Paul Krush

What models people choose to download the most is pretty interesting. I should post it sometime. I would love to evolve the most downloaded models to see if we could create models that are even more popular. I doubt I would ever have time to do this, but it sure is interesting to me. There are sites that vote on pictures, such as KittenWar, but I don’t know of a site that evolves the results. Of course this happens naturally as people chose to refine the winners.

I have revolutionary ideas about consumers designing their own jewelry that I have been developing for years. Few people see what I am talking about and the rest think I’m nuts. Sometimes I start believing these naysayers. For the past week I have thinking I should hang it up and go totally corporate, say good by to jewelry software, and become an Oracle developer. Well it’s been months really. OK, I’ve been like this all my life. I put my foot down a few years ago and said I was finish the goals that I start. It’s hard to believe I’ve had my own business in the jewelry industry for 5 ½ years.

As my ideas get better and I have more experience with jewelry I times are getting tougher in the industry. Stores are going out of business and people are more interested in Best Buy than jewelry. Consumers are so educated that the products have turned into commodities. Asia is cranking up production, doing great work, and crushing manufactures here in the States. Franchises make it difficult for the independent to survive. The trends are not good at all. But, I see something different. What happens when consumers have a chance to design the jewelry themselves? Look at how incredibly popular beading is. Heck, there are no consumer jewelry design packages right now. There has to be room for one person in the world to make some cash at this software.

I see past these tough times for the jewelry industry. There is always going to be room for jewelry. Just thing what’s going to happen when all these electronic devices start getting so small they can be put into jewelry elegantly? Cell phone or mp3 player in your custom earrings? Why not? I think the number of medical monitoring devices will fit into this category as well.
It’s very hard to decide when to quit with these ideas. What if I’m a few weeks away from the finding right ingredient to make this all come together? How do I stay motivated?

The deeper I get into this, the harder it is to get out. I really think I have a great business plan for free jewlery design software for consumers. I need to get this plan on paper and criticized! I know. I need to talk to a lot of people about this. This is one reason I started a blog.

Did you know you can buy home, deck, and garden design software at Target?

Do people play with home design software before going to architect? If so, how has that changed custom home design? Do people rough out the house design, and let the architect detail it? This was one of the directions I was heading when I was working on that 3 stone trellis ring software in the end of 2003. I have not thought about it much lately until several people brought it up here in the forums.

One could write software that would let people rough out custom rings though a series of controls and parameters.

Having consumers rough out the ring first fits some rules I have for consumer design software to work in an independent retail store.

Those rules are; Will the consumer jewelry design software (or kiosks too):
1.) Keep the relationship?
2.) Build the local community?
3.) Be sustainable?

Would free consumer jewelry design software like this hurt an independent retail store? Sure I can think of many ways. One becomes defeatist when you go down this path. Pretty much you can argue that Gemvision cannot make its products better, because in doing so it will smother its current customer base. Every copy of Matrix they sell makes the rest of the copies less valuable though this thinking.

Does a $20 home design package cheapen the work of a professional architect? Of course not, this is mearly a better (maybe) way for the consumer to communicate to the architect. Some people might need to be educated on this.

Why do I keep coming back to consumer jewelry design software? This will be one of the ways jewelry will be designed in the future, and I want to be part of it. Good or bad it’s a compulsion I have.

These are some of the rings I did with a program I wrote 3 1/2 years ago. You enter in a bunch of parameters and it modeled the ring for you. I can do a much much better job at writing this software these days. I was just goofing off with some of these designs. It’s pretty fun using it.

Mass custom over the Internet is not sustainable say past 2012? It’s going to be copied and margins will go to zero. Asia will be king of mass custom for jewelry on the Internet, that is if the US dollar stays king.

What I have heard and taken to heart is for mass custom to work in an independent retail store:

1.) You need the relationship.
2.) You need to build the local community
3.) The business needs to be sustainable.

How do you do mass custom in an independent store and fits these rules? I’m not sure. Maybe a creation and teaching studio where people design their own mass custom items? They would use jewelry CAD software that outputs a simple finished model. It would be a social event with small classes (3-6 people). The computers would have to be taken away from time to time. I have thought about maybe a U shaped table that has the screens under the table so people can see each other and not the back of a computer display. Then there would be a main display for teaching. It would have to be about people collaborating, not people starting at screens.

Heck one could have foo foo drinks. Now this sounds like a Tupperware party or the “Jewelry Design Café”. Now it sounds like a hobby and not a business….

I think there could be a take home version of the software. Sure it could incorporate a website some how, maybe the model sharing database, but the real communication would take place at the store.

Also I see people using this store to make jewelry for their organization. It might be a hobby for them, or they might take advantage of discount pricing and have a little hobby business of their own.

I see this like how people get together in stores and do scrapbook crafting or bead work, except higher end. I am talking about designs that are very simple. A ring with names and symbols. A chain, pendant, or key chain that was build with 3D profile “clip art” that built into the software. Simple, Simple, Simple models.

I think kiosks for mass custom design in the retail store are a slippery slop. They are going to show up in the chain stores, Wal*Mart and such. But how do kiosks build a relationship with the customer? I have some very cool ideas about using hardware buttons and sliders for a kiosk in a store. It’s pretty easy/low cost to integrate hardware these days. More cool that practical, but Sensible Claytools fits into that category.

You could also have such a system scan stock forms for 2D or 2 1/2D model building. You could use this to put the customers handwriting and basic art work on the jewelry automatically. And of course you can incorporate 3D scanning into the mass custom system, like kids handprints and such. Somewhere there has to be a way to do mass customization and fit these 3 rules I have laid out. I really think something like “Build a Bear” for jewelry has huge potential, even if it’s not on the Internet.

I’m sure such a store would have different types of customers. In the experiments I have done I have had a few people interested in affirmations. These are spiritual in nature, or goals, or general loving reminders, or what ever. I can see such a store teaching goals or offering personal couching services and selling jewelry tokens to cast the goals and affirmations into store (well metal).

Really if you look at these ideas such a store is not selling jewelry. It sells experiences. It sells tickets to the jewelry design Disneyland.

Paul Krush