He initially sent me this picture of a piece he must have either found on a different site or created on a different site.

He also told me he wanted Turquoise for the center stones and 4 diamonds on the side instead of 2 diamonds and 2 brown stones.

I sent him a render of my version of the ring he sent me.

The program I use to render my designs does not have Turquoise so I used Blue Topaz instead since the colors are close. He ended up liking the stones so much he asked to see what the piece would look like with faceted Blue Topaz. He was looking for a color not a stone so he wanted whatever would look the best in the ring.

He loved the look of the faceted stones and decided to go ahead with manufacturing using 14K white gold as the metal.

Even from the raw casting, I could tell this ring was going to be really neat.

When all was set and polished, the piece turned out amazing.

The client was super happy and said he would come back to me for wedding rings when the time comes! I can’t wait!

When I got the request for this piece I was amazed because the customer knew just what she wanted and just how to describe it. All I had to do was make it a reality.

She wanted a ring that looked like a braid with one of the strands covered in diamonds. I was surprisingly difficult to get the computer to make a braid considering that I’ve been braiding my own hair since I could reach the back of my head. Eventually I got it. I sent my client a couple of versions with varying widths, tightness, and curvy-ness.

She loved the tighter, curvier piece but wanted it a little thinner which I was happy to do. She decided to use Platinum for the metal and real diamonds for the stones.

The casting was a little rough with all the prongs…

but the finished piece turned out beautifully!

And she even asked me to engrave a super cute message inside the shank.

My dear husband suggested that I write a post about all of the things I’ve learned while running my own business. So here goes the tell all of all of my dark secrets…

I am not an outgoing person by nature. I am shy and practical, not a sales person. When clients send an inquiry via my website, I personally respond to every single (legitimate) inquiry that comes in. I have had to really deal with my fear of talking to strangers (I think my parents did too good of a job when I was little on that one.) I try to respond to every inquiry that comes in as soon as I get it in my email box. Some days I have a lot of trouble with that because the idea of sending an email to a stranger is too much to handle at that moment. I’ve learned that if I am not in the mood right away to send an email back, I can put the email aside for awhile and work on building myself up to feeling up to it. Once the conversation gets going with a client, that fear goes away and I look forward to the correspondence.

The practical part of my personality can also be a hindrance to my business. I don’t like to “sell” people jewelry. I create a great product. If you want to buy it, great, if you don’t, that’s cool too. I don’t do sales and discounts because I’m never going to charge a client an outrageous price just so I can discount it. All of the prices I give are hard prices, bottom line, that’s it. This is not how sales people do it. If you go to a jewelry store, if you stay there long enough, they will keep dropping the price and dropping the price until they get to the price that I would have given initially. I don’t like playing the games. Sometimes, I think that means I make fewer sales. I also think that people usually do end up appreciating my way of doing things more eventually so I am not working on changing my blunt honesty.

And the biggest reason for writing this blog post: As far as pricing, I will never go back on what I said the first time. I recently did a job for a client where I made a mistake on the pricing. That client will never know that that mistake was made. If I make even $5 on that piece I will be lucky. I’d much rather lose money on one piece and have a happy client than go back to someone and tell them they need to pay me more because I made a mistake. I will also never pad other clients’ prices to make up for the loss on a different piece. A mistake is a mistake and you learn from it and move forward.

Zappos recently made a major pricing mistake that cost them over 1 million dollars. See the whole story here. Even though the chances of me making a mistake worth that much money are slim, I think the principal is the important part. I am obviously a for profit company and my goal is to make enough money to support myself but I will not do that by pissing off my clients.

In the last year or so, the most important thing I’ve learned is that I can run my company how it works for me. I can pull from the good things I see other companies doing and learn from what they have done wrong. In the end, what really matters is if I am happy doing what I am doing.

This week I have a pearl pendant for you to enjoy with sapphires and aquamarine.

When the client contacted me she had a pretty specific idea of what she wanted. She wanted a simple pendant with a fairly large pearl surrounded by sapphires. She also thought it would be neat to use slightly larger stones at the 4 cardinal points. I put together what I thought would fit with what she had described but to further accentuate the corners, I used nice dark sapphires for the larger stones and lighter aquamarine stones in between.

She loved the lighter stones with the sapphires! She decided to go with 14K white gold for the metal and all natural stones. Once the decision was made, I went ahead and got the casting done.

Once I had collected the pearl and all of the sapphires and aquamarines, I sent those and the casting to my jeweler.

The finished pieces was gorgeous! The light and dark stones really set each other off. I hope she loves it!

He really liked the trillion fire opal ring I have on my site but didn’t want any diamonds at all. He had seen some engagement rings with pearls and really liked the look of those, so I decided to try to combine the 2 ideas. Below is the original render that I came up with:

He really loved the top piece (I knew he would) and after moving the pearl over a little bit and rounding off the shank, we ended up with this:

He decided to use palladium for the metal to keep the price down and we started manufacturing.
Here are the raw casting and the pearl…


The finished piece turned out amazing! I hope she loves it!