Jewelry – The Goods

5 Things No One Tells You about Starting a Business

May 17, 2016

*Editor’s note: Whether you’re just starting out or have been running your small business for a while now, you’re probably no stranger to the unexpected challenges that tend to pop up from time to time. Designer, entrepreneur, and author of the book How to Create Your Own Jewelry Line, Emilie Shapiro, shares her advice for working through a few of the trickier things about running a creative business.

Emilie Shapiro at her NY NOW trade show booth

Business is the Keyword in Jewelry Business

A business without a goal is just a hobby. Owning a jewelry business is much more than making pretty things. The biggest difference between running a business and engaging in a hobby is the goal; you’re running a business to make money. More and more people are pursuing the life of entrepreneurship and becoming their own bosses. Being a designer and a creator is an amazing gift, but when you decide to become a business owner, your main goal is to make money.

There are a lot of difficult decisions and many hats that you have to wear every day, especially if you are a one woman shop. Accounting, sales, customer service, production management, shipping & handling – all things that are part of running a small business. Running a business is not for everyone. It requires a lot of persistence and ambition. As a craft business owner, you are focusing on efficiency over creativity. Making jewelry is just one small part of running a jewelry business.

As an artist, there is a tendency to make decisions based on feelings and intuition. As a successful businessperson, it is necessary to make decisions based on rational calculation. I like to strike a happy medium between the two.

Gift Guides

Our Favorite Inspirational Jewelry Gifts For Graduation 2016

May 3, 2016

Graduation season is coming, and soon countless students will walk across a stage toward their individual destinies: college, adventure, or a new career. Very exciting! But let’s be honest: commencement ceremonies usually entail a tedious wait through a seemingly endless roster of names, peppered with cliché-riddled speeches. How do you make this super-meaningful, yet often dull occasion more memorable for your favorite graduate? We think one of the nicest ways is congratulating them with a beautiful and inspirational jewelry gift to mark their hard-earned milestone. Bearing profound, uplifting messages, these necklaces and bracelets make ideal graduation gifts (and mercifully rescue you from the daunting task of crafting a sentimental speech yourself).

To help you choose the right gift, we put together a collection of our favorite inspirational jewelry pieces. Some of our pieces feature inspiring quotes while others are more symbolic. We tracked down motivational quotes to complement theses abstract pieces to illuminate their meaning. Honestly, this post is so packed with forceful wisdom, we’re afraid it might explode. Read at your own risk!

For The Trail Blazer

Maker Stories

A Throne For Your Trinkets: Tracy Shea’s Pedestal Jewelry Holder

April 22, 2016

Tracy Shea remembers her first time. As a sophomore at Ohio’s Mentor High School she took a ceramics course and was instantly hooked. “From the minute I touched clay, it’s always been something I wanted to do,” she recalls.

She scored a partial scholarship to the Cleveland Institute of the Arts, but ended up accepting a full-ride to a different college. “My parents refused to pay for an art education,” she explains. “They were like, ‘You’ll never make it as an artist.’”

Fast forward three decades and the Garrettsville, Ohio mom of two spends her days making her popular Pedestal Jewelry Holder. The lace-imprinted ceramic stand — fitted with 50 holes to hang earrings — was born from a desire to display heirloom pieces passed down to her from her aunt. Eyeing her collection “drove me to think, people have stuff that they don’t necessarily want to throw in a drawer,” she says. “People collect stuff for a reason — there are emotional ties. So this is a special place to put things that are really special.” She puts her process — and her life as an artist — on display.

Tracy Shea’s Pedestal Jewelry Holder

Maker Stories

Precious Gem Chakra Balancing Necklace:
Rocking the Chakras With Erwin List Sanchez and Deborah Stotzky

March 30, 2016

Jewelry artists and devoted yogis Erwin List Sanchez and Deborah Stotzky, makers of our new Precious Gem Chakra Balancing Necklace, believe in beautiful stones – and not just because they’re pretty. They keep carefully-chosen pieces of quartz crystals around their studio because of the power they hold.

In yoga, meditation, and Ayurveda, the term “chakra” (Sanskrit for wheel) refers to human energy centers. There are seven main chakras in the human body. It was probably inevitable that Erwin and Deborah would create a necklace that beautifully visualizes these powerful, invisible forces.

Precious Gem Chakra Balancing Necklace | UncommonGoods
Gems, from top to bottom: Amethyst, Indigo Sapphire, Topaz, Emerald, Citrine, Orange Sapphire, Ruby. (Note: Image is highly magnified. See below for actual size image of pendant on model.)

Maker Resources

5 Ways to Attract Retail Buyers to Your Brand

March 16, 2016

*Editor’s note: For many artists, the idea of approaching retail buyers can seem intimidating. We’ve tapped Emilie Shapiro, jewelry designer, instructor and author of the new book, How to Create Your Own Jewelry Line, to share some ideas that budding entrepreneurs can use to attract retail buyers to their brand.

Aquamarine Ebb & Flow Jewelry by Emilie Shapiro

1. Design a Marketable Collection

Whether you are starting from scratch or have created hundreds of pieces, making a collection is very different from designing just one piece. Designing a collection is about translating one design into many different forms. For example, when creating a jewelry collection, you should be able to translate a design for a ring into a necklace, earrings and a bracelet. Every customer will gravitate toward a certain type of piece. Some customers love rings and that is all they buy while other customers want pieces that go together. Retail buyers for a wholesale account will typically want to present the full collection so there is something for everyone.

Maker Stories

Beach Glass Beauties: Jeanne Kollecker’s Marvelous Marble Pendants

February 11, 2016

It was a magazine article that drew Jeanne Kollecker to the arts. “About five years ago, I read an article on beach glass in Lake Erie Living,” she explains. Intrigued, the Chardon, Ohio resident decided to search for some herself on the shores of Lake Erie near her house. “I started hunting and it became an addiction. I knew right away I wanted to turn it into jewelry. You can find a piece and just say, ‘Wow, this would make a great pendant, or an earring,’” she says. She took classes on silversmithing at the local community college, and kept looking for beach glass (so named when it comes from fresh water; sea glass comes from salt water). “Then,” she says, “I found my first marble.”

The beach marble, to the uninitiated, is more or less the holy grail of lakeside treasures — made all the more desirable by the many legends of the object’s origins (more on that below). “They’re such a rare find that when you find one, you do a happy dance,” says Jeanne, who manages a veterinary office by day. “The mystery of them is so much fun.”

As a proud member of The North American Sea Glass Association, she never alters the state of the marbles she finds. “I just wash them with warm soap and water.” The various colors, sizes and finishes of the baubles make each of her pieces unique. “Everything is one-of-a-kind” she says. “No one else in the world is wearing the same piece.”

She takes us through her process — and behind the mystery of the marbles.

Maker Stories

Penmanship Meets Pendant: BB Becker’s Your Story Necklace

February 3, 2016

Falling in love prompted BB Becker’s first attempt to make jewelry in the 1980s; he deconstructed and transformed found pieces into charming gifts for his future bride. Today, his work is a collaborative effort that marries BB’s lovingly-designed sterling silver pendants with his wife Josephine’s graceful handwriting.

This particularly pensive medallion bears a meditation on the bonds we share with family and friends. With one corner curled over as if turning a page on your personal story, each one is engraved with a quotation handwritten in delicate cursive that reads: “The only people who truly know your story are the ones who help you write it.” A recent conversation with BB revealed how ancient art, a meaningful sentiment, and the devoted characters who fill our personal stories inspired the creation of this writerly, wearable artwork.

Design

Stefanie Wolf’s Mosaic Necklace 7 Ways

January 15, 2016

We knew that jewelry designer Stefanie Wolf’s Mosaic Necklaces are beautiful, versatile pieces, but we didn’t know that just how many ways you can wear them until yesterday, when Stefanie sent us this great video showing seven ways. (We’ll admit, it’s three more than we’d thought of, and we LOVE the new suggestions.)

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