Four years of Their Studios

Their Studios is four this month, which feels like both a long time and no time at all.

We started this at a desk in our house, packing every order by hand, and for most of the four years since, that is still where orders went out from. We are not going to pretend that was a strategy. It was just how it worked, and we got quite attached to it. You learn things about your own business when you are the one putting it in the box.

People usually ask what we have learned, and the honest answer is that most of it we learned by doing the expensive version first. So here is some of that, in case it is useful to anyone else making things.

On making things in small numbers

A new design starts at twenty to thirty pieces per material. That is on purpose, and it is absolutely not the efficient way to run a jewelry brand.

What it means in practice is that things sell out, and then we have to tell someone the piece they came for is gone, and quite often we cannot tell them when it is coming back or whether it is. That part has never got easier and we do not think it should. The alternative is ordering hundreds of something against a guess, and then living with that guess in a box for a year when it turns out to be wrong. We would rather run out.

But we want to be straight that this is a cost we pay rather than some virtue we get for free. It took us a while to stop dressing it up.

What a piece looks like before it is a piece

Almost everything we sell started as a pencil drawing with a measurement written next to it. Not a reference image. A shape, a number of millimetres, and a note to ourselves about what the inside should do.

The cuff below is one of them. On the left is where it started, on the right is the one you can buy today.

Everything that happens between those two pictures is the part nobody photographs. The CAD, the first sample that came back wrong, the second one that came back nearly right, a long and frankly quite silly argument about how wide the flat faces should be, and then at some point the decision to stop fiddling with it. That is months. It is also the reason we cannot turn a design around quickly even when we really want to.

On advertising

We ran paid social for almost two years, and we want to say something nice about it first, because it deserves it. If you want people who have never heard of you to see your product, there is nothing faster. You can put a bracelet in front of thousands of people in a week, and choose which thousands.

The trouble is what it costs to get one of them to actually buy. That is called customer acquisition cost, and it needs to sit under what that customer is worth to you over the years they stick around. Ours never got there. The brands we were bidding against for the same person can spend a lot more than us and still make it back, and that gap does not close by being more clever with the targeting. We tried.

So we kept it running longer than we should have, mostly because stopping felt like giving up on something. But we did end up turning it off in September, finally. It was the right call and we should have made it sooner.

On launching things because it is October

For the first couple of years we put new pieces out because it felt like it was time to put new pieces out. There was a rhythm we thought we were supposed to keep up with, so we kept up with it.

You can see it in the work, though. A piece made to fill a slot in a calendar looks exactly like a piece made to fill a slot in a calendar, and we could tell. So now something only goes into production if it does a job nothing else in the range does. Which means fewer launches, and some months where we have genuinely nothing new to show you, and we still find that uncomfortable every single time.

On discounting, which is very tempting

A discount is the easiest lever in the whole business and it is the one that costs the most, and it is never more appealing than at the end of a quiet month when you have been staring at the same figure for a week.

We do run sales, and you will see them coming, because they are planned a long way out. What changed is that we stopped adding one just because a month had been disappointing. It is harder than it sounds.

On letting things end

Some of our designs are not made any more. Every one of them sold out before we stopped, which sounds like a nice problem to have right up until you are the person deciding not to reorder something people clearly loved.

Small batches mean some pieces get a life instead of a permanent listing, and we do still think that is right. It stings every time and we have never once made that decision quickly.

The bit we have never changed

From the very first pieces, we have told you exactly what they are made of. Not quality. Not craftsmanship. 14K recycled gold at 2.5 microns over recycled 925 sterling silver. Solid recycled 925. Recycled 14K the whole way through.

That was never a marketing decision, it came from being on the other side of it, buying jewelry ourselves and not being told what was underneath the gold. It is the driest writing on any of our product pages and we have never been tempted to soften it.

And the good parts

Not all of this was correction.

The first shop that said yes to stocking us changed something. You can make jewelry on your own and believe it is good, and it stays a belief right up until somebody with their own name over the door puts it on a shelf next to the things they chose themselves. Every stockist since has been that same feeling again, and it has not got old.

And the pieces are in Nordstrom now, which is the one we have quietly wanted since the first batch. It took all four years, which is about right for the way we do things.

Four years in, the business looks almost nothing like the one we thought we were building, and quite a lot like the one we actually wanted. Fewer pieces, made in smaller numbers, sold slowly to people who keep them. We are in no hurry to change that.

What we are sure about is that none of it would still be here without the people who came back. The ones who wore the first thing they bought from us long enough to want a second one. The ones who send us photographs of something they bought in the first year, still going. The ones who told a friend about us when there was absolutely nothing in it for them. There was no particular reason to take a chance on a small brand nobody had heard of four years ago, and plenty of you did it anyway, and we think about that more often than you would probably guess.

Thank you, really. Here is to the fifth year of Their Studios!!

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More on the materials and how they are chosen: plated, filled, vermeil and solid gold and what is demi fine jewelry.