The jewelry making and sellingThe jewelry making aspect and selling are two distinctly different things of this business. See, last month I went to visit my daughter and a trip to the NASA museum enthused me so much. After being exposed to the galaxies and their stories I came home and created these knitted jewelry pieces that I want to share with you. 
Selling them is another story. I do understand though that both need equal attention to stay in business. For us (with this passion), jewelry making is our second nature, but look what happens when we take it to business, or try to sell them. According to a survey taken (last month , October'09) by Dr. David Weiman, it was found that about one third of the jewelry makers (all who responded to this survey) spend 20 hours or more per week to jewelry related things, which includes making the jewelry, learning how to do, and marketing or selling. About half (45.6%) spend 16-20 hours per week. Is there a correlation between the numbers of years of experience and the amount of time spent in jewelry ? He thought it would be inversely proportional as people new in the field may find it more exciting and interesting for the novelty and spend more time.In reality the more experienced ones spent more time. This is exciting because it reveals the fact that as you develop as an artist, the field will grow for you too. What about marketing? How much time is spent on marketing or trying to sell? The survey reveals that more than half (who responded) 55.6% to be exact, spend less than 10% in marketing. About 29.3% spend 10-24% of their total jewelry time for marketing and selling. If you spend 10-24% which means of the total 20 hours per week quota, you must devote 2 to 4 hours per week in marketing. Then you are in good shape. But how? what do we really have to do, I ponder. What aspects should we focus on? Dr. Weiman gave 101 easy, quick and quite doable ideas for our marketing polishing strategy. I have used the following five and got great results already and I want to thank Dr. Weiman for that. These are: 1.How to create and use referral cards 2.How to use feed backs to improve my jewelry business 3.Story cards and how to implement them 4.How to prepare myself ahead of time to handle customer complaints, use professional strategies and preserve those customers 5.Lovely, simple ways to show my appreciation to the customers. Well there are 96 left, which I plan to take one at a time every month. You may down load this 71 page e-book and start implementing them one by one. Before you know you'll find yourself gaining more and more happy customers and profits. Need a great handcrafted jewelry selling idea? After The jewelry making and selling please visit the Home page for more options.
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