Consignment Shops and Baseball Bats

Today's Silver Price: $34.79/t.oz

Consignment Shops

People are always telling me that I should sell my jewelry in consignment shops. My immediate reaction is always 'Hell No!' Just this morning someone told me that a friend of theirs had opened a consignment shop in the area and I could contact her to sell my jewelry. Here's how it would work. I make an agreement with a shop owner in which they will sell my jewelry in their store, and they keep a percentage of the sale. I trust that the shop owner will take good care of my handmade merchandise and make some effort to sell it. Now I'm not sure of the details of these kinds of agreements such as what percentage of the sale they keep, I suppose that depends on the arrangement.

From what I have read consignment shops can be a very bad choice.

In his book Philip Kadubec describes how he and his wife made an agreement with a consignment shop to sell their handmade baskets. They set up the baskets in the shop's window display and left the store with high hopes. When they returned at a later date they found that their baskets had been moved- placed under a table and out of view. That's no way to sell a product! Once you leave your product in someone else's shop you have no control over how and where it is displayed.

One of my objections to consignment is that I try to keep my prices as low as possible in order to attract buyers, but at the same time make a decent profit. If I were to give a percentage of my sale to someone else it wouldn't be worth it. I would have to raise my prices.

Also, I have always been terrible at delegating responsibility. So how could I trust someone else (a stranger, by the way) to sell my product? They didn't make it, they have no love for it, and if it doesn't sell it's no loss for them. For now I will stay away from consignment arrangements because it just doesn't feel right for me. Maybe in the future I will revisit the idea but for now I will continue to respectfully decline the suggestion.

Baseball Bats

This past Friday I was sitting in my car on my lunch break thinking about cuff bracelets (this is how my mind works- I daydream about jewelry). I found this video last week in which the artist makes a cuff bracelet out of a strip of 16 gauge sterling silver. He simply bends and then hammers the silver around a mandrel and forms a bracelet. Rio Grande sells a great selection of plain and patterned wire that can easily be made into cuff bracelets using a bracelet mandrel. A bracelet mandrel is a cylindrical object (usually steel) around which metal can be bent or wrapped in order to form a bracelet. As I mentioned last week, I do not have a bracelet mandrel, and one would cost about $30 or $40 to purchase.

I thought about what other objects I could possibly find that are similar to a mandrel and could be used for shaping cuff bracelets. I remembered I have an aluminum baseball bat in the back of my Jeep (a girl can never be too careful) and realized it was quite similar to a mandrel. I pulled the bat out of the back and found it was a pretty good size for wrapping a bracelet around. Aaaaaand... makeshift mandrel? Check!

I'm psyched out of my mind about it! I think cuff bracelets will become a large part of my jewelry collection in the very near future.