Home Business Blog

This is a very fun, yet tough field. Beaded jewelry is beautiful and actually very simple to learn. As a jewelry designer you will use all of your creativity, and patience to design, make, and sell custom jewelry and accessories. You can work with sterling silver or other recycled metals, even using clay or paper-mâché. You can market and sell your finished work at fairs, flea markets, art shows, even in some local gift shops. All you need is a nice little tablecloth to lay over the table and display your jewels on that.

I recommend learning the basics of jewelry design before jumping into this full time, you can begin with a few books and I have also tracked down some e-books on the subject. More on those in a minute. If you are planning on selling homemade jewelry, you will need to find a source that you can buy in bulk for cheap. Also make sure to buy a minimum of 3 each of anything you buy (beads and jewel related- not the wires and thread) You want to get multiples for a few reasons, one is so you can make more, another is if you make a piece and sell it, what if their friend loves it and wants one just like it. Often the store you bought it from may not have the ’same’ pieces, just like in knitting, you want everything to come from the same dye lot.

Always start out small if you are not already a jeweler, get a feel for it using a kit or a set, here are a few to get you started; Bead Buddy Kit, Basic Beadmaking Starter Kit, and Beginner Jewelery Making Kit with DVD. You can also find beads in bulk on Ebay and sometimes at flea markets. Another great source for beads is antique shops, at all of the ones here in town, ours has buckets of unique jewels, from people that bring in beautiful beaded jewelry that has broken overtime. Here in town they charge a dollar a pound for a bag of beads, and another store sells them for .25 cents each. Often you can find hidden treasures, crystals and real pearl mixed in with ordinary beads. While they do sell beads at wal-mart, I do not recommend buying from there except for practicing, as the quality is extremely low on a lot of them, I have found some really nice beads at wal-mart, so not all is lost, but try a craft store like JoAnn’s or Michaels’.

You will also want to pick up some books / Magazines on the subject, they have several at Amazon, just search for Bead Making. A few of my favorites from when I experimented with beading are The Encyclopedia of Jewelry-Making Techniques: A Comprehensive Visual Guide to Traditional and Contemporary Techniques, Jewelry Making & Beading For Dummies, and Marketing and Selling Your Handmade Jewelry: The Complete Guide to Turning Your Passion into Profit. There is also a dvd you can get that shows you how to do a professional job called Beading: 8 Easy Projects. And here is a book from a reader of Home Biz Blogger; Teach Yourself VISUALLY Jewelry Making & Beading (Teach Yourself VISUALLY Consumer)- thanks Chris for sharing it with us!

Another way to get started are the ebooks on the jewelry design business, I tracked down some on Click Bank; Guide To Your Profitable Jewelry Booth, Beading And Jewelry Making and Start Your Own Jewelry Party Business look promising.

If you are wondering what to charge for your pieces, there is a great software program, this is what I used when I started selling at the fair every week. It is a program that has you enter in all of your supplies and the cost, then each time you make a piece you specify how much of what you used and it tells you how much it ‘cost’ to make that piece, and gives recommendations of the price based on the hourly rate you set for yourself. This really helped me as I am really bad at undercharging, therefor not making a profit, this helped so I always made at least some profit. You can get the Bead Manager Pro here .

Ok, I think I covered the basics, let me know if you get started in this, I would love to see what you come up with, jewelry design is so beautiful to me.

Posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 9:59 am in Working at Home | rss feed for comments| Leave a response, or trackback