You'll get comfortable talking more and more about what you do, it will be so much easier for you to transition a casual conversation into paying customers. Welcome to thrive by design, the podcast for ambitious independent jewelry brands, looking to profit from their products, get ready to make more and sell more doing what you love, without spending every single waking minute doing it. Hey, and if you're a creative fashion or product based business, I want to welcome you to the show. I'll be dropping big tips on launching growing and scaling your business. So you could spend more of your precious time using your creativity to make money. You ready? All right, let's do this. Welcome to the thrive by design podcast episode 392. Hey, it's Tracy here. And I'm really excited for today's episode because we're going to talk about my favorite business model, custom jewelry. So if you're a fine jeweler who's trying to get more into doing more custom work, or if you have another type of jewelry business, and you want to design custom work, and you aren't really sure how to get into it, or you're already doing it, your private jeweler, etc, etc. You're gonna love today's episode, because I'm gonna break down some of the ways that you can grow your custom jewelry business in 2023. Now, this is exciting news. So last year, we were in one of our accelerators for our momentum program. And I asked a question, because we had a ton of Fine Jewelers in there. And the question was this, Hey, would you guys be interested in in me focusing on doing a fine jewelry custom accelerator to show you how I've built a business where I barely have to mark it, and where I'm getting repeat customers coming back and referring their friends. And even though I am extra busy, growing Flourish & Thrive Academy, I continue to always have a waitlist of customers in the wings waiting for me to have time to design for them. So I want to show you exactly how I'm doing that. So we are launching a brand new custom jewelry accelerator, it's kind of on the radar, we are already filling up with people who expressed interest last year. So we have a couple of spots left. So if you're someone who would like to know what it really takes to build a custom jewelry business, or you already have a custom or fine jewelry offering, where you're working with private customers, but you want to optimize your systems, you want to get more of those people coming back, you want to deliver a better experience. And you want to really streamline your sales process. And also get your website working for you. So you're getting a lot of leads coming to your website just because of what you've done to optimize it. Well then join us or apply, I should say, for this custom jewelry accelerator, it's application only. So in order to get your application in and to be considered, you need to head on over to flourish & thrive academy.com, forward slash custom and get your application in right over there. We are getting started in April. So if you'd like to be considered, head on over and fill out that application, and let's chat and see if you're a good fit for this. And we're keeping this group very, very small. And we have already a handful of people interested, I wanted to create this into an intimate experience, because you're going to be working directly with me, for the most part throughout this accelerator. And I can only handle so much by myself. So I wanted to make sure that we get you a great experience and that you're getting access to me to work with on your private or custom jewelry business. All right, so let's talk about how to grow your custom jewelry business in 2023. So I'm going to be talking about just some of the things that I have always found that have worked to get people to my website, filling out my forms or reaching out to me on Instagram or other places for my custom jewelry offering. So I don't know for many of you who don't know my story for many, many years back in the day I started my first jewelry company in 1990 probably 9093 or so when I kind of had it my side hustle. I did that for about five years or so and then launched my business full time in 1998. So throughout that time, I had developed a name in the industry as a contemporary jewelry designer. So what that really meant is I was selling primarily to small boutiques and specialty stores in the fashion and like contemporary fashion space and some gift stores and some jewelry stores but primarily, I developed sterling silver down my fine jewelry about I don't know 2006 Or seven I started I wanted to launch a new collection. So I launched a men's collection I think in 2005 six and then my fine jewelry collection right around the same time and started selling that to stores and one of the things that I noticed even though it was like building Three businesses at the same time trying to launch different, completely different collections. Both of those collections started doing really well. But people started coming to me asking for engagement rings and wedding bands, obviously starts with the friends and family, and then expanded beyond there. So when 2008 happened, and the market crashed, and I had to make a decision whether or not to keep Tracy Matthews designs open and get rid of all the 350 stores that I was selling into, that's a story for another time, but I had to make a decision, do I want to continue doing wholesale? Or do I want to switch gears and get back to doing what I really love, which was designing, working with the customers, and, you know, delivering a great intuitive experience, I'd always thought of myself as a Intuit and a healer. And I was teaching yoga at the time, and really kind of blending all these modalities of business together with like mindfulness, and teaching. Like, it's weird how all these things kind of come together to to create this business for me. And so when I was making that decision, and my consultant Phil was asking me, what do you love Tracy, what do you want to do, and all I could say was like, I love working with customers. I love doing this, I love doing that. But I do not love, X, Y, and Z. Everything that my old business or the old version of me was, was in that business. And that's part of the reason why I decided to shut it down amongst many other reasons, and then move into this new venture. And what I quickly found was that I was really on purpose. And at each evolution and stage of my career, I've noticed like shifts and energy and stuff like that. But the one thing that I really loved about building a private jewelry or custom jewelry business where I was only working with private clients, I wasn't worried about wholesale and all those things was that I got to spend more time with the customers, I made a ton more money because I didn't need to carry inventory. I didn't, I wasn't waiting 3060 90 days to get paid. Like all these things that were challenging. In my previous business model. Most of the payments were made up front for the most part I was working with, you know, it was easy to make a $25,000 order. Whereas like when I was selling wholesale, that might have been like working with six or seven stores that took a long time to even get those orders. So it just everything just seemed to fall into place. And I loved it. And so what I really worked on were optimizing the systems and the sales conversations, because I knew that if I had qualified leads, they had many other choices, I needed to be able to maneuver those conversations in a way that would get them to, to want to work with me and be like, ready to like hand over their money. So this was all like in a really organic way. And so part of what I talked about this earlier in the podcast, but part of what I'm going to teach in that custom jewelry accelerator is how I basically handle and position and create those conversations and the structure of them. So that when at the end of the call, people are like yes, you're the choice for me, I don't need to keep looking anymore. So it's fun, like I love all of this because you really get to serve people in a much higher way. So let's talk about how I really built my business and how I continue to do literally zero marketing. And I'm still getting inquiries every single month for projects. Right now I actually have like four or five projects, I can't really keep up with it, because I like to give my customers a great level of service. But if you're doing this full time, I'm going to show you how to be getting like 10 or 15 custom pieces a month, and more overflow then you even have room for so that you're building a waitlist. And people are literally waiting to work with you. And that's the key, right? We want to build that waitlist and get people to be waiting in the wings working with you. So you're not scraping by and waiting for the next random person to find your website, right. So let's walk through some of these tips that I've created, or I've seen work really well for some of the people that I serve, and that I've used for myself. So the first step to this is to be able to optimize your website for your local area search. I was one of the first people who was optimizing their website in New York City for custom jewelry and in San Francisco. And what that ended up doing for me was it allowed people who are searching for like unique jewelry, alternative bridal custom jewelry, custom engagement rings, etc. To be able to find my website. I've had so many people who just randomly came across my website because they wanted to do an heirloom redesign, or they wanted to have a custom engagement ring designed that was alternative