The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Career in Jewellery Design
As a jewellery designer, you take on the task of conceptualizing designs and ideas to provide suitable solutions to clients or for manufacturing. You can either offer your services to clients and work with a manufacturing jeweler to create the pieces or design and manufacture the jewellery yourself.
Here are my top tips to get you started in a career as a jewellery designer:
Gain Bench/ Production Experience or training: To create feasible solutions, it is essential to understand what is involved in producing jewellery properly. Understanding tools, techniques, materials, sourcing, pricing, and overall capabilities is a non-negotiable for a jewellery designer.
Learn Creative thinking/ problem solving: The ability to generate ideas and provide solutions to meet client needs or solve client problems is an important part of a jewellery designers role. Understanding how to ideate and create multiple possible solutions to explore and develop is important for designing original and client relevant solutions.
Learn how to communicate both verbally and visually: Verbal communication is key when working with clients. Good communication skills are essential for understanding client needs and confirming them through questioning. Visual communicate is important so you can communicate your ideas and solutions. Solutions can be communicated through drawing or illustrations but this isn't necessarily the only communication method. CAD or model making techniques (in paper, clay, or wax) can also be used to communicate ideas.
A few extras that have helped me:
Build a Portfolio: Building a portfolio of work is one of the best ways to showcase your style and attract suitable clients. Clients won't pay you to do it unless they can see what you can deliver.
Keep Learning: Continuously learning new skills and being aware of the ever-changing market/trends is critical. Being aware of what's happening and new developments or techniques is always an asset.
Please note that while I did mention visual communication (drawing) I think it is important to clarify a jewellery designer and a jewellery illustrator are different roles. I understand the confusion around these terms in the jewellery industry but being a jewellery designer requires a few more skills than drawing.
I hope these tips help you understand the role of a jewellery designer and guide you if you are thinking of starting a career in jewellery design.