Monthly Archives: August 2015

Marketing and Production Artisan Jewelry: The Connection

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Probably most jewelry artists dream of making one-of-a-kind pieces and think of production work as drudgery. However, production doesn’t have to be boring. It can be lively, interesting and innovative. However, like all your work, it requires marketing. If fact, your chance of success is reduced if you make a production line without considering the market you’re targeting. You need to know what your product is, how it’s different from others on the market, who your primary buyers are, where they buy jewelry like yours, how much they’ll pay, and how to get them to notice your product.

Jewelry artists usually gravitate to a certain selection of materials and techniques that they use to create their work. They may have a particular design voice, theme, or story to tell. For many, this is their starting point. They hope to find an audience to buy the work. Others start from the marketing end: Is there a particular audience or market opportunity they can fit their work to? However, audience and market are almost inextricably intertwined. It is really impossible to consider one without the other: product decisions affect marketing decisions; marketing decisions influence the product. Most jewelry artists go back and forth between the two as they create their lines.

For example, suppose your work is based on something you’re passionate about: old toys, animals, architecture. If your product has a strong identity, it will likely draw people who have the same interests. As a result, that affects how and where you sell your product.

Besides traditional gallery or art show venues, how might your jewelry fit a special interest market opportunity outside normal craft jewelry outlets? Could you sell it at cat, dog or horse shows, or zoos; science fiction, fantasy, steampunk, or graphic novel conventions; history re-enactment or historical society meetings; to hand-weaving, quilting or knitting groups?

For beginners, your business plan will almost assuredly include a strict budget. However, production means making a lot of pieces up front, without confirmed buyers. Not only must you invest time in the making, but the costs of the materials. If your business plan is to reach a large market, you may choose to work in silver, bronze, copper or bi-metals rather than gold in order to stay within your budget. If you want to go into lifestyle catalogs, you may even end up producing your line in pewter or plated components.

On the other hand, if your brand idea is based on reaching a high-end clientele with a taste for gold, you may not want to start with less expensive materials, but may be unable to afford producing the amount of work a wholesale show or large retailer demands in gold. In that case, you may opt to create a small line gold and target your marketing efforts to small, high-end boutiques. It may mean growing your business more slowly, but it will enable you to stay on brand.

It’s common for jewelry artists to start their businesses while working in another field and/or raising a family. Time is an issue. Making a production line enables them to fulfill their dream in the limited time available: before or after work, on the weekends, after the kids have gone to bed–even while watching TV! (Well-known jewelry artist, Ramona Solberg, used to twist and form her signature fibula pins while watching her favorite programs.) To get started quickly, these artists may find a potential market and decide what they can make, within their limited means, time and skills, to fit that market. That may be beading, beading and wire work, assembly from manufactured components.

Market, product. Product, market. The two are inseparable. How will you marry them?

Why Learn a Formal Design Language?

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The best way to learn design is to look closely and analytically at the work of other artists—specifically, here, other jewelry makers. But for beginners, without the language to describe the formal qualities of design, how do you analyze the work? “I like it/I don’t like it/It’s good/It’s not good” is certainly a start, but then comes the question: Why? What makes it good or not good? Why does it hold your attention or not, stop your breath or not? And there, without a formal language, most analysis stops.

By the way, the term “formal” in this context doesn’t mean classical, high-falutin’ or dressed up. It refers to the elements and principles of design from which “forms” are made, things like line, shape, space, balance, size and so on. Without a grasp of formal language, what can often happen is that a beginner, looking at other work, ends up simply copying or imitating it. The derivative work is almost always weak and less than it might have been. Worse, it is never truly one’s own.

(And if you believe the old saw that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” it isn’t. It usually just ticks off the original artist or, if terribly blatant and if you start selling the work, can end up in a lawsuit. Now inspiration, that is a sincere form of flattery.)

This talk of language, vocabulary, structure and form may sound like an academic discussion, but it really—as I finally found, after years of trying to ignore it–is not. Although artists express their ideas through various media–pigment for a painter, clay for a potter, music for a composer, or metal for a metalsmith or jeweler–we are still language-using creatures. We depend on language to describe, explore, and even, to some extent, create our world—even to ourselves. In fact, sometimes our understanding of our world and of ideas is limited by existing language.

Which brings me to the amazing metalsmith Heikki Seppä, who discovered, or rediscovered, this when he began introducing his students to his ground-breaking concept of shell forms to his students.

Why Make a Production Line?

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One of Micki Lippe's production line necklaces. Photo courtesy Micki Lippe.

One of Micki Lippe’s production line necklaces. Photo courtesy Micki Lippe.

Artists make jewelry because they love the creativity, they love working with their hands, and the love the joy they give those who wear it. However, if artists make jewelry as a business, they want to make a living doing it. Time and the economy have taught many artists that production work may be the only way to survive and continue to do the work they love.

Making an affordable production line has many benefits. Continue reading →

The Importance of Design Language: A Revelation

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Learning to draw was a revelation to me. As a child, I thought you either did or did not have the talent to draw. I was convinced I did not have it, although I kept taking workshops and classes to try to learn. Finally, in my 30s, I took a workshop from the brilliant and inspiring art teacher, Beverly Cassel. Beverly taught me that it was not a matter of talent. It was a matter of learning to see.

Yes, well that only took me so far. My drawings kept failing. Much as I respected Beverly, she must have been wrong and I really was missing the talent.

But I kept taking classes.

Including one that covered the elements and principles of design. I’d like to say the light came on. It didn’t. Because learning about line, form, balance, blah, blah, was like practicing scales: you know you should but…why? Can’t you just move ahead and play?

THEN (drum roll), I got into a workshop where we did a critique. This time, the brilliant painter and teacher Eileen Cotter Howell helped me discover how these basics could be applied to actually evaluate and improve my work. By employing the language of design, I could see my work—and that of others–in a new way. The lights finally, after I will not tell you how many years, came on. (I never said I was a quick study.)

Over the last many, many years, it’s been my privilege to interview and see the breathtaking work of a huge number of brilliant jewelry artists. And I’ve come to realize that they employ the elements and principles of design. I wondered to myself, how many beginning jewelry makers, like me those many years ago, keep wondering why their work fails? Even when they copy the work of those brilliant jewelry artists.

Part of the answer, I think, may lie in the fact that many jewelry makers start their work without a structured art background—most art programs teach the elements and principles of design. Jewelry makers may start their work as a hobby, beading, or working with metal clays, or wire wrapping. They may take a class on metalsmithing and get stoked the first time the metal melts under their torch. Other jewelers learn on the job, at a bench, doing repairs, casting, or other jewelry work.

When you learn to cast, forge, solder, set, string beads, wrap wire, or work with precious metal clay (PMC), you come to grips with one aspect of jewelry making—that of tools, techniques, methods and manufacturing. (Like managing paint, ink, or heaven forbid, glue.) But, like me, you may not know there is, or how to apply, a design language.

When jewelry makers talk about design, they are often talking about how the object functions. Designing jewelry that functions well–a ring that doesn’t roll, earrings that are comfortable, or a catch that opens easily, but doesn’t open at the wrong time—is certainly one type of design. But here I’m talking about aesthetic design: Is there enough (or too much) contrast between these two textures; does this large pearl balance this selection of colored stone melee; is the work visually appealing, or even exciting. To answer (or even ask) these questions, artists of all kinds, I think, can be helped by learning the language of aesthetic design.

Knowing the language of design helped me become a better painter/drawer, whatever it is I really do. But because I’ve spent so much of my life associated with jewelry, I wanted to help jewelry makers, who may not be familiar with it, to learn to this language. Hopefully, it will help them see ways they might apply it to their own work.

As a result, with the enthusiasm of a convert, I began writing Good Bones: the Elements and Principles of Design for Jewelry Makers. Since life and work keep getting in the way, I decided to blog some of this information so that it can begin helping people until I can get the book finished.

I hope this will prove useful to you.