Jeweler's Workbench

The holiday season is upon us, and joyarte jewelry couture is opening the December shopping series with a trunk show at Amar Cosmetics in the Quarry in San Antonio. We've been working with the folks at Amar on a number of projects, so we're pleased to be offering this event in their location.

We're so excited this year to be able to participate in the online shopping season. We'll join in with our own version called cyberMondayMadness. For 33 hours, beginning on Monday, November 28th at 3:33am and continuing all day, then ending at noon on Tuesday, November 29th, we will offer an incredible 33% off our entire online catalog. If you want to participate, simply use code cyber3311 in the shopping cart, and it will calculate your savings.

It's been particularly challenging these past few years. Major changes in the financial fabric of the country have hit many of us hard here at home, and some of it too close for comfort. In 2008, I began to feel things starting to slip, and I started to notice something that didn't make sense to me. I saw that there were lots of people struggling financially, or losing their jobs. But yet our country had postioned itself to help many people in many parts of the world, but somehow was missing one very important detail...the very people they needed to help were in it's own backyard.

The month of May was exceptionally exciting for me. In addition to events surrounding Mothers Day on a personal level (brunch with my folks, husband, and our entertaining 10 year old), I was thrilled to be invited to one of my favorite cities, Seattle for a host of events, namely Seattle Fashion Week. This week long event has been running for nearly ten years now with a large focus on local designers and local businesses.

Whew! It's been a long and winding road on this path to e-commerceville,  and I can finally say it is now up and the OPEN sign is on the door! BIG hooray!

But in all seriousness, we've learned a lot along the way to getting the site redone. I thought I'd take a moment to share some of our lessons learned. This is the story of the trials and tribulations of moving from a marketing website to an (easy to use!) e-commerce website, and how I learned to appreciate Sunday mornings, with or without coffee.

Everybody wants to know what's in "the bag". A trunk show offers a big bag (maybe two) of goodies that can range from closeout pieces at reduced prices, to one of a kind finds, to sneak peeks at a soon-to-be-released collection. It's also a great time to meet the designer and hear more about how your favorite find came to be. Add a bit of wine and cheese, the backdrop of the boutique or gallery, and a group of eager shoppers looking to indulge, and you have a rockin' trunk show event!

Often we get email questions from our customers regarding their recent or past jewelry purchases. These questions range from jewelry care to replacement of damaged items to how to match the right jewelry with the right outfit. Here are some recent emails that represent typical questions that we often get and our responses.

The term "gold jewelry" is often applied by a non-jeweler to mean any jewelry that has a gold color. However, each process and metal content has its own term. If you learn a few simple terms, you can spot quality jewelry and not be confused by costume jewelry.