The Advangages of Custom Jewelry Manufacturing for Independent Designers

I feel the pain of an independent designer suddenly tasked with producing dozens and dozens of pieces. It’s gratifying to finally break through and find a market. But keeping up with demand can be a real challenge when you’re on your own.

Jewelry designers often need to start relying on a manufacturer when they get too big to produce all their pieces in-house. And all sorts of new business challenges arise with this. These turn into distractions from the joy of continuing to innovate and build your brand.

Additional employees may need to be hired to produce jewelry. Not only can it be difficult to find artisans who produce jewelry that is consistently high-quality, the designer is now tasked with management challenges, new overhead costs and possibly even the need to find space for more people to work. As a friend of mine once said: ‘bigger office, bigger problems.’

At this point, the jeweler / designer is forced to become more of a businessperson than an artisan. Creative people can succeed at the business aspect of the jewelry industry, but it’s worth arguing that it requires a somewhat different skillset, and it may not be the route most designers want to go.  

Expanding your Jewelry Manufacturing Base

A solution to the challenge of expansion: send the designs to a competent manufacturer who can produce them on-time, at a reasonable price and as per the specifications. This does several things.

  • It prevents you from having to do repetitive work.
  • It eliminates overhead costs of having a dedicated workforce that you need to support irrespective of your sales numbers. You can make an order when you need jewelry made, instead of constantly riding the line between your production staff being overworked and underworked due to unpredictable sales fluctuation. This includes the headache of seasonal demand shifts like the holidays etc.
  • Expenses on production become consistent and predictable.
  • Production can be scaled immediately without the need for expansion plans or professional management challenges. New designs can be sent and produced quickly.
  • You have more time for branding and marketing. Invest time in expansion.   
  • You have more time for creative work, so you can continue doing what you do best: design. Production is one of the necessary ingredients of a successful business, but it never gets anywhere without inspirational designs that originate from highly motivated and impassioned designers. You can focus on steering the ship and keeping your finger on the pulse of the market while we deal with production, supply and logistical challenges.   

Our Jewelry Manufacturing Process

Here’s the basic process we follow when working with a designer. If you’re a designer with 3d models already made, skip the first two steps below. If you have a metal caste, start at step three.  

  1. Send us a picture or a drawing of the piece(s)
  2. We use software to render the piece(s) in 3d
  3. We print the 3d design
  4. We cast the 3d design into metal
  5. We make rubber molds using the metal casting
  6. We start the production process
  7. We document the first piece, once finished.
  8. Once approved, we produce all the pieces needed.

Advantages of Producing in Taxco, Mexico

You may find the occasional warning about getting jewelry manufacturing done abroad. Taxco de Alarcon is clearly abroad, but it’s just a few hours flight from LA. It has extraordinarily high standards of artisanry and meanwhile, the reduced cost of doing business here allows for advantageous prices.

Shipping only takes several days, so it’s not as if our designer partners are dealing with a factory operation in China and would have to wait for weeks to see results.

We’ve found the most important aspects of doing business to be reliability and quality.

It always seems like a bit of a leap of faith when you are working with a supplier for the first time. This is partly why we try to structure our partnership initiation so the designer takes as little risk as possible. We take pride in our partnerships with jewelry designers and retailers, and we don’t consider ourselves a typical ‘outsourced’ option.

Here are some advantages manufacturing with us:  

  • Shipping is free, and all tariffs and duties are taken care of.
  • We have standard quality control processes. Each piece of jewelry must be inspected for defects before it can be shipped.
  • No staggered or irregular shipping schedules. All orders are produced under one local manager and packaged together in the same shipment. There are no instances of multiple packages with different arrival dates etc.  
  • Zero language barrier. Spanish speaking reps are available as are native English speakers, which helps streamline business communications.
  • Design customization is precise due to our reliance on technology, which allows us to use your 3d rending to create castes or to utilize the castes that you’ve created and can send to us.    

Reach out to us if you’re interested!

Aside

Taxco.925 silver is always marked with its percentage of purity before it’s used to make silver jewelry; Our article, 925 sterling silver vs pure silver gives a brief explanation as to how stronger alloys are used to make jewelry more durable, and it has no adverse impact on the appearance. When customers ask ‘why sterling silver vs pure silver?’ the answer is longevity and durability.

Taxco plata is starting to make a name for itself, and this helped our retail partners. Customers in upscale silver retail markets in particular are interested in Taxco silver wholesale.

These include the following handcrafted items: