As aspiring jewelry designers, learning to take the existing art and design skills you have and combine them with marketing and sales techniques that you might not be so familiar with can be a tricky undertaking.
One of the most common issues we get questions about from prospective jewelry design students involves the marketing and sales process. After learning the best ways to lay out patterns, string beads and create wire transitions, you’ll move on to actually designing and creating a beautiful jewelry line of your own. After all that hard work, it’s important to develop a general background on how to find clients to purchase and wear that beautiful work.
Lucky for our students, this is something we extensively cover throughout the final unit of our course. From learning the best techniques for photographing your jewelry and selling it online to preparing some face to face sales techniques for interacting in person, our mentors dedicated the entirety of the final course unit to getting you ready to make money through your talent.
Since its summertime and markets are popping up all over this time of year, we thought it might be a good idea to review some tips for selling your work in this type of venue. Here are our most recommended tips getting started:
Connect With Your Buyers
When you can, it’s a good to make conversation with your shoppers. Try to ask them questions about their style preferences. Are they shopping for a special event? Are they buying a gift for a loved one? The more information you can get from them regarding their reason for browsing, the more helpful you can be in making special recommendations. Not only that, if you develop a friendly rapport with these customers, you might have the opportunity to slip them your business card and turn them into repeat clients.
Don’t Take Criticism Personally
Once you start talking to your buyers and providing them with recommendations, it’s important not to get defensive or irritated if they say they don’t really like something you’ve made. Although as designers, we understand that it can be hurtful to hear negative feedback on something handmade, try to remember that taste is relative, and that your personal jewelry aesthetic isn’t going to fit the style of everyone who comes to your table.
So if you show someone a necklace for example, and they say it’s too loud or too tacky for their taste, just brush it off and try to show them something simpler.
