Tips and Tricks
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How do you oxidize mixed metal jewelry?
Use liver of sulfur to oxidize your jewelry at home!Yes. Yes I have seen those videos showing how to oxidize silver with an egg, but considering how expensive eggs are at the moment (greetings from early 2023) and how I am generally opposed to wasting food, I’d like to recommend using a good professional tool…
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Your small business owner starting-the-year checklist
Starting off your business year with simple tasks Every day as an entrepreneur feels like a never-ending list of tasks. Personally, I like doing the easy tasks first. I get a spark of excitement when I check a small tasks off of my list because look! I checked a box! I used to think that…
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What is alt text and how do I write it for jewelry?
Make your website more accessible and more shoppable by using alt text OK jewelers and metalsmiths – you’ve made a gorgeous body of work, photographed it, and built a website. Now it’s time to make your website more accessible. I love alt text so much. It is a powerful tool for website accessibility. While alt…
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Tool Talk! Using a Hammer Hand Piece for your Flex Shaft
How about that bottom line?That one gets the shaft.It’s the line that tells us that we spent too much, or that we paid too much for that show with the splashy top line numbers. It’s the line that shows our time spent reconciling our receipts.
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How do you know when you need help with your business?
I am the worst at asking for helpFor the first 5+ years of my business, I rarely ever contracted out work. I did my own stone setting, my own website updates, my own books, my own IT troubleshooting, my own marketing, my own SEO, my own ad management.I was scrappy. I was hardworking. I was…
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The whys and hows of being productive in your jewelry business
Because what we as jewelry makers do is enjoyable (bending metal! Using fire! Hammers hammers hammers!) it is easy to think of what we do as “not work”, but is there anything else in your life that you’d like to make space for? Friendships? Family? Social lives? Travel? Exercise? Time to sit and stare out…
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Tool Talk – My Favorite Bench Pin
My Favorite Bench PinIt’s been awhile since I’ve talked more specifically about jewelry skills and tools. And it’s been awhile since I’ve talked to you about tools and I’ve desperately missed talking about tools.Disclaimer – I don’t get paid for any of my jewelry tool reviews. I just really love a useful tool and want…
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How Do You Decide Which Jewelry Sources are Ethical? Part 2 – The Roundup
Does it ever feel to you like others are operating with information that is either over your head, or speaking like their information is common knowledge? Me too! And I read and consume lots of news about ethics in the jewelry industry on a daily basis.
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Should you sell your handmade jewelry on consignment? The pros and cons
The upside of selling on consignment is that you have almost total control over what inventory they receive. After all, it is still technically your inventory until they sell it.The downside of selling on consignment almost always involves a breach of trust in the form of late payments, poor reporting, or damaged jewelry.
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Holidays in July: a checklist to prepare your jewelry business for the holiday season
December is the month when I make as much as 25% of my retail sales for the entire year – that is a hefty amount to prepare for and involves so many moving parts – I need to have a marketing plan in place (shows, email blasts, social media posts and more), an inventory plan…