Do branding and jewelry pricing go hand in hand?

Yes, even when gold is trending upwards.
Yes, even when you’re done with the math part of pricing.

Branding is a core part of your jewelry pricing strategy.

Pricing for jewelry always starts with the math – knowing your COGS, your profit margins, your labor rates – these are the building blocks. But the other side of the pricing puzzle is your branding and the story that your work tells.
It’s about your connecting a story to your work, and telling a story that helps customers relate to your jewelry.

How does the story of your jewelry inform your pricing strategy?

How does that work? Let’s start by unlocking some of your more creative answers.
Try this short exercise and answer a few questions for yourself:
Pick a piece of your work – any piece. You already know the costs and labor that went into it, that part is (hopefully) clear in the value that it adds to your work.

• What is the story of this piece?

• Why did you make it, what inspired it, and how does it fit into the larger context of your work?

• What story do you think it tells about your customers?

• Are there supporting pieces for it?

• Does it look like a piece that you made and that only you could make?

I remember my early years as an artist, I thought that all of my work would speak for itself, that people would see a photo and love my work as much as I did. I thought that surely the visual work would be enough.

But it wasn’t. People love stories, and I hadn’t told enough of a visual story, or a verbal one. I hadn’t brought my branding fully into my work yet, I hadn’t thought about how that one stellar piece that I made would need other pieces around it to support it and contextualize it, so what people saw was something flat and commercial and disjointed.

I didn’t give people enough reason to part with their money. And in the beginning, my pricing didn’t support the story I was telling – of sustainable and artful work, of work that used only fine materials, of work that used my own skilled labor.

My pricing didn’t match that story. It was too low, or it lacked understanding of who my target audience was. My pricing and my story weren’t connected to each other, and therefore weren’t connecting to an audience.

Learning to develop that connection took time – time in front of people selling, it took classes and consultants, it took studying to set my own tone, to set my own boundaries of my work, and it took time to understand, but I got there, and you can too.

We aren’t here to sell our jewelry by the gram weight.

Size and weight do matter in jewelry, don’t get me wrong, but a customer’s perception is just as important – how they relate to a piece you made, or how it makes them feel, what value they get from working with you, what promises you make about your voice, your ethos and your quality all tie into your branding and ultimately to your price.

Your jewelry is the sum of its parts – gold, silver, emerald, tourmaline and chain, but it is so much more – it marks sad and happy times, it memorializes, it empowers and it speaks to big and small moments in our lives.

Let your pricing tell that story.

Work with me on your individualized pricing strategy to help your brand voice and pricing work together.