Ever heard of
“bespoke jewelry”? I hadn’t, at least not til the other day when I read this article on the New York Times website. If you’re short
on time, I’ll save you a few minutes and summarize:
Bespoke jewelry =
custom-made jewelry.
Evidently the trend
is on the upswing and it’s helping lift high-end jewelry sales out of the slump
caused by the 2008 recession.
Interestingly, I
came across the article around the same time I got the disappointing news that
Etsy—the formerly-handmade online marketplace—changed their guidelines
to allow people to sell mass produced items. When Etsy started in 2005, it was
a great alternative to the abundance of online marketplaces selling
mass-produced products. It was a place where artisans could sell their handmade
products. It was a place where shoppers could browse hundreds of thousands of
artisans’ shops and they could have confidence that all the products were individually
made by the seller. It was a place where we were all taking pledges to buy
handmade:
But now Etsy is
focusing on “authorship,” which means as long as the artist came up with the
concept, they can send it out to be mass produced and still sell it on Etsy.
I’m not the only one who is upset about the change. As soon as the announcement
was made, the internet was flooded with articles, blogs and forums where
customers and creators expressed their disappointment.
It’s not like I
have anything against mass produced products. I mean, that’s pretty much every
item of clothing I own (with the exception of a hat I bought in Peru and my
grandma-knitted slippers). IKEA makes an appearance in more than one room of my
house. There’s no handmade stamp on the tumbler I use to polish titanium wire
or the pliers I use to wrap it around precious stones. So of course mass
produced is okay. I’m just bummed that Etsy is moving away from their
commitment to handmade that compelled me to set up shop with them in the first
place.
The Etsy
announcement and the article about bespoke jewelry got me thinking. What’s so
special about handmade jewelry anyway?
Whether it's a
proud mama who receives a multicolored band of knotted strings from her little
girl, or a wealthy traveler who commissions a custom-made ring from a chunk of
sapphire she acquired on a trip to Madagascar, there’s something so very
special about owning a piece of jewelry that no one else in the world has. This
is why I adore handmade jewelry. Each piece is a little (or, in some cases, a
lot!) different.
These pure titanium pearl post earrings are one of my
best-sellers, and I make a lot of them. Sometimes I make so many, I feel like I
am mass producing them! I see these babies in my mind when I’m trying to
fall asleep at night. But if you could come to my studio . . . [Sidebar: I
don’t actually have a studio. I make jewelry in our guest room/office, and
sometimes at my kitchen table. But writing "my studio" makes me feel
glamorous.] Anyway, if you came to my studio/guest room/office/kitchen table on
a day when I’m whipping up a batch of Titanium Grace earrings, and if you plucked two of them off
the pearly pile, you’d notice small differences. The swirls go different
directions. The spaces between the wire are different. Sometimes when I have an
extra cup of coffee there's an extra swirl and I have to start over!
Then there are the
pieces of custom jewelry—I mean, pieces of bespoke jewelry—which are
totally, completely unique. A customer in Chicago
often places orders for necklaces or earrings that incorporate a specific stone
that has some meaning to her.
She’ll write to me:
“I really love blue topaz. Can you make me something with blue topaz?”
Or she’ll send me a
photo of a necklace she loves and ask me to create something similar but with
pearl or smoky quartz.
These kinds of
orders are a dream. It’s so much fun for me to get input from my customer and
create a special piece that’s truly unique and meaningful to her. A piece no
one else in the world has. Bespoken.
Because I hand make
each piece of jewelry, my customers always have the option to customize their
orders, even in small ways. Titanium and niobium earrings are hard to find, and
pure titanium earrings are even harder to find. So those of us with metal
allergies have really limited options in the earring department. People often
contact me with specific requests for their sensitive ears or for their
children’s sensitive ears, and I love being able to offer exactly what my
customers need and expand their options. For example, earring posts are a
standard length, which is a bit of a problem since human earlobes aren’t a
standard size. So sometimes customers ask for longer or shorter titanium posts.
Or they ask for smaller or larger titanium hoops.
I hope Etsy doesn’t
lose sight of how special handmade is, and I hope they work things out so that
shoppers will know which products and shops are handmade and which aren’t. No
matter what happens with Etsy, though, I’m 100% committed to keeping Variya
100% handmade.
