I’ve been sitting at my workbench, looking at a handful of unsold necklaces and asking myself the same question over and over: Why are these still here?
And the honest, simple answer is: they don’t have pearls.
A while back, I decided my necklaces are worth a minimum of €20. My time, my design eye, and the effort that goes into stringing and balancing every piece easily justify that price. But holding that baseline exposed a really clear pattern in my shop: every time I list a pearl necklace, it sells almost instantly. Everything else just sits there.
Looking at my shop stats side by side, it's almost funny how obvious it is. One rice pearl necklace had 136 views and 44 favorites just before it sold, while a non-pearl design right next to it has 14 views and zero favorites. The numbers don't lie!
At first, a little part of me felt slightly insulted. It’s a bit frustrating when a design you spent time on and genuinely love gets ignored just because it lacks one specific bead.
But I’m done trying to force stone necklace sales when everyone seems completely obsessed with pearls right now. So, for my own mental health and peace of mind, I’m leaning into it. I’m pretty much exclusively making pearl designs from here on out.
The truth is, failing with non-pearl designs gets expensive fast. I use top-tier, USA-imported jewelry wire, and every time a piece doesn't sell and I have to snip it apart, I lose those expensive materials. If you have to cut down ten necklaces, you've wasted a real chunk of money on wire alone.
Moving forward, if a piece doesn't work out, I’ll just take it apart, sell the raw stones as components to someone else, and note not to buy those materials for my design tray again.
That doesn't mean I'm going to get bored, either. I’m still making classic white pearl strands because people love them and they sell!
But I’m also using this as a fun playground to see what else I can do by mixing pink pearls with coral, adding dark hematite hearts, or playing with stones.
