Come and visit me

I will be attending a show where you can come and see my jewellery and have a chat. I will be available for the 5 days Friday 5th August - Tuesday 9th August. I will also be demonstrating my craft.

Dorset Arts and Crafts Association in Dorset

I'll look forward to seeing you there!

A-Z of Selling Your Handmade Jewellery / Selling Your Handmade Silver Jewellery

This week's letter in the A- Z of Selling your Handmade Jewellery / Handmade Silver Jewellery is

I for Insurance

If a craftsperson is undertaking fairs /exhibitions etc then the minimum insurance they will need is public liability insurance. Supposing a customer were to trip over your draping table cloth and injure themselves - can you afford to pay out several thousand pounds in compensation? - and that's after the solicitor fees!!

For craftworkers, public liability insurance is reasonably inexpensive.  I had a policy last year which cost me approximately £55 and this included product liability (ie if my product injured someone).  An example of this perhaps would be if a post on a butterfly backed earring broke off in someone's ear.

Clearly I can't specifically recommend an insurer, however I can tell you who I have subsequently insured with (following an increase in premium by £20 in one year).  I've never needed to claim, so I don't know how good they are on paying out - but... I'm insured with £5 million public liability (compared to £1 million last year) and have public and product liability within the policy.

I discovered AIR - www.a-n.co.uk  for artists.  It's a membership organisation which automatically provides insurance when becoming a member.  Once you're a member, you can download the insurance documents.  The cost for being a member of AIR for me.... which incidentally is a great online resource and sends out magazines (either online or paperbased depending on your membership choice) was £30 the year!  You can also post details on the 'what's on' listings plus an image on the interface, as well as review and comments.  It covers craft workers - but double check if it covers you for specifics relating to your craft.  For example it doesn't cover 'hot works' when you're out exhibiting.

As I say, I can't recommend it - I can just say that it covers me for what I want and I found it extremely reasonable in price too..

A-Z of Selling Your Handmade Jewellery / Selling Your Handmade Silver Jewellery

The A - Z of selling your handmade jewellery / selling your handmade silver jewellery

This week's letter is:

H

H for Handmade or Hand Made or Handcrafted or Hand Crafted.

If you are wanting to sell your jewellery or indeed any product which you've made by hand - the question is, what do you call it?  Handmade, hand made, handcrafted or hand crafted.  You need to understand how your customers would think and what would they call it?

There are very useful tools on the internet - a tool which provides an idea for free as to how your customers think is provided by Google.  Having typed in the phrases it will tell you based on the country you search how many monthly searches occur for the particular country.

So for the United Kingdom:

Handmade - 450,000 searches

Hand Made - 301,000 searches

Handcrafted - 201,000 searches

Hand Crafted - 27,100 searches

This gives a clear indication that Handmade and Hand Made is far more popular in cutsomers minds than the word Handcrafted/Hand crafted.

Around the world - the same pattern is evident with the following:

Handmade - 2,740,000 searches

Hand Made - 1,500,000 searches

Handcrafted - 1,000000 searches

Hand Crafted - 201,000 searches

This is why I've chosen to name my jewellery Handmade Silver Jewellery

Free Photograph of Pearls

Free Image from clip art of Pearls

For anyone who wants a picture of pearls for advertising - here's one for you. It's free to use for your own purposes. I hope it's useful to you.

Dorchester Life

I'm featured on page 6 by Ruth in the Dorchester Life magazine for July
Dorchester Life Article "Silversmith gees up for success".

A -Z of Selling Handmade Silver Jewellery / Selling Jewellery

It's the letter G this week in the A-Z of Selling Handmade Silver Jewellery Blog but obviously it can apply to any art wares being sold.

G.  Gallery / Galleries

So how do you go about selling in Galleries?
Galleries tend to mostly work on the basis of sale or return for your goods. Work on a rough guide of 40% commission with 20% VAT - so if you're not VAT registered (ie turnover of less than £73000) then your prices need to take into account this amount being taken by the VAT man.  They will also generally want you to provide jewellery boxes/packaging for your items.  As a general rule they will settle your account on a monthly basis for any sales in the previous month.

If you sell online or in other outlets it's vital that your prices don't vary from gallery to shop to online.  Imagine how a customer would feel if they bought one of your items in a gallery and then went online and found you selling it at a cheaper price because you're not having to pay the fees to the gallery.  It doesn't take much to see that they will go back to the gallery and complain!  So, you'll have lost an outlet as well as annoyed the gallery immensly.  Work out your normal prices based on the fact that you might sell to a gallery in the future if you haven't already got your jewellery into one yet.

Once you've worked out your prices, do some research and find out which galleries you'd like your jewellery to be in.  If you can, there's no substitute for visiting them with some examples of your work and asking.  Letters do tend to get 'lost' in a pile of correspondence and ignored.  Try telephoning first to make an appointment - but if you're in the area and are wearing your jewellery and spot a gallery you like the look of - there's never any harm wandering in and asking on the offchance.

The other option is to join a reputable association (eg. Association of Contemporary Jewellery). These organisations will have local co-ordinators with meetings regularly organising group exhibitions in galleries.
Outlets for Lesley H Phillips Jewellery