Wendy B Tells All!

We are so very excited today, to share with you a fantastic interview with the lovely Wendy Brandes, designer and blogger extraordinaire.  Her brilliant jewelry line can be seen on her website or at her pop-up store on November 20^th to 21^st at 48 Greenwich Avenue.  Big thanks to Wendy for opening up and sharing her story and design process with us.  Enjoy…

• You left an established career in media and marketing to launch a jewelry line, what prompted this move? The possibility of doing something entrepreneurial was always in the back of my mind. I was an editor at the Wall Street Journal, CNN and People Magazine for a combined 11 years. In 2000, I left journalism to manage the websites at the now-notorious Lehman Brothers. I knew I wasn’t going to stay in that job forever, so the question was, do I go back to journalism or try something completely different? I didn’t like the idea of going backward, so I went forward. In 2005, I quit Lehman to do jewelry full time.
  
• How did you become a designer, as far as, learning the skills needed to create a fine jewelry line? My husband got me into jewelry because that was his preference for gifts to me! I became familiar with what was out there and started to want things that didn’t exist, particularly historically inspired pieces and mechanical pieces such as lockets that opened and closed or did other interesting tricks.  So, before even starting my company, I was already designing jewelry for myself, beginning with my engagement and wedding rings. I met a woman who had been a diamond wholesaler for 26 years and learned about good quality from her. She died in 2006, but I met other talented people with whom to work. Let me be clear: I’m not personally soldering $1000-an-ounce metal or setting 100 one-millimeter diamonds using a microscope.  I do the designs and outsource the manufacturing, but I know good goldsmithing/stone-setting work when I see it. And you have to have very special people to do great mechanical pieces.
  
• What was the biggest challenge in moving from one career to the next? Establishing the relationships you need to get things done.  Networking doesn’t have instantaneous results. People have to learn to trust you.
  
• What advice would you give a designer wanting to branch out and develop his or her own brand? Have a lot of money (investors are nice if you can get them) and a lot of patience. Be prepared to go with the flow. If wholesale isn’t working out for you but you can get private clients, do the private clients for now. Or open a store. You can pursue wholesale again later. Or maybe it’s vice versa: you always wanted to have a store but wholesale is what’s happening. In this economy, I think you have to pounce on whatever works, regardless of the business plan you came up with before you experienced the market. I truly believe it takes 10 years to be an overnight success.
  
• What is the most difficult aspect in launching your label, i.e. design, production, sales, finance, advertising? Design is the easiest, most enjoyable part for me. Production is always challenging for a small business because you’re not producing in volume. Your costs and your prices stay high. Of course, you could sell more if your costs were low, but you need to be able to order in volume to utilize less expensive overseas labor. That’s a classic small-business conundrum.
  
• Is there anything you wish you had known before entering the fashion industry? You think you comprehend the kind of challenges you’re going to face, but it’s about 10 times more difficult than what you can imagine.
  
• What is something you would like people to know regarding what it takes to produce a line of fine jewelry? People should understand the labor that can go into a single piece of mine, because part of what they’re paying for is the skill required to create wearable art. The first model for many of my pieces is carved — by hand for complicated pieces, by machine for very simple pieces — out of hard wax. Here’s a picture of a hand-carved wax model in process. Then I make a silicone mold from the wax model. Once I have the mold, I make a silver model from it so I can do further refinements to the design in metal … and then I make another mold of the improved design. (You can’t keep working the wax indefinitely because wax does break and melt, hence the switch to silver.) Once I have the final, perfect mold, I cast in gold. By the way, everything shrinks in the casting process so you have to estimate the size of the resulting piece, and pieces cast separately can shrink at different rates. That’s a big challenge for three-dimensional, multi-part, mechanical pieces like my acorn necklace, where the top and bottom have to be a perfect fit. Also, each stone is set separately and I pay for each one of them. That is to say, I pay for the stones themselves, then pay to have each stone set.  There’s no discounted group rate for setting them! Also, customers have been surprised that even my little pieces like the Squirrel and Teeny Genie (pictured above, center) necklaces are three dimensional — finished all the way around and not just stamped out of the metal on one side. I pay a lot of attention to detail.
  
• What inspires you and how do your transform that concept into a jewelry piece? I’m often inspired by the stories of interesting historical women, especially royal ladies. I have probably 100 possible women in my head at any given time…I’m just waiting for the design to fall into place. For a long time, I wanted to do a piece in honor of Queen Min, the last queen of Korea. I kept coming up with designs but none seemed right. Finally, I saw a piece of lemon quartz whose shape and color reminded me of an Asian scroll painting. I had one side carved with a crane that reflects onto the other side of the stone. Depending on how you hold the stone, the reflected crane appears and disappears. That was perfect for Min because there is debate about whether there are any authentic pictures of her, so I liked the idea of an elusive image. To drive home the connection, I created a ring (pictured top right) setting for the stone that echoes the shape of a pagoda. By the way, that carving was done by hand in Germany, using dental tools.
• As a big name in the NYC fashion scene both as a blogger and designer, how does living in NYC influence your business? I’m energized by the people I meet and the places I go and I come up with a wide variety of ideas as a result. Sometimes I think it would be nice to live on the beach and stare at the ocean all day, but then I’d probably have a whole collection of chunky turquoise and lapis lazuli pieces. I love both those stones but it might get a little old.
  
• What trends are you excited about for your jewelry going forward? Speaking of lapis lazuli, I’m very fond of my Nefertiti poison ring and want to do more pieces with rich color. But that’s a bit down the road. Right now I’m building out my collection of amazing mechanical pieces, creating pendants to go with poison (aka locket) rings. One of my new pieces is an egg pendant that opens to reveal a chicken. The chicken opens to reveal three little eggs. It’s my take on the eternal question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” In terms of creating the pendant, the answer was the egg. Now you know!

Original post here: 39th and Broadway