Website Updates

You may have noticed a severe lack of blogging lately. Well, I’ve been busy – very busy – not only with my recent craft fair at Ardross Farm, but also with website updates. Since I started working with precious and non precious metals and creating more ‘expensive’ pieces of jewellery, I’ve found it quite difficult to categorise what I do – is it jewellery? is it craft? is it both? Am I a Jeweller or am I a Maker or both?

It’s been difficult to figure out the best way to present my work and also what to sell at craft fairs. I would like to sell everything I make, but gathered all together it can be quite overwhelming and also confusing for the buyer. Some things are perfect for the craft market, others aren’t – so I’ve always been in a bit of a quandary.

I’ve had lots of conversations with other jewellers about this recently and they agree with me and advised that I rethought the way I presented my work, both at craft fairs, but also online. While I was creating my daisy chain necklaces for the Scrap Exchange Challenge organised by Fife Contemporary Art & Craft, I realised I could make a small collection of daisy chain jewellery pieces and that got me thinking. I started looking at jewellery websites online and the term ‘collections’ kept cropping up and I really like it as a means to describe a body of work along the same theme.

Like a eureka moment it dawned on me that I should split my work into two main collections – my Jewellery Collections and my Craft Collections – the two are quite distinct in both approach and price and so it made sense to keep them separate. So for instance, my silver jewellery could be categorised like this – the Vintage Button Collection, the Sea Glass Collection, the Antique Silverware Collection and lastly the Daisy Chain Collection. I could then also apply the same principle to my lower priced craft items too and create 4 collections along the lines of Jewellery, Stationery, Accessories and Decorations.

All of a sudden I had clarity and it was so lovely.

So over the past few weeks I’ve been redesigning the ‘Product Range’ section of my website which has now been renamed ‘Collections’. When you click on this link you are confronted with the choice of either my Jewellery Collections or my Craft Collections like so:

And can choose the route you want to take. I think this will also be great for wholesale buyers and make their job a little easier as rather than bundling all my products together, it’s now very easy to browse the high end precious metal work separately from the craft items and keep similar priced items together.

With this redesign I’ve also been able to give a bit more information about each collection and how they originated. People like to hear the story behind a piece of jewellery or idea and I’ve had some amazing conversations with people at craft fairs when I tell them why I started working with antique silverware and recycling pieces of silver rather than buying in new. The same goes for my sea glass pieces. People seem to warm to the pieces when I tell them that each piece of glass was probably made decades ago from sand from the same beaches on which it was found. I love to hear these kinds of tales when I’m buying something special and unique so I’ve introduced this kind of information on my website now. I hope you find it an interesting read!

All I need to do now is take some more pictures of my work as some of the new galleries are a bit low on images, and some of the images are quite old too. Over the next few weeks, I’ll try and get organised and get some new images up and running.

Don’t hesitate to let me know what you think of the new site changes – I’d love to hear your opinions.