Welcome to the GiltTrips podcast. I'm your host, Kendra Lockhart. As a goldsmith and
gemologist, I'll be speaking 24 carat on all things jewelry, metals, and gems. Join
me plus a few friends to demystify both materials and designs as your private jeweler. Let's
tune in on these topics and get golden. It took years of growing my career and just as
many to formulate some hindsight to come to the conclusion that my apprenticeship at the
beginning of my adventure was the perfect combination of light and dark. In today's episode,
I'm going to talk about how I decided I was ready for one, the steps that I took, what
I brought to the table before, who I became after, and the skills I picked up along the
way, both positive and ones that were learned in the shadows. So I had been a designer and
a salesperson for my first professional job. And after a certain amount of time there and
some friction around success with the manager, I decided the next step was to move on and
develop my bench skills. While I thought that I came to the game with a decent foundation,
I would later learn that what I was taught in undergrad wouldn't necessarily make the
cut. I'll come back to that later. So I didn't have much chance or choice around
resigning from the position that I was holding at the time. The manager had gone low and
called my clients on my day off to come and pick up their project that wasn't going to
be ready for another two days. And I had told them that. So it seemed like surprise. They're
early. Kendra's not here. But come on in and pick them up. So it was definitely a detrimental
experience in the client relationship. When I came back from my day off and found out
that the manager said, Oh, your clients came in early to pick up their rings, but they weren't
ready. And I said, why would they come in early when I told them I'd see them Friday or Saturday?
And they showed up on Wednesday. The clients generously and graciously shared they received
a call from my manager. There are times to attempt to reboot and refresh a relationship
with somebody in an authority position. And there are times to realize this is smoke and
whether smoke there's fire time to go. So I left without anything in the works. Fortunately,
I was able to go and collect some more hours at my original part time job in the dental
office while I could come up with a strategy. And the strategy was let's go into a certain
suburb in Chicago that was famous for being artisans, as well as showrooms of jewelry.
I'd grown up there. And since this was now my career choice, why not figure out how to
belong? All I really had left from my position as a salesperson and a designer was a sketchbook,
a couple dozen photos, and a few pieces that I was working on just in materials wasn't even close
to being assembled. So I had components that I could use to speak with. I summoned all the
curiosity, growth and magic that I know I hold within me. And this was a time before the internet
or smartphones. So I simply picked a bunch of stores that I was going to walk into and ask to
speak to the owner. And from there decide if they had time to see me on the spot, or if we could
book a second appointment to go over some of the things that I'd accomplished. And what I was
looking for as far as the next step in my career, opportunities that were already in the works,
or ones that could be created, so that there was some sort of partnership that could happen.
Does that sound a little ambitious for a 24 year old? Sure, except I'd been working since I was
12. So conversations that revolved around value propositions, or risk, or opportunity cost,
or shooting your shot weren't unfamiliar to me. Thank God. The one goldsmithing showroom that I
ended up getting chosen by asked me, up front after seeing everything that I brought to the
table, well, what can you actually do vocationally? And I answer that question from my education.
Well, I can anodize aluminum wire, I can etch a penny, I can, da da da da. And he said,
great, those aren't translatable skills. But he saw some potential, and did take me on as an
apprentice, and also said, we need to immediately put you into a jewelry class at the art center.
I'm not going to tell you that that was the cure all. I didn't necessarily learn things that immediately
made me somebody who was a commercial goldsmith. But it definitely added to the library, but it
definitely expanded upon the types of things I was being taught at college regarding metals,
and esoteric techniques that helped transition me to my future of being a bench jeweler.
The first skill that I was taught was polishing, and learned to take a project that had gone
through several steps beforehand into its home stretch. Is this going to get hand polished? Is
it going to be buffed and then finished? Is there going to be a technique on top of the
metal? Will it be sent out later for engraving? Is there going to be any touch ups after other
vendors? That was an important thing to start at. To this day, I will give him credit for beginning
me at the beginning of my learning curve, even though it was the tail end of a project to be
delivered. With polishing, I definitely had to learn a level of control and precision and timing,
as well as force or pressure between what I was holding onto and the machine that was doing the
work. I also got a fantastic education in the form of what our favorite polishing compounds would
be, which wheels were the best ones for which jobs. And this would make sense later for when I went
independent. The next skill that I was tasked with was sizing. And it was a blind task,
which is common talk for show us what you know, and we'll teach into your blind spots. So I was
given a sterling casting of a six millimeter band and was told size it as many times as you can,
until it can no longer be done. I had different levels of solder as far as temperature. And
fortunately, I knew that much. And I learned in the project that if you're going to make one cut,
the next sizing should be 180 degrees across from where you're at. And then 90 degrees and so on,
to manage the transfer of heat and the placements or stations of where you're doing your work. If you
keep sizing over and over again, at the same spot you're at, you're going to run into problems.
And also trying to take a ring down that many sizes in a very small bridge is going to warp the
integrity of the ring size. So that one was also incredibly worthwhile. One of my favorite tasks,
because I had no idea and could not have known how meditative and soothing it would be for me,
was creating alloy. We would order 24 karat casting grain, as well as that, which would help us make
it into 14 karat, 18 karat, both yellow and white gold, and 14 karat rose. The owner refused to
do 18 karat rose due to the porosity. And he decided to subcontract any unusual alloys,
like 18 karat green gold, because it wasn't worth purchasing the material to create such a small
amount for a project that was probably one of a kind. One of my favorite stories is when I had
to learn how to prep a casting. By now I had been with his company for several months, and he was
ready to have me start despruing and hammering up and sanding out things that were fresh from
the step of turning a model into metal. He tried to trick me a little bit and say,
I need these six rings done in 30 minutes and I'm taking the clock away. Little did he know that
he left the radio on and at that time songs were about two and a half to three minutes long,
so it wasn't that difficult to pace myself along with the radio. And I'm sure a piece of him was
frustrated that I completed the task within his impossible parameters. And I never really saw
since that moment that he had an understanding there was more to me than meets the eye.
At some point it was torch time and I was shown how to anneal a casting, especially in white gold,
if it shrunk significantly as far as ring size and it was necessary to hammer it up. It became a
lesson that created an open communication between me and the wax carver because of one specific
project. She had carved a 9mm wedding band and it went to cast an 18 carat white gold and it came
back over a size lower. No amount of annealing was going to get this up to where it belonged. It
would either have to go downtown for a machine to stretch it up. The design did not support a
sizing up manually. It was a learning curve for the wax carver that a ring of this amount of
substance was going to have to be carved larger than the finger size because of the shrinkage.
That didn't stop either of us from having a less fun stellar day thanks to our boss.
We did have a Master Goldsmith in-house and his name was Ying Ho and he came from Hong Kong and
he was extraordinary. When it came to manipulating the saw blade and mastering the sanding sticks,
there was nobody better. To this day, I'll never forget something he said so very casually that
was going to open my mind to the rest of my career. He said, fast is slow, slow is fast.
And he sat there and showed me him rushing through, despruing and how many saw blades he broke.
And it was an exercise in bending time, especially if you don't have enough of it.
Aside from the bench exercises, I went to the next level developing myself as a communicator,
a sales advisor and a designer. While the owner said he wanted all of us to be capable of counter
sketching and creating one of the kinds with clients, he also had an ego that was not interested
in any of our big ideas, especially if they came out of meeting a new customer.
But let me start at the beginning. He had a certain type of phone etiquette that I'll never forget.
There was a suggested number of rings before we pick up a certain way to greet a caller,
a formulated way to ask the right questions and then to finish by inviting them in and or
booking an appointment for him. He also seemed to have been exposed to some sort of training
because he was particularly good at deescalating and troubleshooting when someone called with a problem.
The template for appraisal creating was incredibly useful as well as insightful. And there was a
certain way that he wanted us to document and evaluate colored jewels, something I hadn't
really done before then. Basically, he exposed me before I discovered that would be my next step
to the languaging terminology and identifying from the GIA, the Gemological Institute of America.
That said, I did look into the full gemology program. At my last job, I had a weekend diamond
certification and that got me from A to B. The future seemed wide open. It was the late 90s.
Why not go for more education? When I finally brought it to him that I was ready to earn my
diploma in colored gems, he was very confronted and told me there's no way that I could do this job
and go to school at the same time. And yet in the same breath, he said, but the tools are right
here, the microscope, the refractometer. I didn't know if it was a warning I should heed. I didn't
know if it was a test or challenge from him since he held a gemologist's degree and was active
and working every day. Or it was some sort of wistful endorsement to go for it and he was figuring
out his ego of possibly having two gemologists and designers and goldsmiths despite the talent gap
between the two of us under one roof. And lastly, the most important things I learned that fall
into the darkness because there's no such thing as a career that only has beauty. There's going
to be some ugly. I learned how to handle myself around an employer who may exhibit strains of
jealousy, hubris, client profiling, emotional outbursts, heavy handed criticisms, hazing, bullying.
One example sticks out as far as a less than stellar protocol around coaching an employee.
He asked me to come in on a Sunday. We weren't open on Sundays. I drove in,
knocked on the door and found that nobody was there except him and his wife. They sat me down
and the conversation, while it started off in a neutral tone, quickly escalated to
a litany of name calling. The one that stuck out is that they took turns both calling me a freak.
They never gave reason or context and perhaps this was just to try and break me. After all,
I was a military kid and I've just never been known for being emotional on the job. It didn't
really get the effect they wanted. I was told to go home and I believe I asked,
am I seeing you tomorrow? And I think they just shook their heads. That was a foreshadowing to
when I would get fired. They told me that I was terminated on December 10th, but it wouldn't be
effective until December 24th. So they were giving me a two weeks notice on losing my job.
Interesting. And that's how it went. December 24th, I worked those two weeks knowing I was
terminated, didn't say anything to my co-workers and said my final goodbye on Christmas Eve.
Three weeks later, there was a voicemail asking if I wanted to come back in and pick up a few
more hours. It was a moment of pure alchemy being worked to the bone for a low wage, recognizing
my growth and deciding I deserve a hell of a lot more. I never returned that phone call. And while
I could tell you it's a dark spot on my resume, I won't. I'll let you know that you can learn the
strangest things about your radiance when someone else is trying to eclipse your shine.
Thank you for listening and learning with me. I would love you to share this project with people
finding rare beauty in today's world and throughout our times. Until the next episode, keep your own
story sparkling.