Surprising Designs Part Two

There are a lot of designs we create which fail utterly to ring anyone's bell. A good example of this was the replica pin of a 1953 Buick Roadmaster grill. This was to be the kick-off piece in a whole series of jewelry designs based on the golden age of US automobile manufacturing. Remember them? They were made in a place called "Detroit" and some of the bumper and grill designs were reallly sculpture in an industrial arts kind of way. At anyrate, I had envisioned a whole series of replica jewelry from this "golden age".

But it certainly didn't inspire our customers. I think we sold about a dozen over the course of a year and finally retired the piece. In all truth the piece was too heavy and too large to worn comfortably. I remember Joan (my wife and business partner) wearing the pin out to lunch one day and our waitress asked if it was one of those "old fashioned radios" Well, kind of. I had hoped that "art" would carry the day, but like my friend Jeff Deegan used to say "Art is Long, Life is Short".

There it is.

Surprising Designs

We have finally completed the first production run of our new designs for the coming Holidays. Coming up with new pieces is the really fun part of working in metals and selling with catalog and website. We do it at least twice a year and our customers reactions to the pieces is always "interestin"g.


Sometimes a new piece gets a surprisingly good reception and sometimes quite the opposite takes place. Many, many years ago I designed and made a Broccoli Pin which interested me because of the challange of creating a realistic texture and proportion. I wasn't expecting much just thought it was going to be "fun". We put it in our then fledgling catalog and ran an ad in "The New Yorker" magazine. The pin was an unblieveable hit. At one point it was mentioned in a Times editorial, a "Gifts for Gardeners" news section and finally wound up on display at the National Archive in Washington D.C.! Who knew?

Next Post: Designs we'll call "What was I thinking"?.