What NOT to Spend Money on in Your Jewellery Business (and What to Invest in Instead) (Podcast Episode)
There are so many things you could spend money on when you’re starting or growing a jewellery business but which ones are actually worth it?
In this episode of the Jewellers Academy podcast, Jessica Rose and Anna Campbell share the investments they’d think twice about, from expensive magazine features and paid ads to huge amounts of stock, packaging and tools. We also look at where your money can make a much bigger difference, from skills and capacity to useful business assets.
Because growing your jewellery business isn’t about buying all the things; it’s about investing in the right things at the right stage.
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When you’re starting or growing a jewellery business, there are almost endless things you could spend money on. New tools, beautiful packaging, more gemstones, a professionally designed website, advertising, awards, magazine features and more stock can all feel like sensible investments in your future business.
And some investments really can make a huge difference. They can help you improve your skills, make more efficiently, reach the right customers and ultimately increase your profit. Others are much more likely to be shiny objects: things that look exciting, feel like signs that your business is growing, but don’t necessarily give you much of a return.
The problem is that it isn’t always easy to tell the difference, particularly when you’re new to running a jewellery business and someone is presenting you with what sounds like an incredible opportunity.
In this episode of the Jewellers Academy Podcast, Jessica Rose and Anna Campbell look at some of the things they wouldn’t recommend spending large amounts of money on when you’re starting a jewellery business and, importantly, where they think your money can have a much bigger impact instead.
This isn’t about never spending money. Growing a successful jewellery business does require investment. It’s about spending consciously and making sure that, wherever possible, the money you put into your business is helping you build something stronger, more profitable and more sustainable.
Before you spend money on your jewellery business, ask these three questions
One of the biggest themes of this episode is that there are very few things that are an automatic yes or no for every jewellery business. An investment that makes complete sense for an established jewellery brand may make very little sense for someone who has only just started selling. Something that is essential for the kind of jewellery you make might be completely unnecessary for another jeweller.
So before making a significant purchase, start by asking yourself what you are actually hoping it will do. Are you expecting it to increase sales, save you time, help you make a new type of jewellery, build your credibility or bring more people to your website?
Then think about how you will know whether it worked. Depending on the investment, you might be able to look at sales, enquiries, email subscribers, website visitors or production time. Not everything is easy to measure, but being clear about what success would look like stops you spending money simply because something feels exciting.
Finally, ask yourself: is this the best use of this money at this stage of my business?
If you have £500, £1,000 or £2,000 available to invest in your jewellery business, there may be several perfectly reasonable ways to spend it. The question isn’t simply Is this a good thing? It’s whether this is the best thing you could do with that money right now.
The questions to ask yourself:
What do you hope this purchase will do for your business?
How will you know if it’s worked?
Is this the best use of this money at this stage of my business?
The following are a list of things discussed in this episode that are worth considering seriously before purchasing.
1. Expensive paid magazine features
Many new jewellery businesses receive emails from recognisable magazines offering them the opportunity to be featured. And it can feel incredibly exciting. Someone from a publication you know has apparently discovered your jewellery, loves what you do and wants to include your brand.
Then you discover that the feature costs hundreds or sometimes thousands of pounds.
These opportunities aren't necessarily scams. You may genuinely receive a small advert or feature in the publication, and being able to say that your jewellery has appeared in a well-known magazine may have some value for your brand. But that doesn’t automatically make it a good investment.
Jessica shares her own experience in the episode of paying thousands of pounds for a feature in Vogue when she was starting her jewellery business. It gave her an impressive “As seen in Vogue” credit, but resulted in very little direct business.
That doesn’t mean you should never consider paid media opportunities. It means you need to be clear about what you're buying and what you hope to get from it. If your primary aim is sales, ask yourself whether a small advert in a large publication is genuinely likely to deliver them.
It is also worth remembering that paid advertorial is not your only route into the media. Genuine editorial coverage, local press, industry publications and sharing your story with journalists can all be valuable ways of gaining visibility without paying thousands of pounds for the privilege.
2. Paying accounts to repost your jewellery or give you followers
If you use Instagram to promote your jewellery, you may have encountered accounts that contact you saying how much they love your work and offering to feature it to their huge audience, as long as you pay them.
Be wary of these offers. At the more dubious end of the spectrum, they may simply be scams or attempts to sell fake followers. Even if the account genuinely does have a large audience, that doesn’t mean those people are potential customers for your jewellery.
One hundred people who genuinely love your work are far more valuable to your jewellery business than tens of thousands of disengaged followers who have no idea who you are. What you are trying to build is not simply a big number underneath your Instagram profile. You’re building a community of people who like your jewellery, connect with your brand and may eventually become customers.
There are legitimate paid collaborations that can work. For example, paying someone to create professional user-generated content for your jewellery brand is a very different proposition because you are paying for a specific service and a piece of content you can use.
But paying a faceless account simply for “exposure” needs to looked at very carefully.
3. Huge amounts of jewellery stock
One of the easiest ways to tie up money in a new jewellery business is to make far too much stock before you know what people actually want to buy.
It’s understandable. You may feel as though you need a huge collection before you can launch your website or attend your first craft fair, so you keep making because you want your range to feel complete and professional.
In reality, you don’t need hundreds of pieces of jewellery to start selling. You might begin with a collection of eight to twelve designs and make only one or two of each. Photograph them, share them on social media, add them to your website, take them to an event and start talking about them.
This is how you begin to learn what your customers actually respond to. You may discover that the piece you almost left out of the collection becomes your bestseller. Your customers might want more personalised jewellery, more gold, a different style or a particular type of piece. You simply cannot know all of that before you start putting your work in front of people.
Making smaller quantities also helps with stock rotation. You make jewellery, sell it, use that income to make more and gradually build a collection based on real customer demand rather than guesses.
This becomes even more important if you're moving into fine jewellery and working with more expensive materials such as gold. You do not need to produce an entire gold collection overnight. Start with one piece or three pieces and build from there. Quality matters far more than quantity.
4. Large quantities of branded jewellery packaging
Packaging is another area where it’s incredibly easy to get carried away. Jewellers tend to be visually minded people, so beautiful colours, logos, boxes, ribbons, cards and all the tiny details that make receiving a piece of jewellery feel special can be very tempting.
Then the packaging company tells you that the boxes cost significantly less per unit if you order 500. It sounds like a bargain until you have hundreds of boxes sitting in your studio several years later displaying a logo you no longer use.
Your packaging needs to be good enough to protect your jewellery and create a lovely experience for your customer, but it does not need to be your ultimate packaging solution from day one.
Start small. Choose one or two versatile box sizes rather than having separate bespoke packaging for every type of jewellery you sell. Look for colours that complement your branding without necessarily having everything printed immediately.
You can evolve your packaging as your jewellery business grows. Paying slightly more per box initially may actually be far cheaper than investing in hundreds of boxes you eventually decide you don’t want.
5. Every jewellery-making tool you have ever wanted
We know this might be the controversial one, because jewellers love tools.
There is always another tool that would be wonderful to own, another piece of workshop equipment that could make something easier or another new jewellery-making technique you could try. But if you are building a jewellery business rather than simply buying tools for your own enjoyment, every big purchase needs to earn its place.
Think about whether a tool will allow you to make something you cannot currently make, whether it will significantly speed up your production or whether it will directly support the jewellery you are planning to sell.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with buying something purely because you want it if you can afford to do so. It is simply useful to recognise that this is different from making a strategic business investment.
Some tools can genuinely transform a jewellery business. Jess talks in the episode about buying her first kiln after learning metal clay. It felt like an enormous expense at the time, but because she was going to teach metal clay and make collections using it, the kiln paid for itself many times over.
It is also worth thinking creatively about access to tools. If there is an expensive piece of equipment you only need occasionally, could you access it somewhere else? Perhaps there is a jewellery school, evening class or bench-hire studio nearby where you can use equipment such as a rolling mill without buying one yourself.
And while we’re here, we should probably talk about gemstones. Buying gemstones and actually using gemstones can sometimes feel like two completely different hobbies.
Before adding another beautiful stone to your collection, have some idea of what you plan to make with it and consider setting yourself a gemstone budget. Your future self, and your bank balance, may thank you.
6. Paid advertising too early
It is tempting to believe advertising is the shortcut to getting your first jewellery sales. You may think that if only more people saw your jewellery, they would buy it, so you put money into Instagram or Facebook ads and wait.
The difficulty is that buying jewellery from an independent maker is often a trust-based purchase. Someone who has never heard of your brand before needs to go from seeing one advert to trusting you enough to hand over their money. For higher-priced jewellery, that is a significant leap.
This is why organic marketing can be so valuable when you are building a jewellery business. People discover your work through social media, see several posts, hear the story behind your jewellery, meet you at a craft fair, join your email list or send you a message. Over time, they move from being a completely cold audience to someone who knows your work and feels confident buying from you.
Paid advertising can have a role in business growth, particularly once you have an established product range, customers, reviews and evidence that people already want what you're selling. But it is unlikely to be the magic switch that turns a brand-new jewellery business into a profitable one.
Build the foundations first.
7. A hugely expensive website
You need somewhere people can see and buy your jewellery, but you do not need an enormously expensive bespoke website to achieve that.
Platforms such as Shopify and Squarespace have made it possible to create good-looking, functional ecommerce websites without paying a web designer thousands of pounds. And simple is often better.
Your customer wants to see your jewellery clearly, understand what they're buying and know exactly how to purchase it. Beautiful imagery, clear descriptions and straightforward navigation are more important than complicated animations and dozens of clever website features.
You can always invest in professional web design later when you understand your customers, your product range and what you actually need from your website. In fact, creating a simple version yourself first can give you a much clearer idea of what you might eventually want a designer to improve.
Your first website is allowed to be the first draft of your jewellery business. Get it live, learn from it and improve it as the business grows.
8. Awards that seem to be more about the fee than the award
Winning or being shortlisted for an award can be brilliant for your confidence and your jewellery business. The process of entering can make you reflect on what you've achieved, and recognition from a respected organisation can provide valuable credibility.
But research the awards you're considering carefully. Look at who is behind the award, whether it is respected within your industry, who has won previously and what being shortlisted or winning actually means.
It is also worth paying attention to what you are being asked to spend. Some reputable awards do charge entry fees, so paying something does not automatically make an award questionable. However, very large fees, expensive compulsory event tickets or unsolicited messages announcing that you've mysteriously been selected for an award you've never heard of are all reasons to investigate further.
Enter awards because the recognition genuinely means something to you, your industry or your customers, rather than simply because someone has offered you a trophy in exchange for money.
So where SHOULD you invest money in a jewellery business?
Once you've removed some of those tempting shiny objects, there is a much more useful question to ask: where could this money make the biggest difference?
In the podcast, Jess and Anna identify three particularly valuable areas to consider: your skills, your capacity and the assets you are building within the business.
Invest in your skills
Your skills are one of the few investments nobody can take away from you, and that includes both your jewellery-making skills and your business knowledge.
Learning a new jewellery technique could allow you to expand your collections, work with different materials or take on commissions you couldn't previously accept. Developing your photography, marketing, selling, pricing or business skills could help you turn the jewellery you already know how to make into a stronger and more profitable business.
There are also plenty of times when we simply don’t know what we don’t know. Getting good training and expert guidance can save enormous amounts of trial and error and help you progress much faster than trying to piece everything together alone.
Of course, not every course or piece of training you ever invest in will be perfect. But developing yourself and your skills is something that can continue paying dividends throughout the life of your business.
Invest in capacity
There comes a stage in many jewellery businesses where the thing limiting growth is the business owner. There are only so many hours available, and you are making the jewellery, answering emails, posting parcels, managing the accounts, updating the website, taking photographs, creating social content and doing everything else required to keep the business running.
Eventually, getting some help can be a much better investment than buying another piece of equipment.
That doesn't have to mean employing someone. It could mean hiring a freelance photographer for a day, paying an accountant, using a virtual assistant for a few hours or outsourcing a task you dislike. It can even mean paying for support outside the business that gives you more time and energy to work.
Often, when you start your business, doing everything yourself is useful because it helps you understand how all the different parts of the business work. But as the business grows, you may find that you become the bottleneck. If absolutely everything has to be done by you or approved by you, there is a limit to how much the business can grow.
Buying back some of your capacity allows you to spend more time on the things you do particularly well and on the work that only you can do.
Invest in assets
It is also worth thinking about the things you can pay for once and continue to benefit from afterwards.
Good-quality jewellery photography is an excellent example. A strong set of images can be used on your website, social media, emails, press pitches, marketing materials and applications for events, so it can keep working hard for your business long after the original shoot.
Your email list is another enormously valuable business asset. Social media platforms can change, algorithms can change and accounts can disappear, whereas your email list gives you a direct way to communicate with people who have chosen to hear from your jewellery business.
Your website is an asset too, even if it begins very simply. Then there are the less glamorous expenses that make your business function, such as your website subscription, your email marketing software and the systems you rely on regularly.
They may not give you the same dopamine hit as buying a beautiful new tool or opening a parcel of gemstones, but they can contribute far more to building a sustainable jewellery business.
Relevant craft fairs and events can also be a valuable investment, particularly when they put you directly in front of the kinds of customers who are likely to buy your work. The key, as with every other investment, is choosing the right opportunities rather than assuming that simply paying to be somewhere will automatically result in sales.
Sustainable growth is rarely the shiny option
There is a common thread running through all of this. The things that look most exciting are not necessarily the things that grow your jewellery business.
Being featured in a famous magazine feels exciting. Having boxes covered in your logo feels exciting. Buying another expensive tool feels exciting. Watching a huge number of new followers appear on Instagram feels exciting.
Building an email list one person at a time is less glamorous. Improving your skills week after week is slower. Gradually finding out which jewellery your customers actually want and reinvesting the money you make takes patience. But this is how sustainable jewellery businesses are built.
You don't need to get every investment right. Sometimes you'll buy something that turns out not to be particularly useful. Sometimes you'll invest in an opportunity that doesn't deliver what you hoped. That's part of running a business, and the aim isn't to make perfect decisions every single time.
Instead, get into the habit of stopping before you spend and asking yourself what you are hoping this investment will do, how you will know whether it has worked and whether this is genuinely the best use of your money at this stage of the business.
Those three questions alone could save you thousands of pounds over the lifetime of your jewellery business, while helping you put more of your money into the things that have the greatest chance of helping it grow.
Listen to the full episode of the Jewellers Academy Podcast to hear Jessica Rose and Anna Campbell share their own experiences, the purchases they would think twice about and the investments they believe really are worth making as you build your jewellery business.
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