Welcome to the GuiltTrips 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. Building on the last episode where I talked about the
eight ways to create your own opportunities. Now let's discuss the difference between
traditional versus alternative pathways as an entrepreneur and areas of business. For me,
both have been priceless. I've enjoyed learning classically and observing how things shift
decade by decade. But as we know, there is that expression, learn the rules like a master so
you can break them like an artist. And oftentimes it really does matter that you throw out the
handbook and go rogue or organic. I'll be covering five different areas of my career where I had to
make the choice of the old way versus the new way. So let's begin. The first decision that I was
faced with, and this was early in my career, was what type of company I wanted to have. My first
couple jobs were in traditional stores. Would I go on to be an owner? Would I build out a brick
and mortar? If so, that would entail researching neighborhood, looking at competition in a certain
race? What is the demographic of that area? Am I a destination? Am I part of a subculture? Would
there be adjacent businesses that could support me and refer me? Or am I completely incongruent in
the area I've chosen? Like have I decided to plant an orange tree in Alaska? I've seen that in some
of my peers and colleagues. I went down the path in 2009 with the recession of potentially moving
out of Chicago and relocating to Austin, Texas. When I did my homework, as far as owning an actual
shop, there was something that was very attractive as far as rent, district amenities, transportation,
and shopping culture in the downtown area. And I got my binder out and I completely fleshed out
how many square feet I'd need. Would it be a hybrid of studio plus showroom? Would I strictly
have a retail only with a back office? Did I want to run it myself? Would I make room for staff?
If so, how big? What would the layout of that look like? So if you go the traditional route of
owning some type of store, a lot goes into it. And you won't have the authority for every single
aspect of that decision making process. So it's going to be collaborative. For example, a colleague
who did end up downsizing his store and picking one town over because it was more affluent and
had better commerce, as well as better resources, including the bureaucracy of that city. It required
a team of builders because the space needed to be retrofitted to a jewelry store. You've got a call
insurance and security and plumbing, electricity, the interior designer, cabinetry maker, just for
starters. Let's not forget signage and all of the permits that you have to file with the city. At
some point, that cascade of choices and project managing seemed to not be the fit for where I
wanted to go and how I wanted to do my business. I ended up becoming a private jeweler. How did
I come up with that plan? There wasn't the word private jeweler when I began my career. That's
just what I channeled or came through. Or if you want to use the word downloaded, that's how I came
up with my title. The decision I had to make was do I want to be completely storeless and have a
studio? Or do I want to have a studio somewhere? The origin of the way that I wanted to do business
was planted for me in my childhood. We had a family carpenter named Nick who would come over
after my parents got home from work. Oftentimes we had him sit and have dinner with us. And then
my dad and Nick would go into the front room and begin drawing out some ideas for a bookshelf
built into the wall or upgrade the patio into a deck. So I was very familiar with watching
somebody who was both the visionary and the maker grab pen and paper. In this case, he would
blueprint it out, take it away, give my dad a call as far as the materials, the cost, and the timeline,
and then return to work on the project. It was easy to see myself in the sense of why don't I
grab some loose stones, depending on the client, maybe a nice bottle of wine, show up to their
home after hours, which still allowed me to do my work and design, create, budget, flesh out if I
had to bring anybody else in to create and collaborate with, and then mark the calendar as
far as when I'd be back to drop it off or set up a time that off site out of their home,
they would want to meet and pick up the item that they had commissioned. The reason I went the
direction I did is it gave me a lot more autonomy and it lowered my overhead. Another area of
traditional versus alternative was the education and the training. I've spoken before that I took
classic courses in metals at university. There was a professor, dedicated studio, college,
sourced supplies, there were scholarships, budget. Most importantly, there was a curriculum. I
didn't have to come up with how I was going to build my brain. It was already laid out for
generations. Contrast that with an alternative route of finding classes to take and fleshing out
my own repertoire. One of the ways that this happened is when I started my apprenticeship,
the first thing he asked me, and this is a well-known story, what can you do as far as bench
work? And my answer was, well, I can etch a penny and I can anodize some wire. Those were things
I learned at university. That wasn't vocational enough. It didn't help me size a ring. It didn't
show me how to set a diamond. So the agreement was go back, take a class. When you hear that,
there's room for, ooh, is this craftsy? Is this hobbyist? No, it wasn't a hobby style at all.
And it was an opportunity to learn with an award-winning metalsmith and to master techniques
that would bridge that gap between I understand the materials, I understand the process of
makership, but I'm not anywhere close to a commercial style of creating. That eight-week
course made me so much more familiar with comfort as far as the tools, how to critically think and
creatively solve when it came to fabricating, which is taking components and building a ring,
as well as something that was a little more subtractive, such as wax carving, which I wasn't
exposed to at school during the time I was there. And from that, it allowed me to think of how can
I go and discover more specialty classes? What if I want to learn certain patinas? Let's say I wanted
this to eventually be my niche and my look for any of my collections, the value for my ability to
earn was in the alternative learning style. Next will be visibility. How do you get out there and
seen, known, heard, liked, trusted, all that goes into being an opportunity for somebody who can be
hired to fulfill a consumer or clients wishes and wants? Obviously visibility traditionally
means how we learn through marketing and branding what's available. For me, that meant partnering
with established businesses. As you know, I was a designer in a couple different retail galleries
and stores. The way that that got announced and circulated was through print work. I was in the
newspaper, there was an article that came and interviewed me and told my story. The stores would
buy space in magazines so that they could advertise what type of business they had, including
featuring new talent. Traditional mailing was done. When I had a lecture that I wanted to give at
the art gallery, postcards went out to certain zip codes, the VIP clientele, and whatever demographic
we wanted to hit. We connected with other businesses in the area that could have partnered with us to
see if they wanted to have anything on that same day so that there was kind of a quote unquote
art crawl. In contrast, how do you get your name out there? In an alternative way. You can do your
own print work, you can make flyers, and you can send out your own mailers and postcards. One of the
most successful ways for me was participating in independent art shows. There were two types. There
was the juried kind where you had to submit professional slides of your work and hear back
if you'd been accepted or not. Often there was a fee for being considered and then you would go and
rent booth space, table space, etc. There were other open calls for artists such as at a church,
at a park district, for some sort of fundraising or charity work. One of the things that turned out
to be most successful for me was finding wedding trade shows because obviously that's the client
that has a real need for rings instead of just a want. It did bring me in contact with a lot of
people who would become my future referrals as far as adjacent or congruent vendors. That's where I
met great photographers, great calligraphers, and a great confectionary artist who ended up being the
maker of my thank you gifts to my top clients. The fourth area would be how to learn how to be a
business person. The art part was handled and was obviously the more natural of the two, but
understanding the execution of commerce and sales was more learned. So traditionally, that is part
of your apprenticeship or working under somebody who owns a store. It's a lot more than just jewelry
as far as apprenticing. You have to learn to think like the owner and sometimes step into their
shoes. For example, if they're on vacation, or if you receive a phone call, or if they have tasked
you with some type of assignment that ends up benefiting them, as well as their clientele,
you're going to learn some chops. For me, it was writing the appraisal, pricing out new insurance
coverage for the shop, discovering a new vendor to replace somebody who was either retiring or
underperforming, ordering supplies, taking a call from somebody who wanted to show us their
equipment or their merchandise or product. Those were all elements that went into understanding
the other half of owning a shop, not just the creation side, but the framework of being a
business owner. Conversely, where I went to learn the best of my entrepreneur skills was the Kauffman
Foundation. One of my clients said, you've got a brain that is a little outside the box, as far as
owning your own brand. What I can suggest is you submit for this program, Fast Tracking Entrepreneurs.
It's a 12-week incubator. And the process to submit my name, he was the one who surprised me with
nominating me. It was very Shark Tank-like before its time. They needed you to be a new artist,
the verbal interview. What is your vision? How are you paradigm shifting your industry? I'm not
going to lie, it was probably one of the most exciting series of conversations I've had in my
entire career. And the deepest value was learning what type of business to set up. Did I want to
be a sole prior ship? Do I need to be an LLC? Do I need to look at the difference between S-Corp,
C-Corp? Do I need an accountant? Can I file myself? These are skills that were priceless and still
serve me 20 years later. The best support system to be made aware of was called SCORE. And it was a
collection of retired achievers in different industries as a resource that could end up mentoring
the next generation. And I love that knowledge share and that passing the torch to somebody who
was where you were at once upon a time. The last point I want to discuss as far as traditional
versus alternative is the look who's talking about you and driving your ideal clients towards you so
that you can conduct business in that matchmaking way where supply and demand is completely fulfilled
in a personable manner. The traditional way that this happened for me was word of media. The gallery
owner happened to be an excellent writer and networker and was quite gifted at creating press
releases. I learned from her how to talk about myself and how to reach out to news sources. Some
were a closed book and you needed to know the right people. Others were open and were certainly
looking to source a great story and have something new to talk about or somebody new to feature. On
the flip side of that is what happens in the simple art of allowing yourself to be found. It was the
word of mouth instead. Out of that entrepreneur incubation there was incentive to talk about your
classmates and see if you could drive any sort of business towards their burgeoning business model,
to share about us, to send people our way, to refer us, to open doors, to make introductions,
and to help us figure out the pathways in much less of a trial and error way. And what that really
shaped was the art of conversation and the instinct of making something out of nothing. Truthfully,
I think it's why I have such good stranger magic. It's why I can be sitting in a restaurant
minding my own business or I can strike up an organic conversation on a train ride. And before
I know it, we're exchanging numbers or emails or business cards. And that's about as alternative as
it gets is to have no plan but to be 100% prepared to recommend yourself that you are a solution to
a quote unquote problem they don't know they have. So this has been one of my more enjoyable
topics to speak about because it really does take me back to that priceless 12 week learning
called the fast track that is still available now through the Kaufman Foundation. And I was lucky
to get scholarship into it. It was a very romantic time in my life that took me from what felt like
a two dimensional artist into somebody who could now be bilingual in both creativity and
transacting and monetizing. Hope you've enjoyed listening.
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 stories sparkling.