Shownotes
Jewelry is not just another accessory to make outfits feel more polished. For some, it’s a way to express their personality, celebrate memorable moments, or a family heirloom to treasure forever. With this in mind, master faceter and graduate gemologist Jennifer Farnes shares how she sparks change in the jewelry industry. As the successful owner of Revolution Jewelry Works, she dives into what separates their company from other jewelry crafters and how they provide full flexibility in custom design. Jennifer talks about her love for jewelry making and offers advice to people who want to start their own jewelry business.
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The Jewelry Revolution with Jennifer Farnes
My goal in opening up my jewelry store was to create a place that I would feel comfortable shopping. In all of my years of following my mom around shopping for jewelry or even shopping for my own engagement ring, I always thought that jewelry was very intimidating. I thought there has to be a way to change that environment. That was the primary driver behind creating Revolution.
On this episode, we have Jennifer Farnes. She’s a master faceter and a graduate gemologist. She’s the owner of Revolution Jewelry Works. I’ve had the pleasure of doing some business with her on a parking lot crash with my wife’s jewelry. Jennifer, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
Tell us about your business and who you serve.
Revolution Jewelry Works, being in the beautiful mountain city of Colorado Springs, we do have a lot of military personnel locally. Beyond that, it’s a very rapidly growing city. That was where we wanted to start our focus. We wanted to create something accessible to the city of Colorado Springs with the goal of world domination. The big thing that was missing here in the Springs was a place that you could go for custom jewelry. There were a lot of old school jewelers where you could go and request something custom, but essentially you would sit down, and they would be hand carving wax for you and you would get a look at a chunk of green material and you say, “I think that’s what I want.” Maybe a year later, you would have a finished piece of jewelry and that is what it is.
With the technology, I knew that there was software out there that helped people visualize what was being created. Make it to where they could actually picture what this is going to look like for me and how it’s going to function in my life rather than having to guess. We’ve got an entire generation coming up of consumers that have been accessing flexibility in every aspect of their life. You can pick your shoes, you can pick your phone case, you can customize your car and everything about it. It’s one thing to go into a jewelry store and be told, “I can customize something.” You can pick this mounting and you can pick this setting and you can pick this shape of a diamond and put them together and it’s a custom, but that’s not custom.
We have people that we encounter day in and day out that are hardcore fans of World of Warcraft, which is an online video game. They found each other because of this commonality of a video game. They want to represent their love for each other because of this thing that brought them together where before they probably would have never met. We’ve created rings with a theme of World of Warcraft. We’ve created rings that have to do with The Legend of Zelda or The Lord of the Rings or any of the above, and it doesn’t have to be something of that theme. It could be that someone says, “I saw a ring that I loved, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted.” Whether they saw a ring that evoked emotions, but they have their grandmother’s diamond and that ring isn’t made for that diamond; how do you go about making that happen? At least half of the custom jewelry that we build is using heirlooms.
People are inheriting these very precious items from different family members, and they want to keep it as a part of their life. You hear the term disposable society, but there are still things that are very precious that people do want to hold onto and incorporate. Instead of letting a piece of jewelry sit in a jewelry box forever, why not turn it into something that you can wear, that you can enjoy and that breathes new life back into something that has so many cherished memories. That is something that was completely missing in this market was the ability to deliver that full flexibility in custom design. That’s what I wanted to create a safe, educational space that people could come and get what they want instead of being told, “These are your only options and just live with it.”
The fun part about this show is the reason that we’re doing this, is you’re doing some work for my wife. What you said reminds me exactly why she was here. We have a wedding band that has been in place for 30 plus years. It got beat up in an accident. We had the stone. My wife says, “I want to use some of the gold in my next recast. We were able to sit down and she said, “Thinner, thicker, taller, shorter this way, that way, the other, this kind of basket.” As you’re sitting here with the CAD, you can visualize, “Move the diamond, move the basket and twist of the basket, all of this detailed stuff. Once that’s done, you can say, “This is what the ring looks and there’s a picture of the gold or white gold, yellow gold or whichever. There are all of this custom visualization and the next step is you come in and you get to see a wax cast and have it done via your CAD program.
We take the exact digital representation of the ring that you approve on the screen. We have a mill as well as a prototyping machine that takes all of those digital components and creates it for us in the wax or in resin.
We came in and we got to see the wax cast and the wife goes, “Yeah.” She tried it on. “Yes, it fits,” and the whole bit. That’s fascinating in walking the talk, you’re not just talking about it. Part of the things I noticed here is the staff is excited to be here. You like being here. Talk to me about the leadership that you offer for your company and how that keeps your edge both in the marketing space and in the sales motivation that your team here has.
I have worked for so many different organizations before starting my own business, large and small. I worked for Target as a store manager. I worked for Victoria’s Secret as a store manager, and then I worked for a small advertising agency locally. I saw so many things about different leadership styles. I took away everything that I could from every manager that I had. One of the things that I found went the furthest with my team when I was a manager at Target was gratitude. When people do something that goes above and beyond the call of duty, just being thankful and recognizing, that can make such a big difference. When I was working for the advertising agency, the hardest part is you are always having to go above and beyond because it’s long hours. It’s hard hours and you’re dealing with a lot of other people’s money and you have to be sure that you’re putting your heart and soul into it.
In that situation, it was the reverse where it’s such a small company and everybody is so hyper-focused on getting their own tasks done that the management said, “Another day, another dollar.” Rather than, “I appreciate the fact that you were here until [2:00] in the morning to make sure that buy came together with the way it should.” With opening up this store, how do you motivate people? Money is a great motivator. How do you do that in a non-competitive way where you can make it a team experience? I wanted my business to be a profit-sharing company. I’ve been previously scoffed at almost like, “Why she would share your money?” For me, if you’re building a business from the ground up, why wouldn’t you? It makes so much sense to share everything that comes in and give it back to the people that make me successful because I’m not a jeweler. I can’t sit at the bench and play with fire and make a ring. That’s completely out of my wheelhouse.
I’m a stone cutter. When you take the equation to mean, “I am a part of something bigger and while I’m the one who has to make the big decisions, I can’t do anything with my business without my team,” then how do you turn that around and help motivate them? With the profit-sharing model that we have, it puts the ownership in the hands of everybody that works here. Instead of me micromanaging and having my fingers in everything, I can trust my shop that if they see something that’s not running efficiently and they know that it’s losing money for the business, they say, “That’s money out of my pocket. How do we fix it?” They’ve come up with some beautiful, simple solutions from practice in the shop and sharing ideas with me of ways that we can streamline our processes that saves us money and makes us more profitable, so everybody gets a cut.
You have this vision, the vision came from somewhere and then you go, “How do I take in and instill this culture?” Let’s say I’m the brand-new employee and I’m coming on board and go, “Let me tell you how this works.” What do you say to that new person that’s coming on board?
We have weekly meetings, but from the very beginning when we’re starting training with a new person, we always say, “Whatever experiences you’ve had in the past with management, don’t even think about that as a part of the equation. Think of this as your safe space. This is your second home.” We spend as much time with each other as we do with our spouses. When someone is coming into the business it’s, “This is your secondary safe space. This is where you can share your ideas,” Part of it is as an owner and as a manager, you have to be willing to listen because you never know when the next big idea is the one that saves your business.
Just because it doesn’t come from your own brain, it doesn’t mean that somebody in your company doesn’t see a way to fix a problem. If you put on blinders and you look away from all of the opportunities that could be right in front of you because they’re suggestions from your team. You can’t let pride get in the way. You have to be willing to take it from somebody else’s perspective and say, “Maybe I am approaching this wrong. Maybe I am thinking about this wrong.” Let them be a part of the tools that fix the problems that you may have or expand on the successes that you’re having and make them even more successful.
You and I talked briefly about this that it’s not just what you’re talking about. You can see it in the growth of your company because you’ve doubled in the past years.
Be willing to listen because you never know when the next big idea is the one that saves your business.
We started almost six years ago with our first year’s projections of $200,000. For a jewelry store in our city, that would be a pretty successful year. Our first year we did $405,000, double of what we projected. Then it was, “Where do we go from here?” It was putting projections out there but working towards those goals, how do we appeal to more customers? A big part of that is customer satisfaction. People are going to share a very good experience with other people and that’s a big factor in the growth of any business.
We were talking about that you guys are going to do the casting of my wife’s ring. We’re going to go from the wax to the metal and you guys said, “Would you like to come in and watch?” Who else does that? It’s part of the experience and my wife is highly excited about coming in and being able to be part of that.
That is very key because in so many situations you never get to see into a workshop and what that environment is like.
That reminds me of a chef’s kitchen when it’s open.
We had the wrap around windows because jewelry manufacturing is a dirty business and we want people to be able to see that. In a very small way, we end up being a part of people’s lives for the rest of their lives. If they don’t have a phenomenal experience, we’re the ones to blame. We need to make sure that every person that comes in loves what their experience is, but also shares that experience. Being a part of it is huge. Just to be able to say, “I got to see my ring be cast,” or “I brought in sketches on a napkin and they turned it into a reality,” and we’ve had that happen.
Everything about the way that we function is how we treat that person coming in our doors; they are absolutely paying our paychecks. We need to treat them with respect and compassion and educate everybody that comes through the doors so that way they can share that experience. And it’s even the same with my team; if they learn something, if they go to training somewhere and they learned something, they are excited to come back and share it with us. It’s sharing knowledge and sharing our passion. All of us are very passionate about jewelry.
We were pretty blown away by the visual representation of CAD. For you, innovation is obviously a key component of your success. How did that start for you? What was that decision like when you decided to use this particular tool or even this one that allows people not to use a loupe to look at stones?
There are a lot of jewelers that saw their heyday in the ‘80s and feel like business as usual is the way to go, big box stores included. We are finding that the technology that’s out there really makes everything; the sky is the limit. We’ve had people come in that have bought their own CAD software and tried to design a ring. It doesn’t quite work the same way because when you scale it down, what you see on the screen versus in reality. You always have to be respectful of metal tolerances. Just the size in general when you’re on a computer monitor versus when you’re creating a jewelry piece.
The technology that we invested in we had the opportunity to learn through the years. Pedro, the very first jeweler that I ever started with, got his training back in 2007 when the software that we use was brand new. He was working for a jewelry store in Wisconsin. They said, “Everybody’s going to learn this type of CAD software and we’re going to take it and run with it.” When he came on board, he shared the knowledge of CAD. It got me excited about it. My husband had experience in other CAD design software more for architecture and things like that. It was software that was absolutely necessary.
The big reason being is people are very visual. It’s difficult if you’re building a business that has very little inventory to help people visualize what it is they’re buying into. There’s no better way than to be able to give them a picture. You even saw how we could put a hand model into the picture that’s the size of the hand of the person who’s going to be wearing it to say, “Scale-wise, this is what this is going to look like.” If you go into a store and you see production jewelry, you’re going to see the same thing from store to store. 90% of what’s in big box stores all comes from the same three countries and the same twenty manufacturers – and that’s it. That’s why people sometimes come in here almost feeling exhausted because they’ve gone to every big box store in the mall and all of the larger stores in the city.
That was my wife’s experience, “Here’s the mount. Here’s the basket or would you like this particular ring?”
That’s not what you’re looking for. Since we don’t have that live inventory, we had to have a way to be able to share with people, “This is what you’re investing in. This is what you’re looking at, this is what you’re planning for,” and hold their hand and say, “Even with what you see on the screen, we can make little changes.” We include two hours of CAD design changes in every design that we do. Even when we go to wax, once somebody sees it and holds it and can interpret their proportions, if there are changes that they want to make from there, then they can. If it was a hand carved a piece, not so much. You can add a little wax.
Make sure when you're bringing in new ingredients to the soup that you don't bring in something that doesn't belong.
The thing I think is interesting, and I had thought about it a lot is the ownership of the experience by the guest because you go, “That’s my design.” Regardless of where they came through on CAD or whether you are driving the CAD design at the time. They’ll go, “I tweaked it here and tweaked it there and this and that and the other. That’s my design.” Shifting gears a bit, I’m thinking about your growth curve. You have this particular management insight that you got from your previous experiences. With that management insight, how do you apply that when you’re growing faster than your projections?
There are a lot of things that you can be looking for when you’re getting ready to hire on a new person and try to stay on top of the growth that you’re experiencing. We almost encountered a situation where we very nearly made it a very bad decision in the hiring process. The one thing that we stepped away from was interviewing for the personality to fit the team. You never know how someone is going to be from an interview to when they come on board, but there are a lot of big indicators when you’re going through the interview process. The big takeaway that I had from that is you can’t just go in and look at someone on paper and say, “This is exactly what we need and their interview was a little weird.” We were desperate at the time. This was when we were hiring our fourth employee.
How many employees do you have now?
There are eight full-time employees. We had encountered a very abrasive personality, but he had all of the other bells and whistles that we were looking for. It wasn’t until we were getting close to having him on board full-time. He was moving across the country and everything like that, that there were a couple of statements that were made over the phone that was like, “This is a red flag and we need to step back and reevaluate.” When you have that initial feeling upfront of, “Everything’s great. This is what we need,” but the personality doesn’t feel right, you should trust that gut instinct.
Since then when we’re interviewing people, we do bring them on board to spend half a day here and spend time with the team to see how everybody...
