YOURSELF. This way you have a starting point for how visible you are on the internet.
2. Optimizing Your Front Door and Landing Pages
Your front door page (or any landing page) is your most strategic website asset. It should be optimized in form and content so that it anticipates the indexing and ranking schemes (algorithms) of the major search engines. While these schemes get altered on a regular basis, there are some pointers which will be generally helpful all the time.
1. Don’t use frames. Try to use DIV instead of TABLE html commands. Try to use a CSS style sheet along with HTML5 (or most recent version) coding. Make your webpage responsive, so that it will load up perfectly no matter the browser or screen size of the device.
2. Don’t use a visually wonderful, but indexability awful splash page. You should settle for a slightly less visually appealing page, as a tradeoff for making it more indexable and rank-able.
3. You are selling things. The average person will have the average computer system or cell phone setup. That means, you can’t use the most up-to-date, exciting website technology available. Your pages won’t load up for everyone, some may take too long to load up, and some may even lock up your device. Save the best-of-current-tech for your personal home page.
4. If you are using a template-based host’s WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) website design editor, be sure the final result will be responsive. Also be sure your website will be easy to update and maintain.
5. TITLE: Your title should be about 9 words (not more, not less), with your most important key word first. Don’t repeat the same word twice in a row; separate it by another word. Use lower case letters for your key words.
For example: “beads, jewelry findings, beading supplies — Land of Odds” is better than “Land of Odds — beads, jewelry findings, beading supplies”. [Most important keyword is first.]
For example: “beads, jewelry findings, beading supplies” is better than “Beads, beading supplies, jewelry findings.” [Here bead is capitalized once, and appears as what would be judged as twice in a row.]
6. FIRST TEXT LINE: Your first line of the page (and this will appear after the BODY tag if you are hand coding), should be about 10 words, again repeating your major keywords, not putting the same word twice next to each other, and listing the words from most to least important. Never start the page with a TABLE or Graphic file. Start with words.
7. LINK AND PAGE NAMES: Be strategic in the names you give your active links and webpages. Use your keywords in these LINK DESCRIPTIONS (link-text) and URL ADDRESSES (url-text).
For example: Call your gemstone necklace page “gemstonenecklace.htm” rather than something like “AC402.htm”.
In creating the link descriptions on your page, write something like “Gemstone Necklaces” rather than “Products Page”.
8. PARAGRAPHS: Have about 3 paragraphs of text on your front-door page. Each paragraph might have 3 or so sentences.
Your major keywords should appear in this pattern:
– At the top of paragraph #1
– In the middle of paragraph #2
– Not at all in paragraph #3
If you don’t like the look of all those words on your front door page, you can always put the paragraphs at the bottom of your webpage.
9. IMAGES: For all your images, use the ALT tag. For the ALT tag, use your keywords to describe the image. By using the ALT tag, when someone places the cursor over the image, a yellow box will appear with the ALT tag words appearing. These are also very indexable.
Make your original images into .jpg or .tif or .gif files. The original images should be a minimum of 500 x 500 pixels and 72–96 dpi resolution. Within your webpage, you can adjust image sizes. Preference for using the percent (%) adjustment rather than setting particular pixel width and height sizes.
10.HEADINGS: Set up 2 or 3 heading on your front door page, and use your keywords in the heading text. Sometimes what you code as a heading is the first thing indexed, and sometimes the only thing indexed. On subsequent pages, use more headings, if these make sense for the page.
11.COMMENT TAGS: Put in at least one COMMENT tag using your keywords. In the HTML code, comments start with <! — and end with → . COMMENT tags cannot be seen on your page. They are hidden within the code. There is a 1000 character limit to COMMENT tags. Words in COMMENT tags are very indexable.
12.DOMAIN NAME: If you haven’t already selected a website domain name, you might try to create one using your most important keyword in the URL-text. There are many sites online that sell domain names. Compare their prices which can be all over the place. Compare the amount of space they offer you, any email limits, and whether you can add a shopping cart. For example, “beadsatlandofodds.com” would do far better than “landofodds.com” in search engine indexing.
You can also envision having more than one front-door or landing page for your website. You might have different kinds of customers, and may want to set up an entrance very tailored to each of them. From the search engine’s standpoint, they do not like to see virtually the same page used more than once. You will lose points here if this is your approach. But you can set up differently designed pages as front entrances, and based on how you get your site listed, you can use any of these as the link-reference point.
3. Choosing and Placing Key Words and Hash Tags
Generate a keyword list of 1000 characters. You can use a word processing program like WORD, which has a character counter. In this list, you would include variations on upper case and lower case spellings, as well as common misspellings.
Think about the words and phrases your customers might use to find you, to understand what you do as a jewelry designer, and how your jewelry will satisfy their needs and desires.
To research keywords, you can go to various search engines, plug in the major keywords you’re interested in, and check out what keywords other sites which pop up in the search engines search, have used. On each site’s front door page, review what words they see to use on this page. Also, you can use the browser’s VIEW button to bring up the Source Code image of a page, and check out what keywords other people have listed in their META TAGS (which are otherwise hidden from view). You can use Google’s ad words program to generate keyword lists.
Hash Tags
A hashtag is a word or keyword phrase preceded by a hash symbol (#). It’s used within a post on social media to help those who may be interested in your topic to be able to find it when they search for a keyword or particular hashtag. It helps to draw attention to your posts and encourage interaction.
If you are using a phrase, do not put spaces between the words.
You want to use hashtags that you think people will search on.
You don’t want to be too general and you don’t want to be too obscure. You can check out what influencers in your area of interest are using on their posts.
You should, if possible, include a branded hashtag, such as #yourname, #yourbusinessname, or #nameoflineofjewelry .
Different social media platforms have different expectations for the number of hashtags they view as optimal. Use that number, not more or less, if you can.
Facebook (1 to 2 at most)
LinkedIn (1 to 3 at most; place them within the body of your post, rather than at the end)
Instagram (10 or 11 is best, but you can use up to 30 hashtags)
Tik Tok (100 characters maximum)
Pinterest (1 or 2 at most)
I would suggest using hashtags in all your posts.
4. Optimizing Your Social Profiles
In various social media sites, directories and other places you list your business, you want to have a great, professional social profile about yourself. Think about…
Username: This is the identity of your business in one simple or compound word. If you have the opportunity to verify your name within any site, do so. This builds trust.
Biography: You want a short introduction to yourself and your business. [Refer to your Getting Started Story in an earlier chapter.] List important information about yourself and your business. Tell the reader how you and your design work solved problems for them. Establish some indicators of credibility and legitimacy. Make your business sound approachable.
Photos: Get a good headshot of yourself and another shot of your working at making jewelry. Get another image that defines your business, such as store front, store displays, or a group of employees serving customers. Last take some appealing images of some of the pieces you make and which represent your brand or style. Include photos showing someone wearing your pieces. Photos should be in .jpg format, 500×500 pixels minimum size, and 300dpi (for print) and 72–96dpi (for screen).
Headline or Tag Line: Usually you have an opportunity to add a short line of text after your name or the name of your business. 7–9 words is good. This line should suggest your keywords and hashtag words. This line should be catchy. Test out a few examples and see which ones get the best reactions.
Content: A lot of informative content on your profiles is always a plus. Research what other jewelry designers are posting on blogs and on Facebook for ideas.
When you update your social profile, let all your followers know. This is a good way to keep them engaged with your business.
5. Site Usability and Navigation Concerns
How usable is your website to:
– New customers
– Returning customers
Websites need very clear Navigation systems.
Websites need strategies to keep them from becoming boring. After someone visits a site a few times, and it only takes a few times, the sites become stale and boring to them.
Websites need all your contact information — address, phone, fax, email — right on your first page. Or at least a very visible link/button to CONTACT INFORMATION. Don’t make your customers hunt for contact information.
Navigation System
There is a series of research about the Magical Number 7 plus or minus 3. When people are confronted with 7 or more choices, they psychologically need to re-categorize them, such as into one group of 3 and another group of 4, in order to deal with all this information. Otherwise they get paralyzed and stumped. People can easily handle 4 pieces (7 minus 3) of information, but start to get uncomfortable with 7 pieces, and can also be forced to deal with 10 separate pieces (7 plus 3) information, but that’s pushing it.
From a website design standpoint, you do not want to make someone have to travel more than 4 links to get to the product information they want. As the required number of links to click on gets greater than 4 clicks, your customers will begin to get paralyzed, and not make the next click. Wherever you find you have more than 4 clicks to get to a product, you can re-categorize, so you have fewer links to navigate.
For example, suppose it takes 5 clicks to get from your section on Jewelry to your section on Amethyst Beaded Necklaces:
PRODUCTS — click 1 to — JEWELRY — click 2 to — NECKLACES — click 3 to — BEADED NECKLACES — click 4 to — GEMSTONE BEADED NECKLACES — click 5 to — AMETHYST BEADED NECKLACES.
You might reduce the number of clicks the customer has to travel by reducing the number of webpages they have to traverse:
PRODUCTS/JEWELRY — click 1 to — NECKLACES/BEADED NECKLACES — click 2 to — GEMSTONE BEADED NECKLACES/AMETHYST.
On the PRODUCTS page, you list all your types of products. On your NECKLACES page, you list all your types of necklaces. On your GEMSTONE BEADED NECKLACES page, you list all the types of gemstones.
Avoiding Boredom
Websites get stale fast. Unfortunately, to keep things re-designed and very fresh takes a lot of time and effort. So, you want to come up with some simple, less time-consuming tricks that you can do to keep your website appearing fresh.
One trick is to put something on the page that moves. Build in some kind of “movement” on your front-door page. You can use a .gif animation file, or create mouse-overs and other simple fun things which move using Javascripts.
Another trick is to create a sense of Interactivity — forms, polls, message boards, chat lines, email sign-up, email link, contests, games, ezines, links/resources page listing other sites of interest.
A third trick is to run specials and/or have a What’s New section.
Contact Information
Preferably on the first page, include your address, email, phone, fax, and other important identifying contact information.
If you have a separate CONTACT PAGE, be sure that the link/button to the page is prominently displayed at the top of your front door page.
If you use a CONTACT FORM, I think it is also helpful to list your email address on this same page, as well. If concerned about robots collecting email addresses off websites to use in spam, you can write you email address like this: warren (@) landofodds (dot) com .
Many of your regular customers or clients will begin to use your website like a rolodex entry. Make it easy for them.
Caution: many anti-spam programs reject emails that begin with Info, Contact, Shop and other very generic terms.
6. Intensive Site Placement and Linkages
It is important that you get listed with all the major search engines, directories and social media sites, as well as specialty directories associated with your specific business.
To make this process go as quickly as possible, it is important to have all your information together in one place, where you can cut and paste the information into the online forms, as requested.
Besides having about 12–20 of your most important keywords or keyword phrases handy, also have about 12 hashtags ready. You will also want to create 25-word, 50-word, 100-word and 200-word descriptions of your site, heavy on keywords, but no side-by-side keyword repetitions. One more thing: have a 7 to 9-word part description / part tag line for your business. Make this catchy.
Do NOT pay for or use any of the multiple submission services. Take the time to submit your site to each search engine and directory, one at a time. A site submitted through a multiple submission service can get assigned a low ranking by the search engines.
You can use Yahoo or Google or Bing to find specialized directories. Get listed in as many as these as possible.
Many search engines and some directories now charge you for a listing, either as a flat fee, or as a click-through rate. You may not be able to afford all the opportunities, but you might want to follow through on the major ones.
Some search engines will let you buy key words. When someone searches on a keyword, a link to your site will appear. If someone clicks through on that link, you’re charged a per click fee. Google ad words and Facebook ads work this way.
Also, link up with web-rings, web-malls, and other affinity arrangements online. You might create your own affinity arrangement with others businesses you know.
There are many sites which list local resources. Get listed. Facebook’s Graph Search allows you to search for businesses both by location as well as friend’s recommendations. It shows you which businesses your friends have frequented. Yelp and Trip Advisor are critical for local businesses.
You can do a search on the URL web-address of your competitors, as well as on their names, to see where they are listed.
Some of your suppliers may list you on their websites. Some of your customers or clients may list you on their websites.
To get a high ranking, search engines do three things:
a) CATEGORIZE your site in relation to certain keywords, by indexing words on your site,
b) RATE your link-popularity, by checking how often someone clicks on a link to your site, and
c) RANK the link-relevancy of your site based on how long the person stays on your site, once they’ve clicked on their way there.
So, the more places that maintain a link to your website, the more likely someone is to click through to it. The better designed your website is, the more likely someone is to hang around awhile. The better indexed you are (called SEO optimization), the more visible you are in any search.
7. Inexpensive Things You Can Do To Get Noticed
There are many low-cost or free things you can do to increase your visibility online. Some suggestions:
a. Get reciprocal links — “I’ll list you if you list me.” There are your friends and personal associates; other similar businesses; affinity sites such as shopping malls, specialized directories, awards programs.
b. Create educational and information content. Share it with other sites in exchange for a link back to your site. In fact, there are Free Content sites online that act as a repository and exchange for free content articles. Submit your articles there.
c. Respond to people’s questions in forums, newsgroups, message boards, reviews and the like. Start each of your responses by repeating their first name. Include a business signature with a link back to your site at the end of your response.
d. Write articles for online ezines, newsgroups, forums, specialized portals and the like.
e. Join affinity groups.
f. Include a lot of explanatory and how-to information next to each of your products.
g. Run a contest.
h. Set up a group and form your own community within one or more of the social media sites.
i. Set up a business page on one or more of the social media sites, as well as the major search engines such as Google and Bing.
j. Create your own online newsletter.
k. Post images on all the social media sites.
l. Post short videos to You Tube, as well as other social media sites, particularly Instagram and Tik Tok. Videos will generate more interest than images.
m. Create a blog. Keep it active. You can also use micro-blogging posts to lesson your workload. Micro blog posts are short links to other websites or posts online you find of interest. Here you make a statement about why the reader should pay attention to this link. Write the link. Suggest that the reader come back to your blog and offer some feedback.
n. Create an email campaign for your email-opt-in customers.
o. Send birthday wishes to your followers; include an image of your jewelry; tag the follower.
p. Create both business and personal profile pages on various social media sites.
q. Run promotions and discount offers.
r. Bundle 2 or more pieces of jewelry and run a promotion.
s. Shine a spotlight on your employees.
t. Show off your space.
u. Run a contest.
v. Re-share content from other sites.
w. Recognize loyalty; feature your super customers in blog posts or posts on social media channels; give them first access to new products; create a brand loyalty program.
x. Invite customers to react to and test out new ideas before you implement them.
y. Reward referrals.
z. On social media, position yourself as a subject matter expert.
aa. Use social media to find cross-promotional partners.
One thing I do NOT recommend is to send mass e-mailings where your target audience has not previously opted in to receive emails from you. Mass e-mailings generate a lot of positive responses, but they generate a lot of negative responses, as well, from people overwhelmed with spam.
There will always be new tools every year to take advantage of. Sharing text, image, video and audio will always remain in style.
However, you decide to attract attention and increase your visibility, you will pay with either your time or your money. At first, you will probably take a shot-gun approach — that is, trying everything. But in the interests of time and money, you will want to narrow your efforts.
8. Social Media Posts Marketing
Post everywhere. React to other people’s posts. Answer queries. Suggest how-to solutions. Include an image with your post, 1–3 hashtags, and a link back to your website or online presence.
Create a presence on all social media sites, and post to them all. However, select 2 of them to concentrate your marketing efforts.
Things which improve responses to posts: touches of humor, quality of information, your excitement, something weird, something the evokes an emotional response, a feeling of connection.
Keep your posts short. Yes, you are marketing yourself and your designs, but more subtly. You do not want to sound salesy.
Engage your viewer. For example, ask “Which of these 3 is your favorite?” or “A and B are perfect together — Agree?”.
If at all possible, end each post with either a CALL TO ACTION or a TAKE-AWAY / LESSONS LEARNED.
Share photos of events. Share photos of what’s new?
If someone responds to your post, respond back to them. At a minimum, thank them for their post. Remember to cite their first names in your responses.
Pay attention to the number of responses you get, and whether you get more or fewer responses depending on the site, the day of the week or the time of the day.
Plan to make posts on a regular basis. You might plan to use the same posts on different media sites. If using the same post for placement on the same social media site, say in several interest groups on that site, try to limit the same post to, in this example, 3 interest groups.
Instagram has been especially useful, productive and responsive to jewelry maker posts. With Instagram, I suggest planning to post at least once every single day. Remember that those captions are important and you want to make them clever or very personal in some way.
Quality will matter more than quantity.
9. Online Advertising
There are many opportunities for online advertising. For each opportunity, you want to carefully think through the costs and benefits. How many impressions (# of eyeballs) will your ad achieve? For each impression, how many of those people will follow through (click-thru rate) and link to your site? What words, keywords, terms seem to influence people to click-thru more often? What is a reasonable cost per click through?
The first types of advertising you should do are the basic, cheap and obvious. Include your website address and/or email address on your stationery, business cards, business checks, brochures, other handouts.
You add some marketing highlights, address and email as your “signature” for all the emails you send.
You might send out a Press release to your local papers and magazines, or to regional and national publications pertinent to your business. You will want to approach them with a good angle, that you think would be of interest to their readers.
Many search engines, like Google, directories and social media sites sell keywords. You pay a certain amount of money for each click thru to your site. You can set a limit to how much you want to spend each month. It could be as low as a few dollars, or as high as you want to go. When one of their visitors does a search on the particular keyword (or keyword phrase), your name appears with the search results, with a clickable link back to your site. You pay when someone clicks on that link and visits your site. Using a keyword phrase of 2 or more words, rather than a single word keyword will narrow your target audience, but at the same time increase the chances one of these people will click through.
Instead of using keywords, you might also be able to target customers by demographic data, such as age, gender, and geographic location.
You might purchase a banner ad to place on other people’s sites.
You can also purchase ad space or sponsorship listings on various online ezines, magazine and websites.
You can place classified ads. Many search engines have classified sections. There are many specialized websites hosting classified ads.
In a similar way, you can post several of your products on Ebay or other auction sites. Marketing on Ebay is very similar to taking out an ad, but probably more effective.
Note: Social media sites and search engines tend to favor paid posts and ads. These sites probably have applications which help you narrow your target audience, thus maximizing your costs-per-click-thru.
10. Generating An Email List and Conducting Email Campaigns
It is critical to generate an email list of customers. You want them to very formally and visibly opt-in to the list. You can generate sign-up sheets, online forms, and the like towards this end.
You can segment your email list into smaller, targeted groups.
A monthly contact is reasonable.
Caution: many anti-spam programs reject emails that begin with Info, Contact, Shop and other very generic terms.
11. Creating Visual Images and Video Content
Images: Images get better responses than text. Make your original images into .jpg or .tif or .gif files. The original images should be a minimum of 500 x 500 pixels and 72–96 dpi resolution. Within your webpage, you can adjust image sizes. Preference for using the percent (%) adjustment rather than setting particular pixel width and height sizes.
Show images of your finished pieces. Of you at working making things. Of someone wearing your pieces. Of the inspirations for your pieces. Of works in progress. Of close-up details of your pieces.
Encourage customers to share images of them wearing your jewelry.
Create a slide show of a series of images to tell a story.
Infographics generate lots of discussion.
Write captions for all your images. Don’t just tell them what the image is. Tell them how and why what is photographed will be important to them. Try to use humor and irony. Make the captions authentic. Bring out your personality in the captions. For example: “The bracelet you always wanted to go with that blue dress,” or, “One of a kind necklace which will no longer be available after the 1st.”
More examples:
“My color-picking frustrations paid off this time!”
“Need to finish this ASAP. Didn’t even take the time to brush my hair today!”
“So tribal … What do you think?”
“I think I’ve made a necklace to match the picture I hung in my room. Didn’t even think about that. Or did I?”
“I made all this jewelry today, and now have to leave it to do some vacuuming. I can’t stop looking at it though.”
Videos: Videos are the best way to get attention on the internet. They catch the eye. They can convey emotions. They make demonstrations easy to follow.
There are many formats. The safest one to use is MP4. When you upload to a site, like You Tube, the sites convert your video to their format. Consider purchasing video editing software. For the most part, keep your videos short — either the 1–3 minute version or the 10–20 minute version.
Each social media platform has its own rules and pros and cons for hosting videos. Check out: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, You Tube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tik Tok, Snapchat. Most require a screen resolution of 1920 x1080 pixels, and a widescreen (16:9) format. You would set up a page or channel on each site. It’s a good idea to create a short introduction video explaining what your page or channel is all about.
You Tube: Host all your videos. On You Tube, you can also live stream video. This is useful to make spot announcements, present new products, and the like. Videos available to everyone. People most often look for “how-to”, “demonstrations”, “product reviews.”
Facebook: Videos can only be seen by your friends and followers. People on this site want videos that are entertaining or inspirational. 85% of viewers watch the videos with the sound off. Video size recommended is 1280×720 pixels.
LinkedIn: People like career-oriented videos as well as corporate and business promotions and interviews and conference broadcasts.
Twitter: Videos are very, very short. Usually off-the-cuff remarks shared by cell phone.
Instagram: Videos are square by default. Optimal size: 1080 x 1350 pixels. You want your videos to tell a story, with a beginning, middle, climax, denouement and conclusion.
Pinterest: Similar to You Tube.
Tik Tok: The standard video length is 3 minutes, though you can go up to 10 minutes. Sound is essential. The orientation is vertical, so you want the size of your video to be 1080 x 1920 pixels.
Pointers:
· Keep the viewer in mind. Aim to meet their needs, whether seeking to solve problems, learn something, be entertained, or be inspired.
· In the first 5–10 seconds, be sure the video content is an attention-grabber with a solid hook. Get your name out and your purpose out. Viewership drops dramatically after 10 seconds.
· Make the video mobile-friendly. Make any text large enough to be seen on a small cell phone screen. Make sure there is good contrast between text and the background it is imposed on.
· Always add either a CALL TO ACTION or a TAKE AWAY / LESSONS LEARNED before the video ends.
· Add captions to your video throughout because many people view videos with the sound off.
· Embed all your posted videos on your own website as well.
12. Garner Online Reviews
Online reviews will always be important.
I widely post links throughout my online pages and emails to the various review sites like Google, Yelp, Facebook and Travel Advisor. Periodically I send out an email to my customer list asking them to post a review.
Respond to every single post, positive or negative. Always begin your responses by writing the reviewer’s first name. Real and authentic responses, rather than canned responses, keep the conversation going and allow you to glean more valuable insights from your customers.
Occasionally the reviews might be negative. I know it’s difficult not to take negative comments personally, but it’s only personal if you allow them to be. Still, even negative comments are opportunities for dialog. Respond to them in a sensitive, understanding way, perhaps suggesting something like, (a) a future discount or reward, or, (b) being grateful for calling something to your attention — that this will change your behavior in the future. Thank them for their review.
One contributing factor to a higher search engine ranking is the number of positive reviews for your site.
Make sure you have set up business profiles on Google and Bing so that your customers can see the reviews posted on either search engine site.
13. Getting Customer Feedback
It is important to get customer feedback about your website, your marketing efforts and your products/product mix. Regularly connecting with customers will help you retain them. It will help you keep their information updated. Asking for feedback will get them more invested in your business. It will help you uncover any customer issues which need to be resolved.
When people email or call you, you might ask some evaluative questions of them, while you have their attention. Also ask them how they found you originally.
You can set up a free poll or survey online. There are many websites that offer free online polls and surveys.
Ask your customers for leads.
14. Competitor Surveillance
The internet provides myriad opportunities for you to view your competitors’ marketing strategies. You can analyze specific competitors you know of in your immediate environment. Or you can focus on 3–5 competitors that are prominent in your business.
Think about what they are doing and their performance relative to what you are doing and your performance.
In the search engine locator box, you can:
– Type a keyword, and look more closely at the first 3–5 competitors whose websites pop up
– Type in the name of a specific competitor, and see which websites mention their name
– Type in the URL address of a specific competitor and see which websites maintain active links to them, or have reviews of them
You can:
– Analyze their website and product line
– Determine what keywords are important to them
– Find out who lists them and links to them
– Check their visibility and rankings
What is their business model?
What assumptions do they make about the market for their products?
Where do they think their customers are?
How do they think their customers will find them?
Where do they advertise?
What is their product mix?
What kinds of pricing strategies have they put into action?
Listening tools (from LinkedIn Share): Some online sites which help you monitor competitors, blogs, comments, videos, tips and the like:
Bing: Internet Search
Commentful: Monitors comments on blog postings
BlogPulse: Identifies daily blog post patterns
Complete Blog: Monitors how people use the internet
Cotweet: Monitors discussions about businesses and their brands on Twitter and Facebook
Digg: Members vote on which web content should be shared
Feedky: Scans and indexes video websites
FourWhere: Finds tips and comments on Yelp, Foursquare and Gowalla.
Google News: Highlights news items about businesses and brands
HootSuite: Customized analytics relative to various social media sites
Klout: Rates and ranks brands based on engagement levels in various social media sites
OpenBook: Searches real-time posts in Facebook
SamePoint: Enables you to connect your business to various social media sites
Sideline: Topic search application for Yahoo
Technorati: measures particular position and influence of any website
Trackur: Lets you watch your reputation, mentions, and promotional campaigns
Trendpedia: Monitors social media sites and what people are saying about you and your brand
UserrnameCheck: Find where your username has been registered
Website Grader: Measures the marketing effectiveness of your website
Yahoo Pipes: Helps you aggregate information from all over the internet
It is important to track the activity on your website, and to try to gauge whether this activity level is affected by any marketing effort you might launch.
There should be a statistics package that comes with your website. You can also link to Google Analytics or other available statistical packages online.
From this information, you should gather the following stats:
· # of unique visitors
· Average visitors per day
· Average length on site per vistor
· # of sales per week
· Average doll per sale
· Percent of unique visitors resulting in actual orders
· # of abandoned shopping carts
NOTE: You can easily find out similar information for all your competitors using many apps available online for this purpose.
16. Have a FAQ page which summarizes all your policies and procedures
Create one page, called a FAQ page, which summarizes those policies and procedures relevant to your customer base. Anticipate the kinds of questions your customers will ask you, and provide the answers here.
So, at the least, your customers will ask about:
· Ordering procedures
· Turnaround times
· Shipping time and costs
· Customization
· What to do about lost or damaged merchandise
· Repairs
· Returns and exchanges
· Backorders
· Copyrights, Trademarks
· Disclaimers
· Lead content or other information about materials
· Gift certificates
· Discounts
· Minimum orders
· Exchanging links
· International orders
· Security of site for online payments
· Other payment methods
· Sales taxes
· Wholesale orders or arrangements
17. Have a testimonials page (also can include pages for Press Articles, List of Retailers Who Sell Your Jewelry, Upcoming Events)
Periodically, gather testimonials from your customers who have purchased your product. Set up a webpage listing all these testimonials.
18. Create relationships with online influencers to market your jewelry
There are many people online that function as influencers. Many will market and promote your products in exchange for something. Sometimes this is money. Sometimes this is product. Sometimes this is some other reciprocal arrangement. [See chapter on INFLUENCERS for more details.]
They might share images of your jewelry. They might wear it. They will create a buzz for it.
Start by creating a relationship with an influencer who is relevant to your product line. Follow them everywhere. Interact with their posts. Show that you are interested in what they have to say.
Then pitch a collaboration.
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FOOTNOTES
Amin, Arshad. 16 Social Media Optimization Tips You Need To Know, medium.com, 1/18/22.
As a marketer, you will be developing and organizing a series of communication strategies and tactics. You will also be combining things into coherent marketing campaigns with defined goals and methods for collecting evidence from which you can evaluate success. This article discusses the importance of spreading word-of-mouth and some ideas towards this end. Also discussed are some additional marketing ideas workable for the designer.
Marketing Strategies
As a marketer, you will be developing and organizing a series of communication strategies and tactics. You will also be combining things into coherent marketing campaigns with defined goals and methods for collecting evidence from which you can evaluate success.
Your strategies will hone in on the 4 P’s: product, price, promotion and place.
· Product: serves a need not being met or provides a novel experience
· Price: set a fair price both to you as well as your customer
· Promotion: your marketing message and how you get the word out
· Place: where your product is available and your distribution arrangements
Whatever marketing strategies and tactics you resort to, remember this.
· You need to be different and refreshing.
· You need to do something your target audience(s) will talk about.
· You need to make your product approachable, accessible, and memorable.
· You need to enhance the emotional connection among client, product and designer.
· You need to be patient and focused.
· You need to be creative.
· You need to be authentic.
· You need to be market-driven, not product-driven. [It might be a great product, but there needs to be a market for it.]
Some marketing tasks you will direct and take charge of yourself. With some, you will work with an agency and turn over responsibility to them. You might rely on online influencers and bloggers. Some things will be in print. Some will be images and/or posts online. Some will be messages to your email followers. You might coordinate your marketing with similar or complimentary products of other businesses (called co-marketing). You might donate items to organizations which will publicize your donations. You will have business cards, brochures, jewelry name cards, guest books, packaging, letterhead stationery, websites, domain names. You might be able to get articles written about you or invitations to participate in podcasts.
You will find that, with jewelry, you will need to use a multi-method approach to your marketing. Any one particular approach won’t be sufficient to reach enough potential clients and influence enough buying decisions to keep you in business.
The Importance of Word of Mouth: The Biggest Source of New Customers
If your client has had a positive experience with you and your products, it is highly likely they will share this with someone else. This is called word of mouth. Word of mouth might result from a conversation. It might result from an online or print review. It might be generated from comments to an online post. It might be a mention in an article. Word of mouth usually accounts for 3 of every 4 jewelry sales in the United States.
Things which drive word of mouth:
· Thanking your customer
· Asking your customer if they get compliments on your pieces they wear, and if so, can they mention that in a review or post online
· Ask your customers to talk about you, such as mentioning you on Facebook.
· Offer a discount to a customer who refers another to you.
· Image and Video posts on Instagram and other social media sites, and concurrently responding to all LIKES and COMMENTS. Note: Always repeating the person’s first name in our response comments.
· Join social media sites groups, and comment on various posts.
· Hold a customer appreciation event.
· Do some co-marketing with similar businesses in town.
· Follow-up on sales to make sure customers are happy.
· Bring a friend campaign.
· Give out business cards.
· Show something special to clients which I know they will want to tell others about.
· In-store giveaways.
· Be involved in the community.
· Supporting nonprofit fund-raising events, usually by offering a gift certificate or a showy piece of jewelry
· Create how-to handouts and/or post videos online (or other educational content) you can give to customers for free.
Some Marketing Ideas
1. Educate with your content
2. Personalize your marketing messages
3. Be data driven
4. Keep your messages and content updated
5. Be visible in your community and online
6. Manage active and frequent email campaigns, along with implementing strategies to expand your email list
7. Rely on credible influencers
8. Concentrate on one, perhaps two, social networks only, and give it your all
9. Create opt-in offers
10. End all your marketing and promotional messages with a call to action
11. Be a strategic user of key works in webpage designs and promotions
12. Teach
13. Do repairs
14. Survey, listen and learn
15. Sponsor a charitable event
16. Donate products or services to a charity event
17. Co-market with other small businesses
18. Do presentations or webinars to enable your audience to get to know, like and trust you
19. Provide free consultations or demonstrations
20. Write articles
21. Build a website optimized for search
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FOOTNOTES
Coursera. The 4 Ps of Marketing: What They Are and How to Use Them. 8/10/2022.
Translating thoughts, feelings, emotions into color, form, structure. Can never get enough of this. But where does all this creativity come from?
I remember in college — way back when — I took a physiological psychiatry class with a professor name Ina Samuels. Dr. Samuels was one of my mentors. She discussed what was new-thinking then, how the brain is this self-actualizing entity. Thoughts reside less in certain defined areas of the brain, and are more a collection of organized chemical-electrical pathways traversing the brain, all around and within it. Memories are more defined pathways that get traversed a lot.
The brain has the ability to invent, and re-invent itself. It is self-stimulative. The brain pleasures itself with creative thoughts over and over and over again each day. Sexy. Sensual. The act of creating is almost masturbatory. The brain discovers, organizes, reinforces and remembers.
Of course, I did not wax so eloquently on my final exam in Dr. Samuel’s class. She gave me a C, and I was embarrassed to have performed so poorly. I got carried away with creatively building upon my understanding of neural pathways, synapses, and thinking — too much so, that my thoughts were way off course. I carried the discussion to mechanics of three way connections and power boosters and revolving tracks — all ideas never before expressed in texts or classes or on final exams.
Yes, I let my creativity carry the day. While it didn’t earn me a good grade at the time, it sure was fun. To be wrapped up in my insights, imaginations, and good ole fashioned, solid in an organizing way, brain sex.
One of my clients, Jan, had taken a few of my classes, was very excited about beading and jewelry making. She began selling her pieces to the people she worked with. She was a traveling salesperson for a health care company, and met lots of people on her travels. And everyone wanted her pieces.
Week after week, Jan would return to the shop and buy a few hundred dollars of beads. and week after week, she enthusiastically reported that she was selling her pieces right and left. After several months, she remarked that she needed to take my Pricing class. As she continued to talk and elaborate about her pricing strategies, she remarked that she typically added $15.00 to the cost of her materials, and that sometimes, her prices were probably lower than the cost of her materials.
Hmmmm….
So if she paid $55.00 for the materials in her piece, she might price it at $70–75.00. A great deal for her customer. But not so great for Jan. I told her to raise her prices.
My niece’s 6-year old daughter told me the other day, “Warren, I wish I could get a job where I can make bracelets all day!” How cute! She definitely would have a lot of fun making jewelry. She most certainly could make money doing it. But I don’t think she was old enough to appreciate the amount of work, strategic thinking, and marketing and good business sense involved, in order to succeed.
But maybe she did. Jewelry making tapes into our creative souls, our artistic essence. The fact that you can make money at it, moreover, serves to heighten the experience.
Two girls — one 12 and one 13 years old — were determined to make money that summer. They had had some experience setting up a lemonade stand last year, but they were ready to make the big bucks. So they turned to jewelry. They created an attractive shelter along the side of the road, and posted clever signs — REFRESHING SPARKLES — to catch drivers going and coming in either direction. Instead of lemonade, however, their customers found cool earrings, and breezy necklaces, and yummy bracelets. And the two girls found success!
While there are many business challenges for jewelry designers, — young and old, alike — you can most assuredly answer the question — Can You Really Make Money Selling Jewelry? — with a resounding YES! It takes some planning. Some Moxie. Some start-up money. Some marketing. And some luck. But it can be done.
For people who sell their jewelry, their art is both a business as well as a source of creativity and self-expression. To be successful, they need to bring an understanding of business fundamentals to the business, and they need to find enthusiasm for business in similar ways to how they found their passion for jewelry. There will be ups and downs, as the economy changes or fashions and styles change. They will wear multiple hats — designer, distributor, manufacturer, retailer — and not always be sure which hat to wear when. They will need to understand marketing, pricing and selling. They will need to have a feel for reading and understanding people.
Successful jewelry design businesses today share several traits. They have a focus on what they do as a business model. They are comfortable working long stretches in a production mode — even though this can be very boring for the artist. They have some comfort level with both bricks and clicks. I don’t think you can have a successful business today without both a real physical presence somewhere and some on-line visibility as well.
Jewelry businesses today also must learn to quickly adapt to competition. This is not only competition from other local, regional or national jewelry designers, but from overseas, as well. Remember in the 1970s, when Asian manufacturers started selling low cost Native American jewelry, they almost put the Native American jewelry makers out of business. Today Chinese lampwork companies are wiping out the opportunities for low-end, simple, basic lampwork glass beads made in America. And adapt is the key word here. It may mean having to specialize in higher quality items, or relying on materials or designs unique to your locale. It may mean having to provide more educational and informational materials with your products to give them a competitive advantage.
Your market today may be international. if you have images of your pieces on-line, then someone in Taiwan or France can view posted images just as easily as someone in Nashville or San Francisco. They may buy your designs. They may copy your designs. Reality, what a concept here.
Successful jewelry designers keep their work fresh and relevant. They build in evaluative components into their business. They do a lot of product and ideas research. They experiment with concepts and other markets. They acutely know their competition. They strive to create a brand identify for their pieces. Branding not only best secures your client to you as a designer, but makes it that much difficult for other jewelry makers to copy your work and present it as their own.
Warren Feld Jewelry 