The 5 Reasons Why Jewelry Designers Fail At Business

Let Business Concerns Influence Your Artistic Choices

To what extent do (and should) business concerns influence the artistic choices bead and jewelry artists make?

If you want to be in business, then I’d say, “A Lot!” But this isn’t what a lot of artists like to hear.

Jewelry making is not a passive art. You make jewelry for others to wear, and have to anticipate how they will assess your work and recognize your artistry. It is not the same as painting a painting or sculpting a sculpture in the sense that with paintings or sculptures, the artist does not need to communicate interactively with the viewer in order to create the product and be deemed successful. Jewelry making, instead, is more an interactive art. It is like architecture, where success can only be created through some kind of dialectic with others, and only be defined as successful as the product is introduced publicly.

Selling your pieces is merely another phase of this interactive art, but sometimes forces upon you some more limits and refinements. You have to market to audiences. You may have to standardize things to be able to make the same thing over and over again. You may have to work in a production mode and repeat making certain designs, rather than freely create and…