Building and earning trust is vital to your jewelry business

Building trust is a vital part of making jewelry as a full-time business – trust with your audience, with your vendors, and even with yourself. And it’s a challenge because, and this is true, you and I will make mistakes.

The ideal state would be to avoid making a mistake in the first place, but there’s that whole “being human” thing (how very dare) that we all must contend with, so mistakes will happen. Also, never making mistakes means never trying, and that is neither the entrepreneur nor the artist way.

How we recover from these mistakes is what really matters

Many of us have been there – chipped a client’s stone, made the wrong ring size, shipped late, quoted the wrong price, got signals crossed on emails and timelines.

Shit, it does happen.

But it’s in how we respond to our own mistakes that matters even more. And it often involves us having to either learn big new lessons (fun! terrifying!) or take a loss (shitty! money losing!)

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Think through the tough scenarios in your jewelry business in advance

Picture this – you are setting a client’s family stone and whoops your setting tool slips and chips the girdle. Now what? Cover it up and continue setting while hiding the chip? Tell the client and let them decide next steps? Promise to cover the cost of a new stone? Let insurance sort it out?

The answers are hard, but also simple. Hard in that responding about a mistake that you made is emotionally fraught. Simple in that trust and transparency can always be your guide.

So how do you recover from a mistake in your business?

What would you do to make it up to the customer who’s stone you chipped?

• Tell them about it (and make a note that for future jobs, the potential of chipping and breaking should always be revealed up front).

• Offer to continue with the setting with the caveat that the stone may be weaker now.

• Offer to source a replacement stone (and make a note to include in future jobs that replacing the stone might be an outcome of taking on an antique stone setting job).

• Review your insurance policy and see if you can be covered for a stone replacement in the future.

• Offer a full or partial refund depending on the job.

OK, but what happens if you are going to lose money from a mistake in your business?

Take a deep breath and picture me holding your hand and telling you this in the world’s gentlest voice:

Sometimes that will happen.

It’s the WORST lesson to learn in business, but sometimes preserving the relationships you make is as important as your profit margin (and this is coming from me, a person who goes on endlessly about how you need your profit margins). Owning your mistakes helps you build trust with your customers.

If you don’t take responsibility for your mistake, if you don’t attempt a repair to the client relationship, you could lose out on their business and goodwill forever. But if you accept the responsibility, then you leave the door open to doing business together again in the future.

The point is not perfection, the point is that mistakes are teachable moments and that mistakes are recoverable.

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Want to know what’s been framing my thoughts on this? I’ve been reading On Repentance and Repair by Danya Ruttenberg, all about what is owed to people when it comes to mistakes, abuse and forgiveness. Owning your responsibility is a deep part of it.