Thank you all for the input, I was the one that originally posed
this question. I use a fee of 60 dollars an hour for shop time, but
of course this isn’t my wage, that 60 dollars an hour is a standard
machine shop rate. Which is designed to include wear and tear of
machinery and drills and such. Which is important since I use a lot
of machine tools in my jewelry making. I earn a lot less than that,
when you take into account my time spent working on my jewelry,
working on my website, customer service, ect, ect… I haven’t been
in this industry as long as many of you have been, only for 5 years,
and I’m 25 years old. And I have been fortunate to be able to work
with some amazing jewelers and learn some great jewelry making
skills from them, but where I have run into a problem is more the
wholesale aspect of the business. I would ideally like to start
getting my jewelry out into the hands of fine jewelry stores. But I
have really run into a wall with this. I can wholesale my jewelry for
around half the price I have it on my website, and since it sells
well on my website, considering the traffic I get, my pricing seems
to be fair enough for most people, and in the few cases I have gotten
to display my jewelry in a public setting, it has sold briskly. But
most of the jewelry stores I have contacted fall into a few
categories. They believe my jewelry is way over priced. One jewelry
store I visited seemed promising, but said he wouldn’t pay more than
5 dollars wholesale for a titanium ring, and then showed me the rings
he pays 5 dollars for and sells for 100 dollars. They happened to be
steel rings that he was incorrectly selling as titanium.
I also had another run in where a person called to actually yell at
me for my prices after I left his store. He was very angry that I
had titanium rings with certified diamonds on my website for around
2200 dollars. Which when I was in his store, was around where he had
some basic engagement rings of the same size. The yelling went along
the lines of, “no one will ever buy titanium rings at that price” and
it was all very discouraging. I not too long ago had a jewelry look
at one of my rings, he left the room with it and came back with the
ruby in it smashed. Then said my rings where of poor quality because
he hit the ruby with a hammer and it shattered. I was tempted to hit
him with a hammer… Of course I realize my jewelry is a lot more
expensive than you can buy mass produced Chinese jewelry for, but
such jewelry is only temporary, the gemstones are usually fake or of
terrible quality, and the metal is soft and will soon deform and the
gems will fall out. I also sell much better and larger gemstones
than my competitors, and am actually a bit cheaper than companies
like Teno, and some other companies that make similar products. And
my work is of the same quality. I have had a few offers from stores
to carry my work, but they where the kinds of places that carry a lot
of handmade jewelry, ranging in prices of 10-50 dollars. So my
jewelry would be very out of place price and style wise. I have
turned down a few of those because they did not have adequate
security to house my jewelry, and didn’t have proper insurance in
the event of loss or theft. So any guidance anyone can give me to
alleviate these problems would be greatly appreciated.
Chris Anderson