Educating the consumer
Many of us who create handmade, artisan items have put our thoughts together to give our readers and customers an idea about just what goes into creating individual unique items. First I think you must understand just what you're getting with a handmade item. What I recently added to my bio on Etsy is this: What you will NOT find in my jewelry shop is mass produced, cookie cutter, or poorly made, low quality items. We are not large conglomerate chain stores, buying the cheapest qualities of gems and metals, sending them to a factory in some third world country to be mass produced on a production line by workers making pennies a day. Now I may be over-exaggerating a bit, but I hope you get the point. Here is a chart which shows the daily spot price of precious metals. I used the silver chart, as this is a popular metal that we jewelry artists work with. As you can see, the spot price for silver, today is $21.79 per ounce!(as of the writing of this post) And this price seems to be on...