For the last few months — as I’ve been broadly hinting here — I’ve been working on a new venture, a jewelry business: Alison Wonderland Jewelry. I’m getting ready to formally launch my Etsy shop soon, and a Big Cartel shop.
At the moment, I’ve just been tinkering with both of these sites, but much to my surprise, I’ve been making sales.
“Don’t be a Dick” Necklace, on Big Cartel.
So in this “pre-launch” moment in my jewelry business, it’s been interesting to see what people are responding to. Early observation: it’s jewelry with words, preferably profane words, or at the very least words that convey a saucy attitude, that is the most popular.
It’s kind of funny because although I didn’t set out with the explicit idea of getting away from the wordsmith biz, I also didn’t think that I would literally become a word smith. (Smith, n. a worker in metal.)
I do know a lot of writers, so a preference for words among people I know isn’t that surprising, but this proclivity is also present in customers I don’t know personally.
This “Don’t Tell Me What to Do” necklace sold out on Etsy within a few days. (I’ll make more!)
It seems like there’s a bigger life lesson in this somewhere — perhaps, whatever you try to do, you always become more of who you are? Or maybe it’s just that after two decades of writing professionally, the habit of primarily expressing myself in words has become a chronic and perhaps fatal condition from which I’ll never completely recover. (Irony of expressing this idea in writing fully noted.)
Or maybe this is like this summer’s data on the 2016 presidential primaries — preliminary, just a blip. As the business actually gets going, it’s certainly possible that I could find that jewelry without words will become more popular.
I’ll report back.
Very Curious Mind 