This is a guest post written by Candace Stribling from Candace Stribling Jewelry.
Branding jewelry can be hard. I am a small business owner who went through the branding process and I’m writing today to share what I learned.
Why it’s important to brand your jewelry
Every artist, no matter the media, must have an online presence. Per this Forbes article, there was a 129% year-over-year growth in U.S. and Canadian e-commerce this year and an 8.8% increase in conversion rates.
Plus, more and more people are starting online stores. Shopify has over 1 million merchants. That number is likely much higher today.
There are thousands of artists who make similar art as you do. How do you get people to remember you? How many times have you heard ‘I got this on Etsy’ instead of ‘I purchased this from artist Sally Smith who has a shop on Etsy’. Buyers know Etsy, but the artists are faceless names.
With so much competition, branding can make your jewelry business stand out.
Brand or brand identity is ‘set of tools or elements used by a company to create a brand image’. Simply, it is what you use to distinguish your brand so that buyers remember you.
In January, I made the decision that my current brand was not defining what my jewelry was all about and I was not reaching my ideal customer. My goals in rebranding were to make my site speak to my target customer – in terms of messaging, user experience and look feel.
It took several months, but my brand now looks cohesive and I’m starting to see positive results.
I wanted to share my four steps to rebranding.
1. Who buys your jewelry? Define your ideal customer
While many kinds of people buy from you, you should design your pieces and your business around a specific kind of buyer. I defined my ideal customer based on a conversation I had with a woman who purchased a pair of earrings from me at an art show last year. She told me how much she loved art fairs, looking and marveling at the art made by artists. When I asked her why, she remarked that you cannot get the stories, the passion, or the heart of the person when you buy from mass-produced jewelry. She loved connecting with artists.
My ideal customer is someone like her that loves jewelry made by hand and wants a personal connection to artist. They want to been seen as individuals with their own personal sense of style and not wearing jewelry that everyone has. I think about this customer when designing my pieces and my website.
I highly recommend reading Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller. He talks about how to build a story around your ideal customer. What is their problem and how does your product help solve that problem.
I worked with one of his certified story brand experts, Karen Martin of KNM Consulting, who helped me define my brand story script. I use this script in all my communications. It makes it so easy to pull words, statements, feelings from this script to speak to my ideal customer.
2. Choose your brand colors and fonts to appeal to your jewelry buyer
Next, I had to select colors and fonts that would appeal to my ideal customer. I found this process hard. I can choose the right colored gemstones for my jewelry designs but selecting a brand look was a little daunting.
I decided to engage with Kristen, a creative graphics designer who happens to be a very successful jewelry designer as well. She came up with my brand colors, fonts, and overall look. She also designed two guides that I use as my freebies that people receive when they sign up for my email list, the CSJ Insiders group.
Here is the color set I decided on.
On fonts, I told her I didn’t want any flowery, serif fonts. My jewelry is minimalist and understated so I wanted the fonts to reflect it. She gave me a selection of fonts to choose from. She convinced me that having a serif for headings would be a nice contrast with a non-serif font. Ultimately, I selected the Cormorant Garamond font to use for headings and Muli Regular which is san serif font for body text. I think they work well together.
3. Brand your website
I use Shopify for my e-commerce vendor. They have many free and paid templates to choose from. My site is built using Pixel Union’s Atlantic theme. A few months ago, I updated this theme to their current version so I could get more features. I did the initial redesign of the website using my brand colors.
My old site looked like this:
And now it looks like this, using my brand colors, fonts, and phrases.
I wanted the website to look inviting and sophisticated. My new brand colors and fonts are prominent throughout the design. The key phrases from my brand script on my homepage.
I updated the website as much as my skills would allow then I had Alexander Design tweak some of the pages and improve the user experience.
4. Carry your brand to other communications
It’s important to carry the brand to all of the communications you use, whether it’s email, newletters or social media posts (i.e. Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest).
Here are some of my Instagram posts using the new fonts and colors.
Conclusion
Going through this process was hard work but rewarding. I’ve learned a lot about branding, marketing, website design and lot of other marketing/business aspects that I was unaware of or let slide. My advice to you take the first step and evaluate if your website and copy talks to your ideal customer. If not, get started on this journey and enjoy the process!
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