Blog Wexford Jewelers : Archives for March 2008

A Quick Site Update

michael@wexfordjewelers.com (Michael Christenson II) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 01:50:00 -0700

After a nightmarish time of digging through cache, old rss feeds, and server logs, I am happy to announce that everything - minus one post - is back online. Huzzah!

Now you guys can get back to reading real post by people who write a lot better than me. I’m just the techie typing, appropriately, from my darkened office at 5 in the morning. Sleep is for people who don’t have major sites to launch.

Speaking of which, the new site is coming along fabulously! During the restore of everything, and creating a better back up system, I delved into optimizing the speed of page loading. The site can now search through thousands of items in mere seconds. Those beautiful pictures have never loaded faster!

I am wrapping up our shopping cart code, our copywriter/jewelry designer/author extraordinaire is typing out descriptions, and our photographer/metal caster/all around jack of all trades is busy getting every single piece of our inventory photographed and ready for you to view. We are extremely excited to be dealing with everyone personally. You’ll see how we plan to do that in a few postings.

Also, we are going to be posting more pictures for you to view but I thought I’d tempt you with one more now:

Hello Everyone!

michael@wexfordjewelers.com (Michael Christenson II) — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 10:33:00 -0700

We um … are alive today. I’m really sorry for the down time. I also feel the need to apologize for all the articles that are down, and to explain what’s happened.

Last night I started a backup on our server. It was an update unrelated to the blog, but on the same server. Apparently the cpu pegged and our server locked up. After hours of attempts to bring the beast back to life I had to migrate to a new one. I am currently migrating the old articles up here, as well as the rest of the data, but it may take most of the weekend to get all of that back.

I’m asking everyone to be patient. I’m taking steps to make sure that this wil not happen again. Thanks to everyone that has been visiting this blog and reading our quirky posts. we will be back up soon enough.

In other news, The main site is moving along nicely, I hope to be giving everyone some tasty little screenshots soon enough; and before you know it the full site will have arrived. I can’t wait.

Keep an eye on this site for updates. Have a pleasant weekend!

Warmest Regards, Michael

How Rising Precious Metal Prices Affect The Price of Jewelry

michael@wexfordjewelers.com (Michael Christenson II) — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 04:51:00 -0800

Gold at nearly a thousand US dollars an ounce. Platinum over two thousand. Silver, incredibly enough, at twenty dollars an ounce.

Did we honestly think we would see these prices this early on?

The falling value of the dollar coupled with instability in the markets has set this industry on its ear. Then we add low mine production to the mixture, and suddenly a reachable commodity becomes just one more thing that’s harder for the common man to acquire. We’ve had a spike like this before, but not with such a steady upward trend. Is it going to stay this way? Who knows. I, for one, think it will.

Rather than bemoan the price- which I can do nothing about- I want to address the situation and how it affects us, the manufacturer/retailer.

We’ve had to revise our repair and custom work price lists twice in the past six months. Our catalog items are all marked for $600 gold, so when ordering for a customer, we’ve had to add 55% to the price for realistic prices. They don’t always take too kindly to being told $155 when the glossy printed page says $100. Some people have walked, most have not. Most people seem to be understanding of our dilemma, of the reality of it all.

We are buying metal off the street every day now. People are getting hard up, this has been an unusually cold winter, and they are cleaning out their jewelry boxes for bill money.

We’re also seeing more custom work than ever before. I think when belts tighten a bit, people tend to look to what they have on hand and utilize that. Grandma’s diamonds are being set and reset into engagement rings, necklaces, even a belly button rings or two. Rather than buy at higher prices, people seem to be willing to pay for labor. We don’t mind, we make the same cut either way, and custom is fun.

In our own designs, as well as the bigger designers, look for fashions that incorporate alternatives to precious metals. Anything to take up dimension and save on gold: wood inlay, larger stones in thinner bezels, enameling, bead strands on pendants instead of chains, silk, leather, cord, rubber… we’ve already seen the bigger push for titanium, carbide, stainless steel. Many people want a wedding band in the $100 price range. No gold band is going to be that price again. Silver doesn’t hold up to constant wear, so we move to metals that should be housing a space ship instead of commemorating vows.

Honestly, I’m a little bit excited about this. For years, gold was cheap. Not dinnerware cheap, but cheap enough that the average person could afford a few gold chains or one nice heavy bracelet. Heavy, clunky styles came about from this, and they looked great at the time, but are now passe. I have lost count of how many herringbone chains I’ve taken in on trade or buy in the past few months, but I am happy to see the little creeps go by the wayside. Ever tried fixing one of those? Now I have to bend my mind towards the creative to keep the price down for you, the consumer, as well as myself, the businessperson.

Platinum sales, always slow, have completely dried up, at least for our small-town store. We have never been a fan of it, with its dulling patina and difficult metalworking properties. Silver is selling better than ever, as both white metals continue to be popular and people discover the affordability of sterling options. We are learning to combine sterling with gold accents, using lighter weight chains, and using multiple stones in one setting.

In summation, I would have to say that it hasn’t hit us too hard, not yet. Our design and service has always carried us, and always will. The people able to use and reuse gold are going to be able to keep their heads above water. The stores with excellent customer service, unique niche items, and a great diversity of product will pull ahead of the cutthroat deep discount boys in this race. And that puts Wexford Jewelers on top.

Unmaking History

michael@wexfordjewelers.com (Michael Christenson II) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 17:50:00 -0800

A couple stands across the case before me. Simple, hardworking, salt of the earth people. The woman has just had her ring painstakingly repaired by us- worn prongs rebuilt, a missing side diamond replaced, the surface refinished. She gazes it at it in wonder,

“I’ve never seen it so bright!” She exclaims, “It must have been extra dirty. It’s as beautiful as the day we were first married!”

“So are you.” Her husband says softly behind her, barely audible.

-Cue heart melt here-

The woman blushes a bit, glances at his own matching band, and grimaces.

“Oh, honey look at yours. It’s so dirty compared to mine now. We should take it home and give it a really good cleaning!”

He shrugs, caring only about her happiness.

“Here,” I offer, extending my hand. Their eyes refocus on me, for a moment they may have forgotten that I was even standing there, “it’s not dirty, actually. Just scratched. If you have a moment I can polish it up nice and bright just like hers.”

“Okay.” He shrugs again, looks at her, wriggles the thin band off of his work-hardened finger. She smiles and looks deeply into his eyes. I quietly leave them to their memories, walk into the back and flick on the polishing lathe .

As the machine purrs to life, I hit the wheel with a bit of polishing rouge. The band in my hand has twenty-five years of history on it.

I touch it to the wheel and a high pitched whine sounds when the gold makes contact-‘ZZzzt!’

There goes the scratch from the barbeque grill, last summer when he cooked out for his daughter’s college graduation party.

‘Zzt!’

The marks disappear, the ones made by his hammer when he built the addition to their house in 1989. They hadn’t expected that last child, but it was all going to be fine now. And here go the tiny scratches from helping his wife do dishes for the past several years. Someone had told them to put the sizzle back in their marriage, and he had discovered that nothing set her on fire more than a man humble enough to help around the house.

‘Mmmp!’

Now I’ve removed the dents made by the sandbags. He had almost forgotten the year he drove down to Indiana with his church group, trying to help protect a town against imminent floodwaters. There’s a long, deep scratch here, he doesn’t remember how it got there, but only one thing makes marks that bright in gold. Carbon steel, possibly saw teeth. Another thing he doesn’t know is that this humble band saved his finger from a pretty good scrape. I wonder what else it’s saved him from over the years

The marks and dings and scratches disappear under the swiftly turning canvas wheel. Car repairs with his kids, years of fresh cut Christmas trees wrestled into a low ceilinged living room, gardening projects with his wife, fixing his brother’s deck, all of these have left an imprint on his life. The only marks that I don’t remove are the ones from softness- the ones that don’t actually leave a visible sign- a hand run through the hair of the woman he loves, the fingers that clasped his daughter’s arm as he walked her down the aisle to give away, the tears that flowed freely when his nephew was stillborn.

I can’t polish away that history, and I would never want to.

That Thing Will Rip Your Finger Off

michael@wexfordjewelers.com (Michael Christenson II) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:19:00 -0800

Child Labor laws notwithstanding, my dad made us all work in the shop from a very early age. Sometimes it was good fun- learning to melt the wax and playing with tiny Austrian Crystals were things any child would enjoy. Other times it was not so fun, but we survived.

My right ring finger, however, almost didn’t.

The year was 1991. I was thirteen, in my first semester of full homeschooling, and my dad had found a great advantage to his daughters not being away at school for 7 hours a day: he could have us help out in the store nearly full time.

I would come to work with him in the morning, my hair up in a banana comb most days. We would park in back of the little strip mall on Speedway Boulevard in Tucson, unlock the massive steel back door, and settle in for the day. Those were, more often than not, fairly pleasant days. It was before my dad went truly insane, and we would sit for hours doing mass production on the huge quantities of silver rings that soon would sell at the Renaissance Faires. We’d play the classical radio station, listening to hours of violin music and NPR babble. Around 3pm, when that inevitable sugar slump hits most adults, Dad would dig a couple of bucks out of the till and send me next door for a frozen yogurt, topped with two squirts of hot fudge sauce.

One day began like most others, with bright Arizona sun angling in the windows of the little narrow store, wonderful smells emanating from the Jewish bagel shop across the road, and a constant parade of college students wanting their silver chains soldered and Fossil watch batteries changed. I had helped dad size a round or two of waxes for casting, and he was on one of his endless phone calls, probably to someone he owed money to.

Bored, and always on the prowl for a project, I wandered into the back room of the shop. The polishing lathe sat there, gleaming cadet blue under a thin layer of black spinoff dust. I had used it many times before, always on simple rings or pendants. Why not, I wondered, just polish all of my jewelry? Get some good practice, make my stuff look nice… simple enough of a concept.

What I forgot, whether deliberately or accidentally I shall never remember, was Dad’s warning about polishing chains: “That thing will rip your finger off!” You see, the polishing lathe has two speeds, and I think we always use the highest: 3,700 RPMs. That, my friends, is wicked fast. The arbor moves so fast that if something touches it, the friction causes immediate heat. It also moves too fast for reflexes. So you can probably understand how dangerous it was for me to polish a fairly substantial silver chain.

There I was, humming along while I worked. I held the chain firmly between each thumb forefinger, something I know now is dumb. As I would move the quarter-inch wide silver links under the swiftly rotating wheel, the waxy rouge would make contact with the metal, removing the finest layer from the top, revealing a finer, smoother surface below the minute scratches and dings. But then something went wrong. The chain was about eighteen inches long. I held about four inches of it at any given time, and there were probably a couple more inches looped around my fingers. This left several inches just dangling down in the polishing shroud. Several inches that, in a nanosecond, wrapped around the three inch muslin wheel, caught on the arbor of the machine, and somehow simultaneously hooked the tip of my right ring finger.

Normally, the machine makes a pleasant hum while it runs, due to the powerful motor inside of the metal housing. Stick a figurative monkey wrench in the works, however, and it kind of hiccups. The RPMs temporarily stop, or drop down to 2 or 3, and then it basically eats whatever has gotten in its way and goes about its merry business. That ‘ERRR-Gunk-URRR-whunk’ sound was made as I lost the entire top half of my fingernail. Somehow, my normally dull reflexes were able to snap into place quick enough for me to extricate my finger. Or maybe it was that the chain disintegrated into multitudes of tiny, rolling links. The sound that several dozen little silver rings make as they hit a steel shroud at 70 miles an hour is also impressive.

I switched the machine off and stifled a scream. If my dad knew that I had been messing around with the machine, I’d have been in trouble! As it was, I wasn’t able to hide my mangled fingertip from him, not with all of the bleeding and crying. He chewed me out while he scrounged up the First Aid kit (regular bandaids weren’t doing the job), I gathered up what was left of my chain (there was enough intact to make a bracelet!) and I got out of dish duty for a couple of days.

My finger took weeks to heal. The top half of the nail was gone, and I eventually lost the bottom half as well. The fingertip was wrenched to one side, and healed ever so slightly crooked, but there is no scarring. The human body is an amazing thing. So is the human brain. It tends to learn lessons. I now polish chains, if at all, on a wooden spindle, with no dangle.

pffttt-fwap

michael@wexfordjewelers.com (Michael Christenson II) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

One of my duties entails serving the customers who walk through our door.

It was a normal day, and I was in the process of photographing rings to upload to our website. Around 11:30, a lady walks through the door, and almost instinctively, I smile and say “hello there”. As I get up from my station where my photography white box is, I notice a hand full of gold. This lady loved her jewelry, and loved to show it off as well.

Whenever someone walks through our door, we like to offer to clean their rings in our ultrasonic cleaner. Not only does it give them an excuse to walk around our cases, it gives them a sense of getting something nice even if they didn’t buy it. Like getting your car washed for free.

My brother-in-law Mike asked her if she would like her rings cleaned while she looked around, and she accepted. Now me, being zealous to see the look on peoples’ faces when they receive something nice, I gladly offered to take the rings to clean them while he helped her.

I should have stayed in bed that morning.

After taking the rings, I notice that, where there should be clean space under the ring, it is a vat of sludge. My stomach turned. What seemed to be years of lotion, oil, dead skin, raw chicken, all held together by knuckle hair, was compacted into every crevice under all 7 rings I was about to clean. So trying not to look, I hung them on the hooks, placed then in the ultrasonic cleaner, and turned it on.

45 minutes later, I checked on the cleaning progress.

First let me explain a little about our ultrasonic cleaner. It is filled with an industrial de-greaser solvent, and the mechanics of it are similar to a microwave. It sends little tiny pulses of electricity back and forth penetrating every little crevice. It cleans very well.

Now as I was saying, 45 minutes later, I checked on the cleaning progress, and it was like telling a child to go and clean up their room. No noticeable difference. Whatsoever. My worst nightmares have come true. I will have to manually scrape the scum from out of the rings, and then put them back in the cleaner.

I take a deep breath and begin.

I grab a small bur from the jewelers bench, and start digging away. For some reason, the sludge was transferring from the ring to my fingers. Remember the old movie “The Blob”? yea, kind of like that.

Ok. Almost done, one last cleanout hole, pffttt- fwap! It explodes onto my upper lip. In shock, I take a whiff of what landed on my face. And without hesitation I calmly wipe off whatever had landed onto my face. I am scarred for life, and will henceforth be passing off any jewelry that needs to be cleaned to our jeweler, who I am sure is more qualified than I am to handle such situations.

Whoever reads this, I am on my knees begging you to take your jewelry to your local jeweler to get it cleaned at least once a month. Lunches could be at stake if you don’t.