Defy the Label

Defy the Label

Unintended uses

A couple of weeks ago a young woman come into the showroom with her two children. She had a list of things she needed, and the children seemed pretty content to wander around looking at stones. I left them to browse for a little while, but then noticed the young girl seemed to be trying to get my attention. When I glanced over, she grinned at me and asked “can you tell me what a connector is?”

Oddly enough, I’d never really considered this question. I was trying to dig up a response, and I told her that a connector was designed to connect different pieces of jewellery. I showed her some necklace and earring samples to demonstrate. She smiled at me and said:

“So you can basically use them the same way you use everything else?”

Defy the Label

Love Bird Necklace Design Idea ( click picture for details ).

 

Three weeks later, and I can’t stop thinking about her and her approach to something she didn’t understand. She had no issue with the vernacular, with our labeling, and simply went straight to the physical uses of the silver components she was looking at. She didn’t care about the labels, a connector was the same thing to her as a pendant. Why couldn’t a charm be used to connect different pieces of jewellery? Why couldn’t she simply put a connector on a chain?

It really made me think about our jewellery designers, and how many of them avoided our connector selection because it ‘wasn’t really their thing’, but went crazy over our pendants. How many customers didn’t even bother to look through our bead cap selection, simply because they didn’t use caps on beads? How many people had brushed aside our cone collection because they ‘can’t be bothered with multi strand jewellery’?

With that in mind, you’ll notice we’ve recently made some changes to our exclusive section of the website. We no longer have the components divided up into sections. All of our charms, pendants, connectors, and cones are now visible on the same page. We’re hoping that this new format will allow our designers to browse our entire collection without restrictions, and that it will help spark new design ideas without feeling restricted.

We’re open to feedback on this change, and would love to hear about your shopping experience. What do you like? What would make your experience better?

If you’d like to see more examples of components being used for something other than their ‘intended’ purpose, have a look at our ‘ Design Ideas ‘!  We’re constantly updating them with every new component we get in!