The issue, to me, is the marketplace: can one get away with shoddy
craftsmanship, why would they even want to, and how does this come
to be thought of as OK?
My experience have been heavily coloured by small company silver
production line fashion jewellery just for starters.
Yes one can get away with shoddy stuff (as has been described), so
long as it holds together. Crooked usually isn’t the problem, that is
usually fixed by being crooked ~enough~ to look deliberate, the
problems are usually ‘flat’ designs that are rushed last minute
becuase they were running late for the spring show (a few of these
are unavoidable, don’t make it your whole line), or the most common
(and perhaps most understandable but also frequently I find the most
painful) inability to get a ‘conventional’ finnish leading to some
stellar ‘inovations’. (I exagerate just a little when I pretend to
quote “hey check out this great texture when I take the stain wheel
directly to the casting skin!”)
As far as I can tell if you have one or two reasonable design
aspects and an ok price point you can get by largely on hutzpah and
good timing. If you have a good design whole you can get away with an
unreasonable price point and a LOT of hutzpah. (Obviously either way
I need more hutzpah, do you know a good hutzpah dealer?)
Why would they want to? Generally speaking from what I’ve seen we
are talking about strong type A personalities who have deluded
themselves into believing what they do is absolutly fabulous, it does
wonders for their sales technique but left for years alone their
product… becomes eccentric. Frequently aided and abetted by actual
holes in their education, I think the Art College model has a lot to
answer for (the one where you come up with what you want to make and
then get the techniques require from the teacher rather then the
technical college model where you are barraged with techniques and
then asked to use them), if you enter that model with a strong sense
of style already then all you are going to do is develop that one
style and everything else is left out to hang. I worked for one woman
who rhetorcally asked what fire-scale was, she was amazed when I
actually told her. Imagine four years of paid jewellery education and
not knowing that? She also could not recognize that we were getting
abnormally BAD castings and should have changed suppliers rather then
flush money down the drain.
But the major factor? Mostly they aren’t selling to jewellery
stores, yeah they make the occasional pot shot, but really the
majority of their cleintelle are Fashion or decor boutiques, eclectic
galleries, who are run by people who ‘don’t know jewellery but know
what they like!’
Do I think my stuff is the end all and be all and all that? Ummm
hell no, I see plenty flaws and shortcuts. Hopefully passible, better
in some ways then some of those I’ve worked for in the past, but I’m
alone a lot with it, so I may not be the best judge. I would like to
think the price point fair for what you get, what else can I do?
Cheers,
Norah
(I think I’ll skip the url this time… hard habit to break though
grins)
