By Gary Dawson
Having a ‘voice’ can mean many things within the jewellery industry. For a designer, it may suggest having a style and maintaining it or perhaps preserving a standard across styles, as I will discuss later. For a jewellery retailer, voice may refer to how their store is branded and/or its position in the community.
Organizations within our industry have their voice, some advocating for and promoting the craft of what we do, while others, how we conduct our business. As an industry, we probably also have some sort of unified voice, as it is publically perceived. And importantly, we help our consumers establish and maintain their unique voice with our offerings.
With the fairly recent innovations of CAD/CAM and new marketing strategies for new generations, we as an industry—and as individuals within it—may benefit from a re-evaluation of the concept of voice. Becoming aware of one’s voice and from where it arises may be an important key to competitiveness in the marketplace. And as a custom designer who has recently adopted some of these new technologies, I find my ideas about establishing and maintaining my voice are changing.
