This week on Zibbet we introduce you to Emma Dobbs from Te Awamutu, New Zealand and her shop Silverlight Jewellery. Emma says her work is best described as ‘soft gothic’.Her Bohemian and Gothic-inspired designs range from the simple and charismatic, to the lavishly fantastical. She designs her jewelry for dreamers with day jobs who moonlight as rockstars!! You’ll be delighted with the unique finds in her shop.Please enjoy the interview, leave Emma a comment, and then use the Share Tools so others can read it, too. Please spread the Zibbet Love!
I’m introverted, intense, passionate, driven, highly artistic, thoughtful, intelligent in an academic way rather than a clever way, and I have unusual tastes in just about everything. I’m terrible at mathematics because I don’t find it stimulating enough. It’s too linear and dry. As you can probably tell from what follows in this interview, I’m an ideas person. I’d rather play with concepts than facts.I love animals, and am a vegetarian because, as George Bernard Shaw and Leonardo da Vinci, respectively, are reputed to have said, “Animals are my friends, and I don’t eat my friends”, and “My body will not be a tomb for other creatures.”I’m a perfectionist, a lover of books and reading, and a chronic multi-tasker.
Almost everything I do is creative. I have an artistic temperament, so I am pretty much incapable of doing anything in a ‘normal’, unimaginative way. My mind never stops; I think about everything, analyse everything, and ignore anything that I find uninteresting. So, I can’t think of anything I do that doesn’t involve some form of creativity on some level. Even when I’m doing something mindless like cleaning, I’m still thinking and imagining.I take care of my pets, and I eat. Those are probably the only things I do that aren’t creative in some way. And I’m not so sure about the eating.I need to make a living, and I don’t want to work for someone else. That was actually my motivation behind learning to make and sell jewellery: I turned my picky little nose up at all the employment opportunities that were available to me. I wanted to work from home, and I wanted the freedom of self-employment. I have always been a creative, artistic type, and I decided to try selling my work. I actually started with handmade cards, decided to branch out into jewellery, and then decided to focus solely on jewellery as it was far more lucrative.
I am very grateful that when I started trying to make a living from selling my work I had no idea how hard it was going to be, for if I had known, I might not have attempted it.As for what inspires my jewellery designs, I make what I like. Originally, driven by the need to make a living from my jewellery, I tried to make what I thought the market wanted; but, in my experience, that’s a dead end, because one cannot know what people want until one offers it to them. So now I make whatever I think is gorgeous and desirable and easy to wear, and I am so much happier for it. And it does sell.For a while I felt that making jewellery didn’t really contribute anything of benefit to the world; there are so many, many jewellery makers, and it’s not like jewellery feeds anyone or gives shelter to the needy. Jewellery is really just meaningless frippery, right? How could I justify doing something so meaningless for a living? However, after a year or three of struggling with this, I came to the conclusion that jewellery helps people to express themselves and feel good about themselves. That really is the highest function of jewellery: beautifying the human body and expressing the personality contained therein. And making someone feel great about theirself is actually a very noble purpose. The better we feel about ourselves, the better our lives become, and the more likely we are to help others to feel good also. I also came to the conclusion that beautiful things, like jewellery, do not need a reason to exist: any object that is beautiful justifies its own existence, simply by enhancing the experience of all who see it.
I look up to anyone who refuses to be normal! Most of us are taught to conform, and we are taught that you can’t have a fun, happy life pursuing your dreams and do good to others at the same time. This simply isn’t true. I look up to people who know who they are and what they want, who are true to themselves, who change the world, who help others and follow their passions at the same time. I admire and applaud people who live life their way, thoughtfully, intentionally and with conviction, and do good in the process. Life is too short to do anything less.Aside from making and selling jewellery? Too many to count! I am interested in so many things; I envy the ancients in the Bible who lived for hundreds of years – think how many skills they could attain, how much they could achieve, how much they must have known! I hope I don’t run out of years before I run out of ideas.However, all my interests could probably fit under the heading of ‘things that are beautiful and good’.
I love that which is beautiful on the inside as well as on the outside. I believe that everything can and should be beautiful, and that there are many different types of beauty. I like being able to appreciate beauty in all its forms. I describe Silverlight Jewellery as ‘soft gothic’ (a tagline which I invariably have to explain!), and the best explanation of modern gothicism I’ve ever heard comes from The Lady Of The Manners, A.K.A. Jillian Venters, according to whom gothicism is “finding beauty and whimsy in dark and unexpected places.” Not everything has to be shiny and new to be beautiful; things that are weird and offbeat and bizarre can be stunningly beautiful if you look past your preconceptions of what ‘beauty’ should look like. Beauty’s not just about looks, either: the story behind an object can make it beautiful.The people. The people are so nice! I cannot get over the fact that Jonathan Peacock, the C.E.O. of Zibbet, once answered my bug report. I’ve asked a question the answer to which I knew must be obvious but which was eluding me, and it was still responded to promptly and courteously. The Zibbet staff are so open and clear about what’s going on with Zibbet and what their expectations of us sellers are, and so polite and gracious all the time. I get the feeling that Zibbet really, truly, cares about its sellers and buyers. That is a precious, and refreshing, attitude to come across in any field of life.
I also like the look of Zibbet’s Premium shops; they can be very handsome, and allow for a lot of customisation: you can keep it clean and streamlined or load up with widgets and other features, as you will. I also like the way Zibbet is honest about allowing its sellers to publicise their other webshops through Zibbet. I think Zibbet has a very gracious and realistic view of how online selling works. I think it is those attitudes, more than anything else, that will make Zibbet great.Improved photo quality. I take pains with my photographs – as Jonathan has said, photographs are THE most important element of selling online – and I notice that they don’t always look as good on Zibbet as they do on my computer and on the other websites where I sell.I’d also love to see some kind of quality control with regard to photography; it makes me wince to see beautiful, professional-grade photography alongside a blurry, dimly-lit, overcrowded photograph. I see so many sellers complain that they make no sales: I take one look at their photographs and I can see why. It doesn’t take much to upgrade your photography from ‘terrible’ to ‘average’; it really doesn’t! The knowledge is freely available online; just a couple of hours of learning and then experimenting and trying different things can work wonders for one’s photographs. It would be nice to see sellers obliged to take that step and thus start doing justice to their work, and it would elevate the overall look and feel of Zibbet by miles, making it an even more attractive venue for buyers. Buying online is an almost purely visual experience; web venues and item photography must therefore be as visually attractive as they possibly can.
I have a Facebook page and an E-mail newsletter. I’m currently re-evaluating the effectiveness of the newsletter, though! And, to be frank, Facebook often annoys me. I was on Twitter for a while and had a blog which I scarcely use nowadays. I found that social media was a distraction that simply kept me away from my workbench far too much. I have found that the absolute best form of promotion for me is simply to make more items and keep listing. Nothing beats that. In my experience, it’s easy to get distracted with social media and other forms of promotion; but if you keep making good stuff and presenting it well, people will find it eventually, and it’s that that makes sales more than anything else.I do have my shop U.R.L.s in my E-mail signature, and I know that people click on them because they tell me that they do! I pay little attention to S.E.O., but I do describe my items as well as I can, and somehow I must be doing it right because many of my buyers tell me that they found my items through Internet searches.
The same way to make the most of anything: keep the main thing the main thing; do the basics really, really well (great products, great photography, great descriptions, great customer service), believe in what you’re doing, take care with it and pride in it, give it your time and attention and passion, and it’s remarkable how everything else will take care of itself.I don’t consider myself fully ‘successful’ yet – it’s taken me three mistake-filled years to make a profit from selling my jewellery – but after those three years that’s what I’ve learned. Make good stuff and present it well; fame and profit come later. Adore what you do. Get the basics right. Like, REALLY right. It matters less what your avatar shows and more that your product works well; no one cares whether you have a Facebook page if your photography is always too dark; etc. Worry about whether your clasps work and how neatly your seams are finished; that’s far more important than how often you blog. Sweat the details of the main thing, not the details that aren’t the main thing. Everything else will fall into place after that.Even more creative and happy than I am now, making stuff that I love and selling it like crazy, using more upcycled materials, giving more money to charity and giving lost animals a home on my self-sufficient farmlet.Tags: Featured Zibbeters, Silverlight Jewellery
