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Sweetheartsinner Creations
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Atlanta, GA
ominatin
FAQ
- EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SWEETHEARTSINNER
- Sweetheartsinner has sold over 15,000 items on etsy. On ebay, Sweetheartsinner has sold over 15,000 items. This doesn't include the larger wholesale orders, artist orders, Roller Derby League orders, and misc. orders made over the last few years or the items sold on consignment in stores locally. As such, Sweetheartsinner can lay claim to over 50,000 products sold. That is a lot of handcrafting. As 1/4 of our sales come through necklace sales, I think back to how many times I have been at the kiln working on pendant settings over the last few years and how thankful I am for learning how to use a kiln.
Sweetheartsinner started while I was in law school. I had been buying a lot of DIY items on ebay and etsy that I thought was just so cool. There was nothing like them for sale in stores. As a huge lowbrow fan and art collector, I really dug the polymar clay processes that a lot of jewelry makers were making, designing them up with popular culture imagery, and making them into cool shapes and using dynamic chains for cool effect.
A few years ago, these types of necklaces would get anywhere from $20 to $60 each. They were all one of a kind and really quite unique. There would be bidding wars for some pieces that featured cool pop culture imagery from Frankenstein to Barbarella. After winning a few on ebay as gifts for friends, I remember how, like most creative minds would, wondered how to make these myself. I bought a shrinky dinks oven, and a book on polymar clay projects. I messed around with the process a lot in my spare time and liked my creations. I could get necklace pendants into cool shapes and add really cool "baked in" imagery-sometimes simply adding images to the shape at the end and simply gluing them on and then coating them with a glossy Krylon or epoxy base.
But the limitations of the polymar clay process was abundant. Sometime while baking pieces, they would be too dry and crack. Also, I could never get the size of pieces thin enough for my liking. Alot of pieces, both mine and other DIY crafters had made for sale on ebay and esty, were too thick or too big and bulky to make for a good pendant size. Many turned out to be more ornamental sized than anything else. While I liked making the polymar necklaces for myself, it seemed that if I were ever to sell my work "for fun", it would almost be too much trouble to do.
Over time, I wondered about other ways to make DIY jewelry. I had heard of photo-type pendants and knew how to make these but there was no real source for pendant settings and the coating processes were all pretty bad. Then I thought of the kiln process and asked my dad about making me up a pendant setting. He made me up a mold of 8 settings and I went to work. After cooling and sanding, I had 8 pendants ready to work with. At first I didn't know how to make these work. I tried sticker processes like Xyron, dozens of types of photo papers and special inks that wouldnt smudge or wipe off, and even polymar clay bases to attach to my newly made pendants. None of these really gave me what I wanted. I tried so many things to make my product process work. It was a very long process to figure out.
For a long time, I decoupaged the designs directly onto pendants. These early pendants showed my actual brush strokes and the time it took to make them was always long. Of course, this was all a good distraction from law school. Law school was different in that I had lots of reading assignments and threats of being called on and humiliated in class, but no assignments due-only one final at the end of each class. This gave a lot of free time away from the normal "busy work" of undergrad.
Once I figured out a decent process, I started to list a few items and were pleasantly surprised to sell things I hand-created. There is nothing like the thrill of making something and then selling it. No middle-person, no exploitation of your labor except by yourself. I guess that is why I love artists, writers, and other types of work like this so much. Working at some company without any real stake in it just sucks. Never wanting to be a actual lawyer or have any sort of "real job" working for someone else, I started to get serious about this business. My original plan for law school involved started my own consulting firm, which I still intend to do.
I decided to use ballchain necklaces for all of our pendants. This was a decent solution to keep our price low. I also decided to paint the pendants black. The unfinished setting being made of slush metal is the same stuff diecast cars are made from. It has a dull gray metal finish. It is not shiny and not too "pretty". I used to paint both sides, but the time taken to do it was too long and due to the molds, paint would often run and ruin the other side, so we decided to only paint the front side. This was DIY handmade after all, and if someone wanted a machine made product, that wasn't going to be from us.
The charm of DIY is that it is handmade, hand assembled, and handcrafted. There are actual humans doing things to make the products outside of just cheap labor feeding machines to make things. Everyone I knew liked the stuff I made and knew it was unique on the market. The ballchains could be bought cheap in bulk (also they were made in America) and added a punky sort of vibe to our DIY pendants. This allowed me to price our stuff cheap.
I also decided early on to start our prices from $7 to $15 each and even cheaper wholesale if bought in bulk. I never wanted our stuff to be high priced because I knew what our market would be-students, off the beaten path type of people, arty people, and punks (in the nicest way I write this-as I like punks). Sweetheartsinner haven't raised our prices in all the time we have been doing it. Since we don't hire anyone, do all the work ourselves, make our own settings, and work out of our home, our overhead is very low. The biggest costs are in slush metal and in the cost for cigarette/ID cases and pill cases-which have to be manufactured for us in Hong Kong and shipped here. Getting 10,000 cases made and shipped here is a big investment.
Our designs feature art and designs I personally like. I love lowbrow art, tattoo art, pop culture, and are collectors of all elements of the same type of designs we use on our products.
Early on, whenever I did the new necklaces, I always hated the brush strokes and leakage the decoupage process did. I would also have to redo about 1/3 of all items I made due to bad clumps of decoupage and dust particles, and bleeding occuring in the process. I experimented a lot with new ways to make a better product. I had it down perfectly with the use of a special epoxy coating. It gave our items a very shiny finish and they looked very professionally done-more machine made and perfect in their look. I made our items using this process for a year. Our mess-ups would only be about 8% to have to be redone due to dust particles or leakage. That made me happy. But I stll had a problem. Using this new process was not effective against water. It was expected that no one would really wear these in a pool or in the shower, but a lot of people did do just that. So we would get a few complaints about the coating wearing off or dulling. That was hardly an issue however. Of the thousands sold made in this fashion, the real issue was women who would be wearing the necklace and use hairspray on their hair that would somehow get on the pendant setting. The chemical reaction of the hairspray ruined the epoxy type of coating we used. I never knew this until we had had more complaints about this happening. I then knew our "perfected" process needed work.
After more research and more testing with tons of different processes, I finally came upon a coating that was more efficient and more durable to use. The finished product also looked good and was resistant to hairspray, could be "wiped" off to clean, and still protect the image used on the setting.
I used the same process on different items like cigarette cases, pill cases, bracelets, and brooches. After an investment of much time, money, and effort, we are proud of the items we make and sell. Of course, this business is not my true passion. It is a way to make money, be free, and not have to work for anyone else, while I work on a new business I went to law school for. After law school, I got my MBA. You don't need a law degree and MBA to do what sweetheartsinner does but I am still working on that other business. I love Sweetheartsinner in the meanwhile. It's cool and I make things I like using my own hands. There is a solid joy in working for yourself and actually creating a product and not simply being some middle man.
A few of the personal joys I do get of this business is in creating and designing new pieces. I love working with photoshop and other software to make new designs. Whereas, I am a really good writer, I really wish I could also do art. Doing digital based design work gives me a little sense of doing real "art". This business has also put me into contact with some of the lowbrow art scene and has lead to my collecting of a lot of lowbrow pop surrealistic artworks. My lowbrow collecting started because a lot of artists started to buy our service of making pendants for them using their art so they would have something to sell at gallery shows besides their costly paintings so everyone at the show might have something to take home, to market their work with, and as gifts for the artist's friends. Artists have used the reverse "unfinished" side to autograph the necklaces and some even did limited edition numbering on them. I always thought this was a great idea to do for them because it gave more exposure to their art and whereas not many could afford art for their walls or even have space for art, almost everyone could afford a pendant with cool artwork on it. It gave everyone who came to a show something to take home and spread the artists work out to the public more than just the standard "prints" for sale. After all, I'd be wholesaling the pieces for $5 each and the artists could mark them up to whatever they wanted and they would do pretty good. I still get losts of such orders to this day. I suppose, at least 1/3 of all of the money I have made with SHS has gone back into actual art I have bought!
Another personal joy of SHS is that I love that a lot of Roller Derby teams ask us to make pendants for them using their logos. This is too cool as I love Roller Derby and our punky products seem to be a perfect fit! It gives me great joy to think of all the teams who wear our stuff while they kick ass on the track!We are members of Crafsters. org and Indiepublic!
Atlanta, GA
ominatin
